Your content strategy must be inimitable to your brand, to your customers’ needs, to your company’s objectives, to your business culture and to how you differentiate yourself from your competitors. How do you create an effective audience-focused content marketing strategy that is unique to your brand, relevant to your audience and generates more predictable outcomes? John Miller, founder of Scribewise, defines content marketing as the creation and distribution of audience focused, journalistic content.
He also states that press releases, advertising, email marketing, and social media are not content marketing. While these are all important elements of your marketing plan, these marketing channels do not fit the criteria for an audience-centric content marketing plan. For content to contribute to your marketing and revenue objectives, it must be well-written, unique, deliver value to your audience, be shareable and fulfill best practices for discoverability. I have provided an example of a practical application of an audience-centric content strategy below.
The Importance of Audience-Centric Content
Customers are talking about your brand and your competitor’s brand whether you are choosing to listen or not. More importantly, potential new customers are being influenced in digital channels by what is said by others. The online conversations taking place in the digital space have forever changed how marketing departments should function. In order to create an audience-centric content marketing plan, marketers must be tuned into their customer’s experience with your brand. Marketing Daily author, Sarah Mahoney, quotes Cory Munchbach, a Forrester researcher, in his report, The Convergence Of Brand, Customer Experience, And Marketing. She writes that only 18% of CMO’s in the companies researched by Forrester say that customer experience derives from brand strategy.
One of the main obstacles in integrating the customer experience and brand is that most CMOs believe they are already customer-focused. When marketing and customer experience are not converged into the same mission with succinct messaging, an audience-centric content strategy will be difficult to achieve. In the Forrester survey, only 8% of marketers could define comprehensive consumer personas and identify their fundamental needs to guide marketing strategy. As buyers continue to access product information on their own terms, marketers must have an in-depth understanding of their customers and prospects to develop an audience-centric content strategy that resonates.
Define Your Personas
Content strategy begins with identifying your direct and indirect target audiences and creating a persona analysis of them. This is also the time to define your primary audience(s). Is the purpose of your content strategy for customers, prospects or both? Once these are identified, you can begin to define your audience’s pain points, their needs and interests. The next step is to correlate how your products or services offer solutions to those needs. Finally, identify the brand-centric keywords and audience-centric keywords that will become the foundation of your content strategy.
Image source: Forbes.com
Content should always be written through the lens of your customer’s perspective. Often times, for sales professionals and marketers, this can be a paradigm shift in how your content team conveys its messaging. For your content to foster relationships that can lead to revenue opportunities, use your advertising channels for selling and your content strategy for gaining trust and authority.
The Importance of Trust and Authority in Blog Content
The grim reality is that half of Americans don’t trust advertising. According to YouGov, 65% of post grads think advertising cannot be trusted compared to 44% of those with a high school education. Granted, this data includes consumer advertising. But building trust and confidence in your firm’s expertise is essential for all business to business firms. Creating content that is thinly disguised as advertising will be seen for what it is…all about You and Your Brand.
While advertising is a valuable way to gain exposure and create brand awareness, trust is built through creating thought leadership by delivering quality, transparent content that resonates with your audience. The four essential strategies to build trustworthy content include:
Eradicate the Narcissism
Eliminate the need to tell them about your brand. Your website’s About Us page is the ideal place to extol your virtues. Instead focus on content that empowers your audience with information and insights that helps them do their job more effectively, saves them money or improves their outcomes… When a visitor is ready to fill out a form, use email automation technology so you can do better person-to-person engagement through your ongoing email communications.
If your content is well-produced and valuable, your audience will visit your website to learn more about you. However, make it easy for them to do so by adding a relevant link with a CTA (call-to-action) to the specific page on your website that expands on the insights about which you have written. And if information about your product or services adds value to your content, be transparent when adding it. Your audience will see through thinly veiled advertising and tune you out of their social engagement and even worse, opt out of your email communication.
Balance Gated Content and Free Content
Offering free content (videos, eBooks, some case studies, etc.) is an effective way to build trust with your audience. Gating (filling out a form in exchange for content) is also a great way to nurture your audience beyond the ungated content. When you do gate content, keep your forms simple. You will have opportunity to learn more about who fills out your form as they progress through your marketing funnel. Asking for too much detail too soon will reduce your conversions, reduce your qualified marketing leads and limit your opportunities to build relationships that will ultimately lead to revenue opportunities.
Build a Relationship
When a visitor is ready to fill out a form request for a content offer, have a defined strategy in place to nurture their interests. Use email automation and segmentation technology that allows you to segment your visitor’s interests over time as they revisit your web assets. Use marketing automation tools to manage your online social engagement, and data intelligence tools to understand your audience, their interests, behaviors and buying signals as they move through your marketing funnel.
Make It Easy to Share
Customers and prospects trust their peers, colleagues and friends more than anyone else. Creating quality, trustworthy content is the first step to building trust. Making it easy for your audience to share it online is equally valuable. One of the many elements in Google’s search algorithm looks at how well your content is shared online. The bottom line is quality content and social sharing are two important factors in how your content is found in search engines.
Practical Application of a Content Strategy
Executing an effective audience-centric content strategy takes commitment and investment in terms of time, resources and technology. As an example, I will use Telogis, a global SaaS platform for location intelligence. I chose Telogis for several reasons. They have a trustworthy and authoritative website that effectively communicates who they are, what their platform delivers, industry verticals that use their product and several case studies (video and text) that address their platform’s solution capabilities. They also invest in online advertising which recently has driven more visits to their website than organic traffic. And subjectively, I really like their content. Their website navigation and content is audience-focused. Creating a blog with audience-centric content and a social strategy to support their web assets is a logical next step for Telogis.
A content-driven SEO strategy may very well allow Telogis to reduce dependency on their online advertising to drive traffic, while increasing the number of organic visitors to their site. Adding a social share and engagement strategy would exponentially increase their website and lead generation opportunities even more.
Organic Search Value of a Blog Content Strategy
I began this article by pointing out the importance of persona analysis. One of my goals is to encourage your content writer(s) to create content that is both highly relevant to your audience and relevant to how your potential customers search online for the products and services that you offer.
While Telogis does not have a blog per se, they have an excellent resource center with several posts related to providing valuable insights into their customer’s concerns within the transportation and logistics industry. Their content is very well-written, insightful and presumably very valuable to their audience. I would like to see it more easily discoverable through other online channels beyond their website.
Why is this important? Telogis ranks well in search engines for several non-brand keyword phrases. However, adding a blog to their website would expand the search value and likely improve their organic discoverability on search terms presently used in their online paid advertising strategy. Going through the persona analysis process would ensure that their content strategy is designed for essential brand keywords and search terms that their audience uses when researching business solutions important to Telogis.
Share Value of a Social Strategy
Maximizing your web assets using content requires executing an effective social share and engagement strategy through social channels that make sense for B4B. For most B2B brands that means LinkedIn and Twitter are at the top of the list. Most businesses begin their social journey by infrequently posting updates. This is a dip your toe in the social waters approach. However, to maximize the outcomes of an audience-centric blog content strategy, brands must be willing to dedicate the time and resources required to focus on engaging through social channels through employees, not only through the marketing department. This requires a culture shift and investing in the right social media and social listening tools that allow you to effectively participate in online conversations, engage with your audiences and measure the impact of your content and social initiatives.
The three most important take-a-ways in this post are:
- Perform a persona analysis
- Create audience focused content
- Look at your content from an audience perspective
Bottom line – it does not matter whether you describe your content marketing strategy as audience-centric, audience-focused or audience perception. Just remember that in order to maximize your outcomes from your content marketing efforts…forget the me and focus on them.
