Creating Great Content | Research and Strategy
Content marketing is a great way to drive quality traffic to your website, build brand recognition and awareness and position your company as a thought leader and industry expert. It’s a tried and true, proven marketing strategy that continues to grow in relevance for B2B and B2C companies.
Why You Need to Create Great Content
According to MarketingProfs, more than 2 million articles are published every day on the web. According to MerchDope, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute! Articles and videos are just two types of content. There is a lot of content produced and published every minute of every day.
This means that the competition we face for the content we produce is growing every minute, and will continue to grow. So how do we compete, and how do we make our content stand out?
The answer sounds simple: create great content. Create content that is optimized for search performance, content that will captivate your target audience and content that will inspire current and potential customers to take action. Depending on your primary objectives, that action may be simply viewing your content in its entirety, liking or sharing it, or making a purchase.
Research and strategy are important components of a successful content marketing program and can equip you with the knowledge and insights to create great content.
Market Research and Target Personas
Creating great content starts with a good understanding of your target audience. As marketers, we need information about what our customers need and want, and why, in order to build a content marketing strategy to effectively communicate with them. One of our recent articles, ONLINE MARKET RESEARCH, outlines how an understanding of who your customers are, what motivates them, and how to reach them will allow you to be relevant to your customers and prospects.
Developing content to target personas will help your content be more effective by increasing its relevance and will provide a better return on your content marketing investment. If behavioral segmentation is not an option (it does take some time and an investment), there are other ways to gain insights to help you develop target personas. For example, online audits and customer surveys can also uncover information that can be valuable in this process.
Developing a Content Strategy
After you have a good understanding of your audience, you can start thinking about your content marketing strategy. To get you started, here are a few questions to try to answer:
- What are the primary objectives you would like your content to achieve?
- What kinds of content can help you achieve those objectives?
- What kinds of information and topics are your target personas interested in?
- What kind of SEO opportunities are present?
- What kinds of content are your competitors producing?
- What kind of frequency would you like to achieve with your content?
- What resources do you have available to produce/manage your content?
- How will you distribute your content?
- How will you evaluate the success of your content marketing program?
Answering these questions will help guide you in developing a successful, manageable and measurable content marketing strategy, sharing great content, that will help your content stand apart from your competitors and stand out from the plethora of content produced and published each minute.
To learn more about an effective content marketing process we’ve found to be successful, check out a popular post from our agency library, A MAP TO SUCCESS WITH CONTENT MARKETING. This article outlines the process for creating great content and managing a content marketing program in a visual and easy-to-understand way, all the way from the strategy of identifying target personas to the execution and optimization throughout a campaign.
