Throughout all your marketing collateral, your website, newsletter, sales pages, and email newsletters, you will need to have a developed cohesive message or theme. Your content theme will need to explain how your products are different from the competitions’ and how they solve your audience’s problems all in one voice – regardless of the channel.

* Determine the Goals of the Message – When crafting any message, the first thing you need to know is what your goals are for the content. Do you want to inform, engage, get more newsletter signups, or make a sale? Whatever your goal is, it must be something you understand before recording or writing the first word.

* Understand Your Products or Services – Make a product funnel with the products you have so that you understand every stage of the buying cycle for your audience. Also, it will help identify holes in your product funnel that you can fill with other things.

* Study Your Audience – It is easy to think you already know everything you can about your audience because you wanted to work with them and you have already created products and services. But, you would be wrong. Always study your audience so that you can stay ahead of their wants and needs.

* Identify Your Audience’s Pain Points – As you are studying your audience, you will discover various pain points or issues that your audience needs solved. Your products and/or services should solve these issues and take away their pain, and your content should explain how it works.

* Assess Your Competition – It might seem strange to look at your competition when it comes to developing your content theme, but you should. Not to copy what they do, but to get an idea of what type of content they’re using that’s converting. What do they know that you don’t? What do you know that they don’t?

* Define What Makes You Different – As you’re developing your content, you want to keep in mind what differentiates you from the competition. As you think of that, try to weave that story throughout.

* Find Your Voice – One of the first things to consider is what your voice will be. Will you be serious, funny or irreverent? This aspect of defining your content theme is important, and will move you forward and help you establish your brand.

* Brainstorm Your Message – Your overall message defines your value proposition. Your value proposition doesn’t change just because your products change. Your overall goals are still to solve the pain points of your audience with your various products and services. Writing a mission statement can help you identify your whole message.

Knowing what you want to communicate with others, specifically your target audience, will go far in helping you frame your content theme in a cohesive way. You can use this same information for any content that you plan to create for your business, whether you’re creating blog posts, white papers, or information products.