I stumbled across some great advice last week I feel compelled to share from Velocity Partners, a UK based marketing agency. I’ve added my 2 cents to reconcile with my recent experience over the last 12 years as a Brit based in Boston, MA scaling businesses.

Six Principles of Great Content Brands

1. Be the Buyer: Everything starts with their challenges, needs, prejudices and concerns.
   I couldn’t agree more. Specifically take a walk through your web site. Does it make it easy to go on a logical journey? Does it allow them to connect to the issues they are worrying about? 
2. Be authoritative: Stay in your sweet spot, where the things you understand better than anyone else intersect with the things your prospects really care about. Domain experience gives you insight. That insight will get you noticed. Don’t be shy at releasing case studies demonstrating the Challenge, the Solution and the Results.
3. Be Strategic: One-off content islands don’t add up to a content strategy. You need to commit to your topic. You need to demonstrate you understand all aspects of your chosen niche. eg if you call yourself a wealth manager you better understand tax, and service and not just about beating a benchmark index.
4. Be Prolific: Content marketing is a marathon not a shot put. Create editorial calendars for the year. Think about monthly and quarterly themes to your content.
5. Be Passionate: If you don’t care about this stuff, why should anybody else? Passion and curiosity are infectious. They drive interesting, useful content. Going for safe is risky. Be clear on your position.
6. Be tough on yourself: You’ll know if you’re being lazy. Don’t be lazy. Nobody said remarkable content production would be easy. But the harder you try the luckier you become! Remember quality content builds trust and trust buys attention and attention buys engagement and now you have an audience that wants to hear from you and that’s rare.