If you are developing your content marketing strategy for the coming year, always remember this effort involves highly strategic, consistent creation (sometimes curation) and distribution of valuable content to attract and keep a targeted audience of clients and prospects.
Take time before diving in and splashing about to make a plan to improve your content marketing strategy. Evaluate, adjust, tweak, and change it once you have a foundation to refine and build on. In this effort, consider the following five questions:
- Who are you selling to? This is your audience—the industry professionals you’ll speak to via your content. You won’t know what type of content to create until you know the clients you’re trying to reach as precisely as possible. Look at your best clients: the biggest spenders and the repeat or long-term clients. Describe them demographically: their income, their location, their employment sector, their interests/hobbies, and their ethnicity. (For professional services firms: what companies do you provide your services to? Who are the decision-makers? Is it the CFO or the owner of each company, CFO, facilities manager, etc.?) You may have a few distinct audience segments with unique concerns based on their role that can be addressed with more targeted content.
- Who would you like to reach? Who would your services appeal to if they knew about your company? Who do your competitors work with? Tailor some content to appeal to each segment.
- What problems does each audience segment have? You're offering service solutions. Can you repackage/rename your services, making them apparent solutions for specific segments? Or add new features to your product or service offering? Can you add or create new tailored services? Now, build content around them.
- What is your typical client’s sales cycle? How many unique contacts or communications until they set up a meeting to discuss working with you? What content is needed to move clients along the sales cycle? Look at past client behavior for data--and track this in the future. To improve your content marketing strategy, ask your best clients what spurred them to take the plunge and hire your company.
- What's next? To improve your content marketing strategy, reflect on these questions, compile your data, and use the information to inform future content creation. Map out upcoming content needs on your editorial calendar, including planned social media activity around the new content.
Taking the time to answer these five questions and respond with content that more specifically addresses your target audiences' key challenges or concerns is the pathway toward a more reliable content marketing plan. When you deliver targeted content, you will make an greater impact!
Let's kick-off 2014 with a great content marketing plan!
For more information, contact Colosi Marketing.
