What’s the hardest thing about content marketing? Judging from conversations on social media and in person it seems that working out what to blog about is certainly up there with the biggest obstacles.
Sound familiar? Do you find it hard to identify the sweet spot for your content?
Your business isn’t the focus
With content marketing the centre point is your customer. You are creating content for your customers, not for your business. Your primary objectives are to build an audience, nurture relationships and build trust – not selling.
The ultimate purpose is still to create leads and enquiries. The big difference is that engaging people through content means that your potential customers are opting-in. They are giving you their permission to sell to them because they trust you to help them with their problems and ambitions. Just think about how radically that changes the selling process!
Building trust through content
Building that level of trust and authority isn’t going to happen with a single piece of content. It won’t happen overnight. And it certainly won’t happen if you are creating content with your business and your issues at its centre.
I’m not suggesting that you create content about any old thing your customers might have an interest in. The aim is to create trust in your business as an expert; which means you need to bring your expertise and knowledge into play and identify where it overlaps with the needs of your customers.
With the right focus, research, and sense of direction, finding suitable topics for blog articles, infograpics, videos, slideshares and so on should never be a challenge.
If you understand the information needs of your audience, and how these relate to your expertise, experience and values, you should never be stuck for something to write about.
The formula is relatively simple to understand. In fact here’s the simplest of diagrams to illustrate:
But, while the concept is simple, making it work still needs research, mental effort and planning.
The green circle above represents your side of the content marketing equation and the blue side represents the people you want to engage. You could call the bit in the middle ‘Value’. You could also call it the sweet spot for your content.
Looking first at the ‘you’ side of the diagram, the products and services aspect is, in theory, the easiest bit to understand. It’s also the most common bit to misunderstand. Your service offer will influence your content, but shouldn’t be the subject.
Here’s an example to illustrate. One of my clients provides web-based software applications for a range of businesses. We never publish articles that just talk about their software. We always focus on an issue or challenge that businesses face, these, of course, happen to be the sort of issues that their software is really good at overcoming.
We try to help businesses to think a bit more deeply about how the processes and systems they use are affecting their business performance. And we always aim to offer helpful suggestions about how things could be better or more efficient.
Knowledge and Experience
Your content is an opportunity to reinforce that you have relevant knowledge and experience to address the things in the ‘customer’ circle above.
Of all the words in the green circle ‘beliefs’ is probably the most interesting. As a business, what do you care about? What makes you do what you do in the way you do it?
These last 3 elements: knowledge, experience and beliefs, are what will give your blog and other content a distinctive and engaging personality. This will make you stand out from all the other content that just passes on information without getting people to stop and think.
Content Marketing – Customer Needs
Naturally, the starting point for any content strategy that delivers results has to be the customers you want to win.
For all of us in business, the two most precious commodities are cash and time. Successful business people don’t part with either readily, and without getting something back. If you want people to spend some of their valuable time reading your content you have to be helping them with at least one of the words in the blue circle: objectives, needs, issues and challenges.
Your content strategy needs to be based on a thorough understanding of your target customers, what they want to achieve, what they are struggling with, and how what you do helps overcome those issues. You need to spend time researching, discussing and documenting this before you start producing content. Often, it’s helpful to include somebody external in this process to get a more objective view.
Draw me a picture
Buyer personas are invaluable. These ensure you are writing for specific people and help keep you focused on their needs. Customer interviews will also help you to understand why your existing customers chose you – what problems or challenges did you help them overcome and where do they see your expertise adding value to their business?
This analysis of customer needs and how your offer addresses them also pays off with the identification of relevant keywords for internet searches – you will understand the solutions they are likely to be searching for.
Also, by focusing on answering real questions you have the opportunity to get found for a wider range of highly relevant searches. Somebody looking for a particular solution ends up finding your excellently produced and highly relevant content through a ‘long-tail’ search in Google.
Hummingbird Changed the Rules
Late in 2013 Google released an update to its search ranking algorithm called Hummingbird. The aim was to interpret what people a really looking for (intent) and to allow natural language searches.
Google is doing this because it wants to offer a more rewarding experience. Becoming an engine that provides answers from authoritative sources to real questions is the direction that Google and Bing are both moving.
In other words, your business needs to become an authority or expert in what you do. And the way that Google will determine whether you are an expert is to look at the content you publish, what it’s about, and how people interact with it.
How Many Circles?
In reality most businesses will have a number of different types of customer they are targeting: different sectors, different sizes and so on. A more accurate diagram would have several customer circles and different areas where your services, knowledge and experience overlap. So you need to segment your targets in a meaningful way and carry out this analysis for each group.
This may seem a bit more effort than what you are currently doing but I can promise you it’s worth it. The prize on offer is the capability to publish content that people will actually want, value and engage with.
It will also be the content that Google will use to decide whether your business is the ‘expert’ that it wants to present to its users.
Richard Hussey, RSH Copywriting
I run a copywriting and content marketing business in South West England.
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