Is your content relevant or just part of the white noise?

Building a sales funnel using organic content is one of the best investments a business can make but how do you cut through the noise and the ever growing volume of sub standard content online?

 Any marketer can create leads by throwing money into paid advertising. Google Adwords has long been an easy source of leads: the more money you spend, the more leads you will get. Yet this does not build a sustainable business or help engage your target market in a sophisticated fashion. You can trawl for leads, conduct ill informed outbound and risk brand damage or attract prospects with highly targeted and compelling content for free.

Unlike paid advertising, the main investment in designing and executing a content strategy is time, and a lot of persistence and patience. It’s not a tap to be turned on or off, it’s a process and stream of contacts that must be nurtured. Most businesses will take months or even years for their content strategy to pay dividends, but I’m yet to meet a marketer who wasn’t grateful for that earlier investment.  

It’s remarkably easy to get started. Like high school English, starting with who, what, when, where, and why serves as a good framework for your strategy, particularly who, what, and where. 

 Who?

 The first item to consider when building a content strategy is your target audience. Who will be consuming it?

As part of your business plan you should have already spent some time devising a series of buyer personas, which can now inform your content strategy. Writing with your audience in mind is key, giving consideration to tone of voice and how accessible the content needs to be. 

Your who will in turn inform the what? and the where? 

 What?

 What content should you share with your audience, and in what format? Some personas may prefer short form videos, others will prefer long form articles or white papers. What they will have in common is the desire to find information that solves their problems. 

A useful framework is known as “jobs to be done.” By focussing on the jobs our personas need to complete each day or week, we know which jobs we can make easier or problems we can solve. Can you help your buyer improve a tiresome process? Can you help them automate? Can you help them optimise? Ultimately how do you make their life easier? mitigate a risk or show them an opportunity that represent gain.

 Presenting these solutions in the form of useful content - “adding value” and ‘being relevant’ - is what will drive your content strategy.  

Where?

We know who and what, so the final question to answer is where should the content be shared? The obvious starting point is your website’s blog or resources page, where with the help of Google your prospects should find it (more on optimising that later!). 

More importantly, sharing this content on social media and other platforms helps build your community and create a conversation (important for social selling!). Exactly which platforms you share your content on should be informed by your buyer personas; are your prospects scrolling Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn? Maybe all of the above. Are there industry publications you could contribute to? Would a podcast work?

The where is a key question. You can have great content, but you need to meet your buyers where they reside.

There’s a few simple and basic fundamentals to help frame your content strategy.

More tips on how to differentiate your content in my next few posts.

Author

Doug Hawkins

Business Transformation and New Venture Specialist.