Understanding your consumer, their journey and purchase process is and should be the backbone of any content marketing strategy. The material we produce needs to help a buyer with their purchase decisions and address certain pain points.
It should educate and inspire as well as provide helpful tools to steer the buyer’s decision toward a specific product or service that you are offering. If it doesn’t, then the content serves absolutely no purpose and becomes a huge waste of your time and resources.
As well as to educate, your content needs to generate a sense of trust and show the reader that you understand what they need and know how to solve their problems. It should never be a sales pitch.
To understand your consumer means to follow their journey from the awareness stage right through to purchase (and beyond), and a content marketing strategy helps to attract those prospects and convert them to customers. It’s about producing targeted content, always keeping the buyer’s interests in mind, and with so much consumer and industry information available to us online, there is simply no excuse for poor content.
The move to digital has made content marketing one of the most effective marketing tools out there. The most important and fail-proof factor is to thoroughly understand your target audience and address something they cannot solve or are struggling with. This is the key to success.
If you have appeal, gain their trust, satisfy a need and delight them in the process, you could be on your way to converting a prospect to a customer and producing targeted content doesn’t have to be hard. Here’s a simple guide to get you thinking:
1 – Start with market research
Thoroughly research your industry, your audience and their behaviour patterns. What do people need and what are they struggling with? How do they buy?
Consider the buyer journey and start thinking about the sort of information they would require. This is the first step to developing great content that is targeted with purpose.
2 – Develop a buyer persona
Once you’ve done the research, you should by now be able to identify who your prospects are. Now it’s time to develop a few buyer personas.
According to Hubspot a buyer persona represents a semi-fictional version of your ideal customer. Consider their demographic information (i.e job title, role, responsibilities company, industry and budget) and their behavioural traits, such as their concerns, goals and motivating factors. Write it all down with as much detail as possible.
Developing these personas will immensely help with creating engaging content ideas and will help you structure a great content campaign.
3 – Your prospects matter…all the time
The buyer journey should not stop at the market research stage. Combine the buyer journey with the buyer personas that you have created. Always think about the prospect when producing any sort of content. You should ideally create a content series that covers topics relevant to their purchase journey – it’s not supposed to be a direct sales pitch.
For example, if you have started a fitness business focusing on body transformations, your content needs to work through all the elements that prospects should consider on their health and wellness journey. Talk about diet changes, foods that promote weight loss, what to eat/not to eat before and after a workout, simple lifestyle changes and include some success case studies. In a non-intrusive way you want to educate your customer and show how your services can help them achieve their fitness goals.
Now it’s your turn. Start creating some awesome content!
If you need help creating a winning content marketing strategy, please get in-touch with us at [email protected].