Building out your brand and acquiring new users is no easy task. Cultivating a strategic and well-thought-out content strategy can help your marketing team best utilize their talents and budget. Check out our top tips on building a strong content strategy to improve your lead acquisition efforts.
The first step in building out your content strategy is to understand your audience. Know what your target users are searching for and how to best market your content to them. Try to build out buyer personas to discover the patterns and trends that are attractive to your target audience.
Buyer personas are the makeup of typical trends followed by your users. For example, the age group of your typical buyer will heavily influence your content strategy by helping you choose colors, designs, and slogans that will capture the attention of potential buyers. The same goes for commonalities within your audience’s demographic. Gender, residential location, education, financial status, and marital status can all be used to influence your content strategy.
After creating your buyer personas, it is time to select the content distribution channels you wish to use. This is important because you’ll be able to envision exactly where your content will end up and how it will look when presented to your audience. For example, if you target a younger demographic, choosing to advertise your contact on popular social media channels will likely be more effective than choosing a more formal newsletter.
There are many pros and cons to each and every channel you will evaluate at this stage. Remember that you might have to change your strategy once your campaign is underway if you find that certain content is underperforming. Be flexible and ready to adapt! Evaluate options such as blogs, trade shows, ebooks, infographics, podcasts, social media, and more.
You’ve likely heard of SMART goals before - this is because they are extremely useful when establishing an effective plan and implementing benchmarking standards. SMART goals are used to make sure your goals are attainable considering your funding, company size, timeline, and more.
After you have completed your buyer personas and decided on target channels, you can set SMART goals. The acronym SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Be sure to consider each step when deciding on how to move forward with your plan.
Now it’s time to build out your content marketing strategy! Before launching your content, consider your buyer’s journey and the flywheel. This will help you distribute your content in the most effective way possible.
Your buyer’s journey is essentially defined by the process in which your customer goes through before making the final purchase. Of course, the final goal is to land a paying customer, but it’s essential to consider how your buyer will reach this step! Focus on awareness, consideration, and decision - as these are the three core phases of the buyer’s journey.
The flywheel model focuses on creating an excellent customer experience. Once a customer has made a purchase, the flywheel keeps them satisfied and coming back for more. Here, your marketing team will focus on retaining customers by creating content and engaging experiences for this group of users.
Are you ready to get started on building your content strategy and boosting lead acquisition? Get a step-by-step guide on how to do so in our whitepaper.