Content marketing is a storytelling strategy whether you are leading a company, blogging, content writing, copy writing, or online selling. Content marketing is important to drive your customers or clients to your website and generate potential leads or potential customers for your business.
Content marketing also means a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong relationship with the target customers by giving them high-quality content that is very relevant and useful to them regularly.
What if your audience decides to read and consume your content? What value they can get from your content? How can they benefit in using your products or services?
Here we discuss proven content marketing tips and strategies that convert leads to your website or any social media platforms and become a loyal customer or client.
Identify your Customer Personas
Create an Empathy Map
Evaluate an Experience Map of Customers
Make a Content Plan
To come up with content marketing plan as a content marketer, research first your company’s customers through gathering data about them such as
conducting interviews/surveys with your company’s executives and team heads
administering surveys using online forms (Google Forms, Typeforms, MailChimp)
gathering email queries and questions
conducting one-on-one customer interviews
reviewing clients email responses
These data give you a better understanding of a customer in identifying customer persona, creating an empathy map and experience map, and planning your strategies in creating content.
Identify your Customer Personas
Identifying your target audience and customer persona is the first and most important step to succeed any company can undertake particularly if you’re just starting a business. According to Neil Patel, the target audience is a share of customers that companies or businesses direct their marketing actions to drive awareness of their products and services. It deals with targeting a market with whom you communicate.
On the other hand, customer personas are profiles of buyers that would be your ideal customers. These are fictional persons with characteristics of real customers who share common interests, goals, and problems with your company.
Sample Customer Persona avatar:
A persona is a person that may be interested in your products or services and how you can make that person very engaged in your brand. It is detailed and in-depth research about your content audience which comprise of:
Target audience basic demographics include age, gender, educational background, purchasing power, social class, location, and consumption behavior
Personal characteristics
Lifestyles, habits, customs, beliefs, etc.
Interest
Engagement in social networks
Professional information
Aside from knowing your customer personas, you can also use an Empathy Map to have a better understanding of your potential customers.
Create an Empathy Map
An empathy map is a tool used when collecting data about customers to better understand your target customer base. Like to a customer persona, empathy map presents customer needs, concise customer data into a brief chat, and help you study what customer wants, not what the company thinks they want. Empathy map defines what are your customer’s views about herself/himself, other people on her/him, and her/his environment.
The empathy map begins with answering the “Because Statement” like: Our customers (clients/users) need a better way to ________________________ because __________________. Better, craft a statement card like
Our customers need a better way to:
Because:
All inputs from the organization are important in crafting an empathy map. With the help of your company executives, department heads, salespeople, marketing team, customer service team, customers, a content marketer can grasp what are the impressions about the prospects. Using a four-quadrant empathy map, you can now pinpoint what is the impression or any wording the prospects describe their problem or solutions they are looking for.
Sample of Customer Empathy Map Worksheet:
A business that always prioritizes customers are, first and foremost, the main component to make your brand successful. It is a business that gives important what customers see, thinks, does, and feels just like what your customer empathy map wants to convey.
Evaluate an Experience Map of Customers
Every customer wants to experience a smooth and hassle-free journey on buying your products or availing your services. Because of it, evaluating a customer experience is necessary to achieve business goals – that is giving high-quality customer service.
A customer experience map is important to know how a customer has gone through in buying your products or getting your services. An Experience Map illustrates the journey that a prospect takes from a stranger through to loyal repeat and referring customers.
Brainstorming is a better way to create better content for your customers. To know what experiences customer has to take from prospecting to repeat buying, these are the guide questions to answer and visualize the experience map for your business:
Where does the prospect find you? What’s the first point of contact? Who triggers the contact, you or your customer?
How sales process does go at present? Is there anything that should be resolved?
What kinds of web content available to the prospect so that she can start to educate herself/himself about your products and/or services? What questions are answered? How will the content be relevant and useful to solve that prospect’s problem?
What motivates the prospect to take action in permission-based content, like an opt-in email list? What makes taking that action appealing to her/him?
What does the prospect need to know to make her/him decide to buy?
What does she/he need to believe and experience to be satisfied and to become a customer or client?
How does the actual buying experience look like? What are the steps a customer or client goes through? How could that process be made simpler and more enjoyable?
What happens once the purchase is made?
What is the process of delivering the products and/or services to the prospect? How does this experience more desirable to her/him?
What is the plan to remain connected with this prospect? How can the business maintain that high-caliber experience with your products and/or services?
How does a happy customer refer to the products or services to another customer or anyone she/he knows? What is the step for this experience?
Now that you have identified your customer personas, plotted both the empathy map and experience map, you’re ready to provide the right content to your target audience in a consistent time through a Content Plan. You can create your content based on the following:
To Educate: Example of this are tips and hacks, how-to, steps to take, tutorials and similar content
To Excite: Example of this are promotions, limited offers, discounts, freebies and giveaways, and related content
To Engage: Example of this are surveys, contests, and others that prospect can be participated or joined with
To Motivate: Example of this are motivational quotes, inspirational stories, success stories, biographies, and similar topics
The content is ready for publishing. You can also deploy it through your social media accounts and business website. To know about social media, we have useful tips about how it works for your business. You can also hover over on what website builder best for you.
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Sources:
https://neilpatel.com/what-is-content-marketing/
https://neilpatel.com/blog/accurate-customer-personas/
https://optinmonster.com/content-marketing-examples/
https://blog.hubspot.com/service/empathy-map
https://neilpatel.com/blog/a-17-point-content-marketing-checklist-proven-to-boost-your-engagement/