Do you find your content strategy helpful enough for your business? If not, how can you make it work?
Many companies do not spend enough time to produce high quality content, mainly because they don’t how to do it. It is very important to reach your target audience with your content. Studies have shown that almost half of your target customers likely view three to five pieces of content before they decide to engage in your sales process and product offers. For this reason, it is best to create and distribute content that appeals to them the best.
This article uncovers the simple yet helpful skills, materials, and preparations you need, to produce pieces of digital content of quality, which drives more leads and later on to sales.
Here is the list of useful tips to make your content strategy work. Keep in mind that your content is your way of communicating with your target customers without having to sell them. Therefore, make it the best as it can be.
Understand the Golden Circle – the why, the how and the what of your business
As a content strategist, you need to understand why the company exists in the first place and the mission it aims to fulfill. It is better to assess why your company is doing what it is doing and how it is doing this kind of business.
Revisit what has been done so far and how was this done. Study from the data available; ask tenured employees and do brainstorming with your team members.
Your goal is to equip yourself with information that would help tell your company’s branding story in a way that appeals to your audience. That is to say, your content will be anchored to this story.
In the same vein, ensure that your company’s mission must coincide with how your target customers understand it. Hence, highlight how would the content benefit these people – the characters in your story.
If you’re new to the industry, consider using HubSpot. It’s free and equipped with extra insights and useful materials.
Organize your Content Marketing Strategy
Valuable, relevant and consistent content is produced from a strong content marketing strategy. Thus, create and organize your marketing strategy by building a content creation framework that aligns with your company’s brand and is able to evolve as business goals change over time. Moreover, focus on creating content for every stage of the buyer’s journey – the active process of leading up to making a purchase. Check Jobs theory to see how you can take your business off to the target.
Know who your target customers are
Consider asking yourself what persona can benefit from the content. Creating a buyer persona or a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers helps best to effectively know your target customers.
Define your customers based on real data and some educated speculation about their demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. In doing so, the different departments, including but not limited to marketing, services, and sales, must be involved so significant information is collated accordingly in every stage of the buyers’ journey – awareness stage, consideration stage and decision stage.
Similarly, avoid disregarding customers who were not interested in your content before. Use the power of remarketing. These types of customers give more fuel to your business. It doesn’t mean that if they did not consider your content before, they will also not consider it in the future. Remember that how people think change over time.
Communicate with feelings
How will you then add life to your story to make it even more interesting? This is where conflict comes into play. Use this element to create an emotional appeal with your audience. What are the answers they are looking for? What are they struggling with or the problems they are trying to resolve? Give emphasis to these types of questions.
Give value, understand, and most importantly, empathize with your customers. You must put yourself in their shoes. From there, list down and rank the best possible approaches to answer their questions, clear up their confusions and give resolutions to their problems.
Use a compelling title for your content
Titles must be promising to your readers. Your target customers must be able to figure out what to expect from reading the content. This can be in list format or how-to format, amongst others. Subsequently, make sure that your meta description also goes along with the title.
Monitor your content performance
How and where does this persona consume content? You should be able to determine the factors that make your content work. At the same time, take note of those that aren’t. If you are looking for a good place to start, use Google Analytics.
Correctly analyze the metrics and tracking links used. Meanwhile, determine the roadblocks you hit, and what you’ll need to work into your process to avoid these roadblocks the next time around. Be able to determine the opportunities for improvement and make sure to apply them when creating and distributing new content. In addition, evaluate your key results and/or key performance indicators. Marketing software, like HubSpot, would also be very helpful for you.
Know how to measure and analyze your content and how this impacts the revenue for your business.
Content must be well-researched
Remember that your purpose in writing the content is to attract, engage and delight your clearly defined audience.
You must read and consume content from a wide variety of places including the ones from your competitors. Evaluate popular sites close to your field of work and determine the popular posts and their commonalities – marketing strategies and efforts, that you can also apply in your content. Check as well the opportunities and train your mind to think about how will you modify and improve them.
On the other hand, when opinions are provided, they must be justifiable, such as making educated guesses. Think critically in giving opinions, more importantly, on controversial issues.
Word of mouth is the best fuel to promote your content
Your content strategy must attract a clearly defined audience to your site and engage them into leads. Most importantly, it must nurture and help close these people into customers.
However, it doesn’t stop there. Your content must as well, delight your customers and turn them into promoters of your brand. Remember that relationships with customers and trust from them can be easily built if they are referred to by their families, friends, colleagues, and people close to them. Consequently, it will drive your business.
Make customer-owned content
Since the ultimate goal of writing content is to drive profitable customer action, your approach must be direct and takes the scene of talking to customers in front of you. Avoid using unfamiliar words, it will only make you sound less credible and thus defeat your purpose.
Use the active voice and second-person point of view and keep it consistent throughout your whole content. Use short sentences and paragraphs. Likewise, make friends with white spaces. This strategy helps best in keeping your content user-friendly, especially to first-time visitors.
Optimize your content for search engines
Quality content is bare without having them used by your identified audience. Thus, it is highly recommended to optimize them to make it easy to find and made available to them. How can this be achieved?
Check our simple guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This provides step-by-step techniques to make your content rank in search.
These tips are simple but once done correctly, it will certainly make a big difference as to how customers value your content and build a relationship with your company. Upcoming articles will also be distributed to further help you in executing these tips and create a better content strategy.
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