Content marketing is a great way to generate leads, acquire new customers and attain a leader stand in your field of expertise.
Efficient content marketing leads to the following results:
- Generating leads,
- Building trust,
- Improving customer engagement,
- Increasing website traffic, or
- Increasing annual sales
So, what’s the hack to find and delight the right audience?
However, metrics like website traffic will only benefit your company if the right target audience visits your landing page. Developing a content strategy can be a complex task. The first step, ideally, should always be to identify and define your buyer personas, i.e. a basic character sketch of your existing and prospective customers.
How do you define buyer personas?
The most accurate way of designing a buyer’s character sketch is via research. The research should begin with an analysis of current and previous customers: their demographics, their interests and the challenges they face in their day-to-day activities and the modes by which they look at solving those problems.
Google Display Planner or Google Analytics are tools that are readily available for research. The more data you have the better, as it enables you to discover patterns among people and use them as a base to create a sample for every trend you identify.
Knowing your buyer personas
With the existing hoard of content readily available on the web for consumption, it is highly essential to give your prospective audience a hook as to why they should invest time on your content/blog.
After having identified your buyer personas, the next step is to make sure that you fully understand their needs and challenges, which you can then address in your content. Make sure you pay attention to the topics that might be interesting for your audience, as well as the format you choose to deliver the content. The specific preferences of your buyer personas can have a significant impact on whether your content will be successful or not.
Giving your audience the right content at the right time
Presenting the right content to the right audience at the right time is what will take your content marketing to the level of effectiveness you need. The whole idea of effective content marketing is to meet the audience at the right time in his buyer journey, at the problem phase, at the solutions seeking phase or at the choosing the right alternative phase.
Where should they come across your content?
The first page of Google search, undoubtedly. This can be achieved through optimising your content for specific keywords your prospective buyers might look for. You can use tools like AdWords Keyword Planner to collect ideas and get an overview over search volume and grades of difficulty for each keyword.
When should they come across your content?
It is essential that your content meets the prospective customer at the right stage of their buyer journey. The buyer’s journey begins at awareness and ends at decision making where you definitely want to be his/her choice.
The first stage, the awareness stage, is where the prospective user is aware that a problem or a challenge exists for him/her but they’re unaware as to how to solve the problem. The second stage, the consideration stage, is where your buyer will ideally either have identified the problem in the awareness stage and now is looking out for solutions which is where you can be the one to address his/her problems. The third and final stage your potential buyer persona experiences is called the decision stage. Here, they already have an idea about their problem and the solutions to solve it, but they still have to decide on a seller from whom to buy.
Effective content marketing is one which either inspires or educates your customer at the right time and at the right place.
