As an Internet marketer it is easy to get bogged down with tactics. Does this keyword get a decent amount of traffic? Is this copy tweetable? We all deal with these questions daily. These challenges get the most attention because they are immediate, easy to understand, and have clear solutions. The question that companies and agencies have a harder time answering is whether the content meets the quality standards your customers/potential customers demand.
Regardless of your distribution method e.g. SEO or Social Media, content is at the heart of you campaign. If you haven’t clearly defined your content strategy you need to stop, collect your team, and hammer this out before spending any more time on tactics. Here are a few questions to get you started:
- Who is our customer?
- Use this to create a profile so your content can speak to a particular person i.e. purchasing manager at fortune 500 company, 30 something new car buyer, etc…
- What are the common questions/problems they have which fits with our solution?
- This will help you generate content topics
- If I needed that solution where would I go to find that information?
- Thinking about how that information will be found will help you determine the format of the content i.e. video, infographic, article etc… and also clarify distribution points
The days of build it and they will come are long over. Marketers in the know are spending a lot of time carefully crafting their content to reach a specific audience. Not targeting your audience is an easy way for your content to get lost in the sea of information overload.
Below is a mind map I created to help remind the team that content is at the center of everything we do.
