No words wasted.
Your content needs to be tailored to the right audience.
This is the principle of how your content starts and ends, and is the main indicator for your potential content marketing success.
However, many people at times find it hard to write engaging content and capture the audience’s interest in a meaningful way. In order to do this, a content marketing strategy that is exceptionally focused on your long term marketing needs is exactly what your business needs.
Your customers might not care about your content.
This is another principle you must be aware of.
In reality, your customers might not be engaging with what you post online. Your blog, social media, and email marketing may all be missing the mark with your audience. This is not just a theory, it’s a reality that many brands are experiencing. According to a survey made by Forrester, it was found that 87% of brands are struggling when it comes to creating focused content. Therefore, implementing a problem-solving method is what every brand should be focusing on. But what is (or are) the actual problems your content strategy may be facing? Well, here are the most common ones:
- Not knowing the actual audience, their interests, and needs
- Too much promoting and way less interacting with the audience
- Not knowing how to use attention-grabbing methods for engaging content (headlines, calls to action etc.)
At this point, you may be thinking – ‘How will I cover all the interests and how am I able to target every individual reader out there?’
How To Write Content Focused To Your Audience Interests
Now, let’s escape from theory – and give a better picture on how to write content that is tailored to the needs of your particular audience.
Basically, it can all be summed up to the following stages.
Research
Meaningful content engages when you know who your audience is. The relevancy of your posts, learning from the feedback of your audience as well as creating valuable and informative content is are ways to research and dig in deeper in the interests and needs of your average reader.
You can do quality research using these measures:
- Customer interviews
- Persona development
- Data mining
Development
Brand development is a unique phase in sorting out what the content will look like and how relevant it would be. In order to achieve this, you must identify your brand and establish its identity. These are key factors to determining the type of content that will be created.
Finding out the unique selling point (USP) is the main differentiator that a brand has from its competitors. It’s also the first point of establishing your content strategy and where it should be focused – obviously, not directly into promoting it but indirectly by thoroughly examining it, the need for it, as well as the benefits it gives.
Planning
The planning phase is where you’ve established your brand’s identity and it’s unique values and are now determining how to integrate everything into top-quality content.
Discovering where your audience and the brand identity overlap is done in the phase of planning, usually by:
- determining what kind of content your brand already has and how to improve it with addressing it to your customers’ needs
- brainstorming new ideas for content that fill in the holes that may be present and grow your brand to provide more value to its audience
- creating an editorial calendar and guidelines for the content strategy being planned that is shared amongst your full company
Defining goals and metrics
As everything in life, the only way of measuring the success of your strategy is to have a goal to strive to. To define your goals you need to clarify exactly what you need from your content strategy.
Some of the most common goals include:
- growing the reputation and positioning your brand as an authority in the industry/niche
- attracting new customers
- decreasing website’s bounce rate
- growing the base of loyal followers and customers
- answering the common question about your brand in a meaningful way
Writing
The writing part comes next and for obvious reasons’ it’s the heart of your content strategy. Effective writing is imperative to success, but how to start or learn it?
Start with drafting – take notes of everything you will collect for your strategy and afterwards sum them up in a hierarchical and meaningful order so that you present all the ideas to your followers in the best way possible.
With understanding what kind of content your audience wants, what approach would they want you to use and what questions they need answered in the content, you can start to structure the body and write an effective copy.
However, the days of producing a sub-par article and expecting results are far behind us. If you are unable to produce content to a high standard, you are always better to retain the services of a professional who can.
Launching and post-launching
The phase of launching is when your content is produced ready to publish. But what about post-launching?
Once your content is live, you need to then promote it to get it noticed as readers will not necessary find it on their own.
Content is best promoted via these channels:
- social media channels
- guest posts on other sites
- email marketing
This being said, sponsored posts on social media and guest posts on other sites are definitely worth investing into – at least now – when you have actually valuable content, right?
Conclusion
Content may be a great marketing buzzword and an aspect driving much theory to it, but the fact is it’s one of most valuable driving factors in your whole business strategy and will continue to be so.
Did you know that (according to Content Marketing Institute) even 61% of people actually feel better when a company delivers custom content?
If you don’t have it, then you need to focus on creating a content strategy sooner rather than later. If you do have top-quality content, you should be adding to it consistently. Content is not a trend. It’s the future of your business and imperative to delivering a personalised experience to your audience.
