3 Simple Questions for a Successful Content Marketing Strategy
There are many factors that contribute to a successful content strategy–including SEO optimization, audience targeting, and measurement and optimization. But the most important piece of the puzzle is the quality of the content itself. No matter how smart the strategy, if the content doesn’t resonate with your audience, it will fail. And content that resonates must solve a problem; contribute to achieving a goal; and/or satisfy an emotion.
Here are three simple questions to ask that will consistently guide high-quality content that performs.
Is it useful?
When people (and search robots) are seeking content, they are often trying to solve a problem. For that, they need the right tool. From website content to social media posts, high-quality content includes a measure of utility or education.
The people in your company hold troves of knowledge about your industry, products and services, customer pain points and their motivations. Survey your team. Ask them about what they find interesting, fascinating or surprising about their work. What kind of questions do they get most often from customers? What do they find frustrating about the industry, and what would they do to solve it?
Even if It seems like basic knowledge, the chances are good that your target audience will find it useful. Create a shared document, like a Google Doc, where members of your team can add their ideas and questions, then organize them into buckets that align with your business’ value propositions. Get your subject matter experts or a third party to create content to fill these buckets and you will soon have a content library ready to use for website landing pages, email newsletters, social media posts, short videos, blog posts, white papers, pitch decks…
We help businesses win customers, grow revenue and gain customer loyalty with content. Let’s talk about your content strategy. Contact us.
Is it timely?
What does your audience need to know today, this week and this month?
The UPS slogan from the late 90’s, “Moving at the Speed of Business” was meant to remind us that every industry changes quickly. Along with a long-term content calendar, keep resources available to create content quickly.
Ideally, consumers can rely on your business to help them react when market conditions change or new trends appear on the horizon. Set up Google alerts using keywords relevant to your industry, products and services, even your competitors. Research seasonal trends that impact your customers, and list the ways that you can help them prepare. The best channels for posting this kind of content are social media platforms, blog posts and email.
Is it moving?
You might not think that your brand, products or services are capable of stirring emotion. They are. You are.
Take a step back from the tangible aspects of your offering, and consider the human emotions associated with them. If you sell car batteries, you’re not just selling a power source and a warranty. You are selling safe passage for a family on a road trip through a frozen landscape. You are helping them bond with each other by removing worry along the way. Subaru does a great job with this. Tech companies often struggle with it–they are notorious for diving right into the intricacies of their software and APIs, when they are really helping make people’s lives easier, more productive, even more fulfilling.
Survey your customers and gather their stories by asking them questions about how your business makes them feel. What can they do now that they couldn’t do before? Take this content and demonstrate how it relates to your company values. People buy with their emotions. People want to buy from businesses that share their values.
Is it useful?
Is it timely?
Is it moving?
Satisfy these three conditions with your content and every piece of content you create stands a good chance of connecting with the audiences that help your business thrive.
Bonus question: Is it achievable?
One of the most common failures of businesses in content marketing is simply biting off more than they can chew. There is nothing more frustrating than having a great plan in place then realizing that the resources simply aren’t there to fulfill the strategy. Content marketing requires dedication and consistency to truly make it worth the investment.
We help businesses plan and produce great content every day.
Contact us to learn more about how we create content that helps business grow and profit.