Content is still king but how often you produce it correlates directly with the success of your business. Back in the day, companies only created content, such as press releases, to announce when a new product, service or promotion was launched.
But in today’s marketing world, that’s not enough. Now you need to constantly create new content that gets you found, speaks directly to your target audience and influences them to do business with you.
Get Your Content Found
There are two primary ways your content gets found online:
- Search Engines
- Social Media
So, whether it’s a blog post, video, or ebook that your potential customer found on Google, or a webinar or social media update they saw on Facebook or Twitter, people are coming across your content as they research and learn about the products and services they need.
When your content is written, optimized, designed and promoted in an engaging way, it helps improve your search engine rankings, drives more traffic to your website and helps turn your prospects into leads by moving them through the sales funnel.
Content That Makes Your Audience Clamor to Do Business With You
Everyone has an opinion on what counts as successful content. In my book, content that gets the attention of your target audience, keeps them engaged, and makes them want to do business with you is the real proof of great content!
But before you begin creating new content you must have a deeper understanding of what drives your target audience so you can speak directly to them. Let’s start with building buyer personas.
Building Buyer Personas
When a company wants to know what content they need to create to write effectively for their target audience, it’s helpful to understand who they are writer to. There are many things that they will need to find out about their buyers including:
- What triggers their buyer to begin researching solutions to a problem?
- What are they the most concerned about?
- What are the steps their buyer will take to reach a decision?
Once you understand exactly who your buyer is and write to their needs, then you can use analytics to review the actions they take on your website, landing pages and social media accounts.
For instance, as an Inbound Content Marketing agency we might discover that a prospect needs help with:
- A new content marketing program to generate more traffic to their website
- Content offers that can boost and nurture leads
- A website redesign to generate a higher conversion rate
And, when your analytics and online marketing is consolidated into an automated marketing platform, you can easily see the search terms that brought prospects to your website, identify the content that caught their eye (and how long they stayed on that content), along with the forms they completed to get more information.
This kind of lead intelligence information is not only priceless but it will help to refine your buyer personas over time.
Developing Your Buyer Profiles
After you’ve segmented your buyers and learned more about their needs, you also need to understand how they shop for the things you sell. Asking these questions can help you discover more about them:
- What is their online behavior?
- How are they finding your information online?
- What kinds of content do they like as they conduct their research? (blog articles, ebooks, webinars, videos, infographics, etc.)
- Which of your products or services do they want to know more about?
Knowing the answers to these questions will help you understand what drives your prospects. And the more you understand their needs, desires and behaviors, the more you can develop custom content that speaks directly to them.
After you’ve got your buyer personas and buyer profiles nailed down, the next step is to conduct a content audit. We’ll talk more about that in the next article.
Content marketing is one of the eight steps in our Digital Marketing plan. To learn about the other steps and how you can put the Digital Marketing plan to work for your business, download the free whitepaper “8 Critical Ingredients of a Digital Marketing Plan.”
