Content With Your Content?

While most marketing managers would agree that an annual review of their content strategy is well worth the time, most don't know where to begin.

"How do I create a content strategy that works?"

Here are the eight steps to creating a better content marketing strategy:

1.  Understand Your Target Audience(s)

First you should dig deep into your customer data.  How can you group your customers, and potential customers, based on purchase behavior?  See the previous blog post for more information on how to segment a market.  Step 1 is developing your brand personas and identify characteristics shared by the people in your segments.  Pay special attention to common pain points, decision drivers and social engagement trends.

2.  Set Goals

Content tactics vary significantly, depending on your business objectives.  From building brand awareness, to increasing customer loyalty, to customer service, content can be optimized to fill any number of needs.  Step 2 in creating a great content strategy is to identify what you want the content to accomplish and how you will measure the effectiveness of the content (KPIs).  Make your goals measurable and give them deadlines.

3.  Create a Plan

Step 3 in creating a content strategy is to use your business objectives and brand personas to start creating content plans that identify the relevant content mix and topics as they apply across the customer buying cycle.

4.  Keyword Research

As an extension of Step 1, this step is to do research to determine the words and phrases that your target uses to find information about the topics you've selected.  Use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to get keyword ideas, to get an understanding of how frequently keywords are searched, and to understand how much competition there is for the keywords.

5.  Generate Optimized Content

Step 5 is to create content that is optimized for your target audience.  Using words and phrases that are SEO friendly and are on your keyword list, but read poorly, is a bad idea.  Search engines are smarter than ever and sacrificing readability in order to get higher organic rankings will only get you burned in the long run.  Content that's smart, fresh and relevant is more likely encourage engagement and get shared.  Content that feels robotic and/or grammatically incorrect is less likely to be shared and will likely damage your brand.  That being said, be aware of the keywords that you are targeting and use them naturally in your content.  Don't be afraid to use variations of your keywords (word order, synonyms...) to make it read naturally.

6.  Promote Your Content

Creating and publishing thoughtful, relevant content isn't enough.  There is too much noise on the web to get seen and heard.  Step 6 in your strategy is to outline how you will promote your content to your target market, and to industry influencers who may increase your reach.  One of the benefits of promoting your content is links to your websites.  These links can be gold for your rankings.

7.  Engage

Once you push your content to the web and promote it to your target, don't leave it at that.  Step 7 is to participate in the conversation, most importantly by listening.  The conversation around your content is a great place to find future content topics.

8.  Measure

The last step is to take a look at the KPIs you identified early on.  Is the content resulting in engagement?  Is it leading to your intended behaviors?  As you identify your baseline KPIs, measure future content against these figures to determine if you are improving.  Identify trends where you can.  Are you getting the desired result from content that's technically focused?  Is your target responding to content that's funny or educational?  Use this to guide future content creation efforts.

Using a systematic approach to generating and updating your content strategy will have a positive impact on your ability to reach your business objectives.

How to Segment a Market

On more than one occasion I've been asked "what is market segmentation?".  It's a pretty simple concept, but one that manages to evade many business owners.  Considering how important it is, it's about time we covered the topic.

What is Market Segmentation?

At some point in the history of commerce entrepreneurs realized it didn't make sense to treat all potential customers the same.  It's common sense really.  If you sell widgets, your pitch to a child would likely sound much different than it would to an adult.  You would probably use simple words, a metaphor, a friendly tone... you might even get down on your knees so you can chat at eye level.  Now if you were to use the same communication style with an adult, you would be considered rude and/or laughable.  This is the idea behind market segmentation.

Market segmentation is the exercise of taking a group of potential customers and grouping them based on common characteristics, so you can address them in the unique manner that is most effective for each group.

Why You Should Segment Your Market

The analogy that seems most appropriate here is hunting a sasquatch with a shotgun.  Shotguns shoot dozens of small metal balls all at once.  These balls spread out into a wide round pattern, maximizing the chance of hitting your target.  Unfortunately these balls don't pack much of a punch, so if you shot a sasquatch with a shotgun, you would most likely just irritate him, making yourself his target and probably also his lunch.  Rifles shoot a single bullet, making it much easier to miss your furry target, but when you do aim in the right direction, you're much more likely to bring home a trophy than become his lunch.

When we don't segment and try to communicate with everyone in the same way, it's like hunting a sasquatch with a shotgun.  We're likely to reach more ears, but less likely to bag the sale.

How to Segment a Market

The most common method to segment a market is to simply group people by their demographics.  Women over here, men over there.  Children at the little table.  You get the point.  This method for segmenting a market enables you to be a little more strategic in the way you communicate your value.  If this is your only option for segmenting, by all means go for it, but there is a better way.

Why Move Beyond Demographics?

Segmenting by demographics is quite alluring in its simplicity.  It's quite easy to say to yourself, "I'm going to talk to all women this way, and all men that way" and go about your day.  The problem with this method is it's just too simple to be useful.  We highly recommend that you segment by use scenarios.

Segmenting by Use Scenarios

Instead of thinking first about how to break up an enormous pool of potential customers by demographics, I would recommend thinking about how your product might be used, or what jobs your product might be hired to do.  For example, If you sell toys and attempted to segment the market by demographics, you might incorrectly exclude men and women without children.  

I would recommend that you consider all of the situations in which people toys.  You might first create one primary segment consisting of adults who give toys as gifts, with the first job being to bring joy to children and the second to help the adults feel good about themselves as caregivers/aunts/uncle/grandparents.  To reach this segment, you might consider the times of year (holidays, birthdays...) that toys are purchased as gifts and structure campaigns accordingly.

You might create a secondary segment consisting of children who buy the toys for themselves, with the job being to bring happiness to themselves, or to bring a sense of inclusion into a peer group.  To reach this segment you might consider year-round campaign.

Segmenting in this way will help you develop unique strategies to reach these customers in ways that are much more effective than demographic segmentation.