(BE) come a content MASTER

So, earlier this week Kadia Francis (IG: @thedigitaljamaican), a digital content creator tagged me on a question around content. So, this blog post was inspired by her and her willingness to initiate and moderator a conversation via Twitter on content. 

So, I will discuss today what is content marketing and the key element to executing a great content marketing strategy for yourself or a brand.

(BE) Credible.

In order for content marketing to be helpful or informative, it needs to be credible. Rather than using the kind of breathless hype that characterizes most sales pitches, content marketing needs to set a tone closer to that of a newspaper article or a trade magazine—or even a documentary. It must show, not tell. It must advise, not sell. It must enrich rather than pitch.

As with much of content marketing, it sounds simple, but it is tempting to cram in a little bit about your product, right? Don’t. Your audience has a finely tuned BS filter. (BS stands for blatant sales. No, really.) When that filter goes off, they stop listening. They start questioning whether the information is for your benefit or theirs. You lose trust.

Some successful content marketing can be entertaining—much of consumer marketing works that way—but content marketing is more often applied to high-consideration products, such as technology products or business services, that require lots of information and a long sales cycle.

The credibility of your information is essential to gaining trust. If you provide enough helpful information, you establish your company as an expert in the field. When you clearly describe the problem that needs to be solved and you help solve it, your credibility goes sky high, and customers begin to believe that you are the answer to their prayers.

(BE) Targeted

Most successful marketing is targeted, so it isn’t surprising that content marketing is, also. You can target your content marketing by using traditional targeting approaches, with demographics (for B2C marketers) or firmographics (for B2B businesses)—such as industry or company size.

Stages of the buyer’s journey. Someone who is just learning about a problem is not ready for a coupon. Your content needs to be carefully targeted based on where the buyer is on the journey to a purchase.

A/B testing and multivariate testing allow you to identify effective messages—not just in general but when targeted to specific personas within a stage of the buyer’s journey. Search is the main way we accomplish this, but social shares, emailing links, and other methods provide information specially selected for the recipient.

(BE) Different

How do you build messages that tend to help your audience take the next step in their client journeys? One question that comes up throughout the buyer’s journey is “How can your company help me solve my problems better than your competitors?”

Differentiation is a difference that a market will pay for.

Focusing your initial content marketing efforts on content that describes and addresses these problems is your best approach. They express those things in their own terms, which tend to be in the common parlance of the market. Differentiation makes sense to them only relative to that common parlance. If you try to be clever, your differentiation won’t work. Mainstream customers worry about products they can’t compartmentalize in some way.

(BE) Measurable

The digital medium enables all kinds of analyses of the target audience. Fine-grained analysis can be used to target the audience not only with the content they need but in the time and space that is most convenient to them.

The big data that content marketers need to use these four hallmarks—known as the four 4Vs:

1. Volume. This is the “big” part, but you probably knew that.
2. Velocity. This extreme speed of incoming data has never been seen before.
3. Variety. You have structured data coming from your metrics analysts in spreadsheet form. You have unstructured data coming from your keyword research and social data visualization listening, which starts out as plain text. You have A/B test data. You have user experience studies. You have surveys. It all comes together to produce meaning in different ways.
4. Veracity. None of this matters unless you know you have accuracy.  Some metrics, called structured data, belong in spreadsheets and relational (i.e., SQL) databases. But many modern metrics are derived from unstructured data—text, images, videos, and other kinds of data that is more complex to analyze than rows of numbers and values. We call it big data not just because there is a lot of it but because analysis of it involves mixing both structured and unstructured data.

In the end, nothing matter is you aren't having fun and being YOU. So, always, (BE) authentic, start with your CONSUMER FIRST.