Hitting Your Target Market With Content Marketing
Recently I was working on a content marketing plan with a client who has a unique challenge that many companies could only hope for – too much content!
Can this even be possible? Well that depends.
Having a lot of content isn’t really helping your business if there is no strategic plan in place to leverage it. Plus, how do you justify the time and cost to produce such content that hasn’t necessarily been created with a goal of reaching your target market?
An important step in creating your content marketing plan is to “get in the heads of your target market”. That means that you need to think like they do, at every stage of their buying process. Remove yourself from using industry jargon and the knowledge you have as a professional in your field – and put yourself in their shoes.
What questions will they have as they:
- Become aware of a problem or need they have?
- Begin to research their options?
- Evaluate the best solution to help them to solve their problem or meet their need?
- What can they expect after they make their purchase?
As we worked through the list above, and began to map our content to the various questions that we suspected our prospects would have, it became clear that we had tons of content, but only about half of the articles, videos and presentations that had been produced really hit the mark by providing the information we knew prospects would need to know.
So now what? Well…you must resist the urge to go back and change the questions to match your content!
What you can do is this – evaluate the content that doesn’t match any of the questions you have identified, and determine if you can edit it at all, so that it is more relevant from your prospects point of view. Second, this exercise is not about throwing out content, you worked hard to create the material, so this is a good time to remind yourself that a good content marketing plan includes a mix of material; it’s OK to post something just for fun!
Good luck with your content marketing planning and remember to always think like your prospects!
If I can help your business develop a content marketing plan, please let me know. I’d love to help.
Leanne