Getting started
The first step of any content marketing strategy should be to establish your target audience. You may already have a good idea of what sort of person is buying your product or service, but if you don’t a useful exercise would involve creating ‘buyer personas.’ The Buyer Persona Institute is a good place to find a definition for this concept.
Built from the real words of real buyers, a buyer persona tells you what prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh their options to address a problem that your company resolves. Much more than a one-dimensional profile of the people you need to influence, or a map of their journey, actionable buyer personas reveal insights about your buyers’ decisions — the specific attitudes, concerns and criteria that drive prospective customers to choose you, your competitor or the status quo.
To create buyer personas you’ll need to combine market research and all the insights you have gathered from your customer base. Unless you have just started your business, you will probably have already done a lot of this kind of work. This blog is an excellent resource if you are new to the idea of buyer personas.
What are your customers looking for?
Once you know who is buying what you have to offer, the next logical step from an online content marketing point of view is to create a list of keywords that these people are searching for. A successful content marketing strategy creates content that your audience actually wants to read or watch. Targeting buyer personas rather than just anyone is important, as the name suggests these people will actually buy your product, and they will be tempted to do so if you can attract them to your site with useful content.
Quality over quantity
Hopefully you know the industry your business operates in and what its niche is. This will allow you to create quality content, which is something Google values increasingly over other SEO tricks and shortcuts. If the content is text-based, make sure it is well-written and readable as this is something Google analyses and scores too.
Of course your content could come in all kinds of different forms, and incorporating many different types of content will help you to appeal to different types of people. Some people will read long blog posts, some people love videos.
Use analytics
The one thing you definitely shouldn’t do is ignore all the tools at your disposal that can be used to track the popularity of the content you are creating. See how popular social media posts are or track the traffic on your website so you can adjust your approach based on what works the best. Utilise Google Analytics to track the progress of your content marketing, by drilling down to your landing pages reports to monitor bounce rates and engagement rates on your new pages.
It is important to consider the importance of drawing traffic to your own website rather than to an external blog. Having a site that you can update with news and blogs is absolutely essential; you don’t want to be creating stuff that is actually just benefiting someone else’s website.
At Alloy Marketing we have years of experience when it comes to creating and executing marketing strategies for various different types of businesses. If you really want to get an advantage over your competition, find out more about our content marketing and inbound marketing services today!