Content marketing is great, but without a strategy, you’re just shooting in the dark and hoping to hit something. That can waste a lot of time and money, and as someone running a business, you don’t have time or money to waste.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what a lot of small business owners do: they hear people telling them they should be blogging, so they start blogging without a schedule or even a clear idea of the people for whom they’re blogging. Or someone tells them they should be on social media, so they create profiles on all the social media channels and burn out trying to create content for each one.
Creating high-quality content is time consuming, but if you’re creating content no one cares about and/or using the wrong platforms to distribute that content, you’ll be wasting all that time when you could have been creating content that answers the questions people are asking and helps guide them through the buyer journey all the way to that “Buy” button.
To help you avoid that problem, we’re going to go over everything you need to do to have a solid content marketing strategy in place before you start creating any content.
Table of Contents
- Who Is Your Target Audience?
- What Are Their Pain Points?
- Answer Their Questions
- When Are They Asking Which Questions?
- Focus on the Emotions
- Where Do They Hang Out Online?
- Making the Most of Your Content Marketing Strategy
- Conclusion
1) Who Is Your Target Audience?
This is the single, most important question you have to answer before doing anything in your business. The customer should be at the center of everything you do, which means you need to have a very clear idea of who that customer is, what their struggles are, as well as their likes and dislikes.
To get a clear idea of what your target audience looks like, create some personas. If it helps, you can think of your personas as characters, and your goal in creating them is to flesh out those characters until you know everything they would do in any given situation. Your personas should include:
- Gender
- Age range
- Race (optional)
- Income level
- Job title (optional, unless you’re in a B2B industry)
- Hobbies
- Family life
- Pets
- Interests
- Content they consume (both educational and recreational)
You can create as few or as many personas as you feel comfortable with, but most companies create at least two so they have one for each gender (unless their product/service is designed for only one gender). Just don’t create so many personas that you can’t keep them all straight.
2) What Are Their Pain Points?
A lot of small business owners tend to get carried away with all the cool things their products can do, but that leads to a focus on features, rather than benefits, and customers don’t care about features.
Your audience wants to know how your product/service will make their lives better, which means your marketing content has to focus on the benefits you provide.
Clearly defining the benefits you provide and the problems you solve for your clients can help you identify your target audience and vice versa. It also leads to our next tip:
3) Answer Their Questions
Once you know your audience’s pain points, you can start to identify the questions they’re asking online to try to solve those problems.
Keyword research also helps with this. Use keyword research tools to identify questions that a lot of people are asking, but haven’t already been covered to death by other people in your industry. Identifying and filling those content gaps is key to showing up in online searches, as well as providing value to your audience. Answering the questions no one else is answering is how you build a reputation as the authority in your industry.
4) When Are They Asking Which Questions?
Not only do you need to know what questions your target audience is asking and the keywords/phrases they’re using to search for answers, but you also need to know when they’re asking those questions. What is the intent behind each keyword? The reason you need to know this is because you need to know where your audience is in the buyer journey when they encounter each piece of content you create so you can match that content to the right call to action.
For example, if someone is searching how to do something, they’re probably not looking to hire someone to do it for them. Instead, they’re looking for tips on how to do something for themselves, which will most likely lead them to a blog post. This is why it’s so important for your blog posts to provide actionable tips your audience can use on their own, but if you go straight for the hard sell at the end of the blog post, they’ll click away because they’re not ready to buy yet.
Instead, you’d be better off asking them to sign up for your newsletter and/or follow you on social media. That’s a much smaller ask that they’re much more likely to provide, and it gives you the opportunity to continue pushing your great content in front of them and demonstrating your authority. When they are ready to buy, your brand will be the first one they think of because they’ll have seen it consistently show up in their inbox and their social media feed.
5) Focus on the Emotions
People are guided by their emotions to buy products/services, even when buying for their businesses, although buyers in the B2B space are more likely to do their research and run a cost/benefit analysis before making a purchasing decision.
That said, when you get right down to it, B2B customers are only human and humans are emotional creatures. There’s nothing wrong with fantasizing about how a particular product/service can help skyrocket their business to the success of which they’ve always dreamed.
That means, as the marketer trying to sell them that product/service, it’s your job to make those dreams come alive in your marketing content, then harness the emotions it creates to motivate your audience to take the next step in the buyer journey.
6) Where Do They Hang Out Online?
It’s true that social media is a key component of distributing the awesome content you worked so hard to create, but trying to be on all the social media platforms is a recipe for failure and burnout.
Likewise, only sticking to the social media platforms you like and only posting when you feel like/think of it could also be a recipe for disaster. Your ideal customers might not favor the same social media platforms you favor and they might not be active on those platforms at the same times you’re active.
Instead, you need to conduct research to determine which social media platforms your target audience is using, then determine when they’re most active on those platforms. Only then can you come up with a posting schedule that ensures your content will get in front of the right people at the right time.
This article can help you identify which social media platforms you should focus on based on the age range of your target audience, although that’s only one factor you need to take into consideration.
7) Making the Most of Your Content Marketing Strategy
Now that you have a clear idea of who your target audience is and where they’re hanging out online, it’s time to put systems in place to make sure every piece of content you create aligns with your overall content strategy. Here’s what that looks like:
1) Define Your Goals
You can’t determine the success of any given content marketing strategy if you don’t define the goals you want to achieve with each piece of content. Do you want to gain more social media followers? To make connections with the top influencers in your industry? To get more subscribers for your newsletter? Or more paying customers?
Make sure each goal is as specific as possible – and measurable because that will help you create a plan of action, and it will help you in the next step of this process. Just saying you want “more customers” is not specific enough to determine if your content marketing efforts are paying off. How many new customers will you need at each price point in order for your content marketing efforts to pay for themselves and start bringing in a return on that investment?
I understand that we all want more paying customers, but remember that not every piece of content in your strategy will be designed for people who are ready to buy right now. For those who are not prepared to buy just yet, make sure your call to action leads them through the buyer journey so your brand will be top of mind when they are ready to buy.
2) Measure Your Results
So you’ve done the research, you’ve identified your goals, and you’ve implemented your content marketing plan. Now it’s time to measure your results.
You can’t determine if your content marketing efforts are paying off if you don’t measure the results, so keep your goals in mind and measure them.
How many newsletter subscribers did you have before you started this campaign? How many subscribers do you have at the end of the campaign?
How many social media followers did you have before you started this campaign? How many followers do you have at the end of the campaign?
How much did traffic to your website improve after you implemented this campaign? Where are visitors to your site coming from? Which pages/blog posts are they visiting? How much time are they spending on each page and how many pages are they visiting before leaving?
These are all things you need to track before, during, and after each marketing campaign to determine if your efforts are really driving the results you want from them.
Conclusion
Coming up with a content strategy requires its own investment of time, in addition to the time required to create the content, but by taking the time to strategize your content marketing efforts, you make the most of that time and ensure that none of it is wasted on useless content that doesn’t drive results.
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