The key to maintaining loyal clients and customers, as with any relationship, is to build a solid level of trust. Empower them with information that helps them overcome challenges and discover new opportunities.
A content marketing plan builds brand awareness and helps to establish your brand as a knowledgeable source people will seek out for valuable information. It's the first step in converting information seekers into customers.
Each piece of content should have a purpose and fit within the campaign you’re developing. Content doesn’t always mean written pieces like blogs, ebooks, and white papers. Great content can also come in the form of videos, tip sheets, infographics, social images and more.
Consider these tips for building an effective content strategy:
Evaluate Your Resources
Creating content can be an overwhelming task when you don’t know what you need. Before you jump into the content creation process, assess what you already have that can be repurposed, what can be used as is and what you need to create from scratch.
Research Your Target Buyer Persona
Buyer personas are a general representation of your ideal customer. Try not to skip doing this exercise as it gives you the opportunity to really think about and pinpoint your persona’s needs, challenges and interests so you can give them personalized content based on those factors.
Click here to find out what mistakes to avoid when creating your buyer personas.
Consider the Buyer’s Journey
Before your leads convert into customers, they go through what’s known as a buyer’s journey, which gives them the opportunity to get to know your brand and eventually decide whether or not to do business with you. Different types of content will work more effectively at different stages of the journey. If your target is just starting to get to know you, they will likely be more receptive to a blog post about a topic of interest rather than jumping straight into a case study.
Write for Your Audience
When thinking about campaign themes and content topics, it’s easy to focus on the areas that matter most to you. Everyone has an agenda. You may be launching a new product or a new service offering, but avoid letting your content go down a self-serving path. It’s more important to entice new customers with topics that matter most to them.
Develop a Distribution Plan
Now that you have content, it’s time to think about how you’re going to give it sufficient visibility. A targeted plan is going to be more effective than throwing your content everywhere to see where it sticks. Think about where your audience spends most of its time on different social media channels, news sites and more. Remember that different types of content will lend itself better on various platforms. For instance, short videos and visually interesting pieces are perfect for social channels.
Click here for more tips on building a content distribution strategy.
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