Is Your Content on Target?
Marketing content comes in a variety of flavors - website, nurturing, blog, Social Media, etc. We can talk about early stage, mid-stage, late-stage and customer content as well. There are educational, expertise and evidence versions to build engagement in different ways. Then we can go farther and list all the different formats, such as white papers, eBooks, articles, success stories, data sheets, video, podcasts etc.
The question is - Are you using the same type of writing for all of them?
Content is not meant to be all the same with the only difference being where or how it is used. It needs variety, a varying amount of meatiness and some spice thrown in to set it apart. How much of each and how these ingredients are applied depends on intention, audience and takeaway.
But you also have to consider your company's brand, personality and culture.
Confused yet? That's a lot of stuff!
This is why you need to start with audience. Your audience rules when it comes to content design.
- If your content is too low-level or too difficult, you miss.
- If you go for humor but your audience is serious about the subject, you miss.
- If you write about technical product features and your audience is interested in business value, you miss.
- If your content is online but too densely packed to be easily scanned and assimilated, you miss.
The problem is that quite often marketers developing content make assumptions based on personal preference. You have to kick personal preference out the door and base your decisions on your buyers' and customers' preferences.
I get a lot of pushback about why this won't or can't happen. Usually it's because marketers don't get face time with prospects or customers.
Hogwash.
There are resources all over the place at your company — salespeople, account managers, customer service and support staff — and I'd like to be so bold as to suggest that we could actually speak with our customers.
One of the first things I discuss in my book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, is buyers. I talk about a framework I call the buyer synopsis. This is a combination of buyer persona with a problem-to-solution scenario. I include exercises to help you create a styleguide to map content to the buying process dependent on what's important to those specific buyers.
Once you have that, you can develop content to suit intention, takeaway - and of course, your audience.
The biggest thing to remember is to try to meet them on common ground. Let your content fly and pay careful attention to their response. Then tune and tweak your content to target your audience more closely.
If you aim for perfection, you'll end up second guessing yourself and modifying your content based on what you think, not what you know. The trick is to make content development a fluid process that becomes instinctive because you've become well-versed with what matters to your buyers.
Ardath
Reader Comments (8)
SEO Fact: Content is king. Always will be. Don't assume that more is better in terms of keywords. Do not fall victim to the temptation to simply keyword stuff your site otherwise two things will happen. First, you'll get banned by the search engines and even worse, you'll be ignored by the humans who land on your page. Both types of visitors can see through vain SEO attempts to trick you to get onto their site.
If your content is not targeted, you will just waste your time and energy in creating your articles. You should first concentrate on your market and the search keywords related to it.
Content is not meant to be all the same with the only difference being where or how it is used. It needs variety, a varying amount of meatiness and some spice thrown in to set it apart. How much of each and how these ingredients are applied depends on intention, audience and takeaway.
the great workThanks for making such a cool post which is really very well written.
It needs variety, a varying amount of meatiness and some spice thrown in to set it apart. -Roger Dubuis Excalibur swiss watches
-fashion Alexander McQueen BootsIf your content is not targeted, you will just waste your time
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