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 find it hard to write engaging content that captures their audience’s interest in a meaningful way. You need a content marketing strategy that is targeted on who your customer is and the questions they need to be answered. Focusing on this is the first step in your long-term marketing goals.
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 intended consumers.
This is 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. This is the problem you need to solve for your brand to be successful. It happens often. Brand’s don’t know who their actual audience is, their interests and their needs. They tend to promote their product instead of interacting with their audience. And don’t know how to use the best attention-grabbing methods for engaging readers like mind-blowing headlines and excellent call-to-actions.
But how do you target each individual reader and their individual interests?
How To Write Content Focused To Your Audience Interests
Now, let’s escape from theory – and give a better picture of how to write content that is tailored to the needs of your particular audience.
Basically, it can all be summed up in 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 and creating valuable and informative content are ways to dig in deeper into 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 key phase before you can plan and implement your content strategy. You need to first identify your brand and establish it’s identity before you can focus on creating content that works.
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 now want to integrate top-quality content that matches these.
This best way to discover where your audience and the brand identity overlap is to start with the following;
- Determine what kind of content your brand already has and update it to ensure it addresses their needs.
- Brainstorm new ideas for content that fill in the holes that may be present and grow your brand to provide more value to its audience.
- Create an editorial calendar and guidelines for the content strategy that is shared amongst your full company
Defining Goals And Metrics
As with everything in life, the only way of measuring the success of your strategy is to have a goal to strive to smash. To define your goals you need to clarify exactly what you need from your content strategy.
Some of the most common goals include:
- Growing your online reputation and positioning your brand as an authority in the industry/niche.
- Attracting new customers.
- Decrease your website’s bounce rate
- Grow the base of loyal followers and customers
- Answer 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 where exactly do you even begin?
Start by developing customer personas that define exactly who your customers are. Research what they are doing online and what sort of channels they engage with. 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 to write 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 and 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. This will unlikely ever change.
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.
