Despite the widespread adoption of content marketing, many businesses struggle to use content to drive meaningful results. Why? Because they lack an effective strategy.While almost everyone is producing and publishing content, less than half of all businesses have a strategy to guide the production of their content. And, of those who do have a strategy, only a fraction are getting it right.
The primary reason that content strategies fail is that many businesses still don’t understand the approach. They see content only as a means of generating leads and not as a means of establishing a relationship with customers. In their drive to generate leads, they produce content that meets their goals and not those of their audiences. And that’s where the wheels fall off. Audiences don’t have to read a business’ content, and, unless it’s valuable, they don’t.
But how do you determine what content will be deemed valuable? That depends on your personas, the first and most important element in any content marketing strategy.
Flesh-out lifelike buyer personas
The development of your buyer personas should start with thorough research. The more detailed you can make your personas, the more targeted and relevant you can make your content. So, where do you start? Many marketing strategists will rely solely on the findings of market research companies. However, you can also reach out to your target audiences directly using interviews and surveys, and gather insights from sales and customer care staff who interact with your customers daily.
By compiling all this information, you can create lifelike personas whose interests and challenges will allow you to produce content with the greatest relevance. By the time they are complete, you should know all of the following about them:
- The channels they are most active on
- Their preferred forms of content
- The topics they are most interested in
- Their thought processes during a purchase decision (the buyer journey)
Once you know these, you can set about creating a content marketing strategy that will satisfy both your goals and those of your readers.
Create a content strategy around your buyer journeys and goals
For your content to achieve your goals, it has to be aligned with the interests of your personas and the different stages of their buyer journeys. Think of your goal (a purchase, conversion, or just greater awareness) as your personas’ destination, and of the different stages of a buyer journey as waypoints you have to guide your personas through with your content. Consider the points at which a persona might become stuck as well as what information you can include to help them along. This is the content you need to produce.
It needs to be relevant to their interests and concerns, offer trustworthy advice, and steer readers towards a purchase. But those are only the basics. Your content also has to be properly keyword optimised, well-written, and insightful – it has to provide a perspective that others do not. Think of the competition. If your content doesn’t stand out amongst the rest, how much attention will it get?
Leverage the power of content with social media
Content marketing is, of course, just one component in a more complex approach to marketing – inbound marketing. With inbound, content is made even more effective in two ways:
- It uses social media as a means of traffic aggregation
- It uses conversion assets to generate leads
This ROI-focused approach to marketing has the potential to deliver incredible results for businesses who already understand content. To learn how a well-developed inbound marketing strategy can drive growth in your business download our guide to digital marketing here:
Image Credit: Huffington Post
