Category Archives: content marketing

Buyer Persona: Cater Your Content to the Right Audience

Buyer Persona, content marketing, ,

Around 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content a day. We all know content marketing brings success to businesses. However, new challenges have arisen with content marketing. With around 5 billion internet users today,  how to produce personalized content that reaches exactly the right audience? 

Not only does your business need to find a unique brand voice, but you also need to make sure your content is attracting the right audience. What’s more, if you’re a small business owner, you may need a LinkedIn engagement marketing tool to help boost your content reach effectively on LinkedIn. 

For right now, the very first thing to discover is: Who is your audience? There is one classic method to profile your ideal customer, which never ceases to go old, that is building a buyer persona.

Here, we will guide you through creating a perfect buyer persona in 4 simple steps. Take a piece of pen and paper, your laptop, or anything to get ready for brainstorming.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a holistic profile combining the most common traits of your ideal customer group including their background, demographics, goals, motivations, and more.

How can a buyer persona help you?

  • Understand your ideal customers’ challenges and goals
  • Understand what should be the topics, writing style, and focus of your content
  • Capture your ideal customers’ attention 
  • Produce quality leads for your business

Preparation

You need to have a solid knowledge of who your existing customers are. Open your Google Analytics, website statistics, customer database, or even Facebook audience insights. Remember to keep referring back to these places and collect information to answer the following four sections.

1. Demographic information

  • What is your persona’s name? Use the formula [adjective] + [first name] like “Work-driven Anna” so it’s simple and memorable.
  • What is their gender?
  • Which age group do they belong to?
  • Which country do they live in? Do they live in the suburbs or the urban areas? 
  • What industry do they work in and what is their job title?
  • What is their annual salary?
  • Are they married? Do they have children?

2. Psychographic information

Psychographic information via Adioma
Via Adioma
  • Think of 4 adjectives that best describe their personality. Use the image on the left as a reference. 
  • What motivates them to do their everyday work? 
  • What are their current short-term business objectives for this year or quarter?
  • What are the long-term business goals they wish to achieve?
  • What serves as a roadblock for their success? 
  • What are their biggest fears? 

3. Behavioral information

  • What are their hobbies and interests? 
  • What do they enjoy doing in their spare time?
  • Where do they search for information and seek help?
  • How do they prefer to interact with business? 
  • Which social media platforms do they use the most? 
  • Do they have a device preference?

4. Switch back to your perspective

Now that you’ve gotten every information you need, it’s time to uncover the content you should produce and the channels your business can utilise to reach out and help your buyers.

The demographic information allows you to niche down your content. The more niche your content is, the better it is going to resonate with your prospects. If you are targeting small business owners based in London, talk about the local business trends that small business owners in London should be aware of. If you are targeting married small business owners, talk about ways to balance family and business. 

The psychographic information determines your writing style and the various problems your content should solve. Some prefer to read about how-to articles with actionable examples, while others enjoy in-depth articles that provide food-for-thought for them to ponder on. Don’t forget to address how your business can lead them to success by overcoming their roadblocks and biggest fears. 

Create a simple marketing message using the information you have and include them in your articles and posts following a simple formula of [Call to action] + [Their challenges or goals] + [Time range to achieve the ideal results]”. If your ideal customer faces the challenges of generating engagement, an example would be “Download our free resource now to multiply engagement by 5x in 1 week”.

The behavioral information determines the platforms and channels you should be distributing your content as well as the touchpoints you should target. For mapping out your touchpoints, you can follow the buyer’s journey.

Conclusion

There we have it, all the steps for creating a simple yet comprehensive buyer persona. Some businesses need multiple personas to understand the various types of customers they deal with, but for now, it’s okay to start small and choose one group of customers based on what you already know. 

5 Ways Content Marketing Can Benefit Your Brand

content marketing, SEO, ,

Content marketing is not just a fad. It’s a solid marketing strategy that has brought success to brands and businesses of all sizes. When you do content marketing correctly, you can expect to benefit for a long, long time. So, here are the top 5 ways content marketing can help your brand.

1.    Valuable content brings hordes of traffic to your site

Who doesn’t want traffic? No webmaster in their right minds would say they don’t want traffic. The truth is we build websites and establish a presence on the Internet because we want people to know more about us.

The good news is with content marketing, you can bring a ton of people over to your site without paying exorbitant amounts of money for advertisements. Yes, it will require some money to amplify your content but nowhere near the cost for ads that get minimal results.

2.    You’re building your brand identity

When people see your brand on many valuable posts and articles, you’re essentially letting the world know what your brand is all about. You’re establishing an identity online.

When people go looking for information that falls right up your alley, then chances are people will be able to better recall your brand over your competitors!

3.    You’ll gain your audience’s trust

It takes a lot of work to gain people’s trust. And it’s essentially what content marketing is – it’s a lot of work. But once you’ve successfully established yourself as an authority and your brand starts sticking in people’s minds, then it will be easier to gain their trust. You’ll find that when you’ve captured people’s trust, getting them to follow your calls to action becomes much easier. Remember trust is a long term game so take it slow and steady!

4.    Get higher conversion rates

The most successful content marketing campaigns have excellent conversion rates. This means they’ve successfully positioned themselves as authorities in their industry, and they’ve created content that resonates with their audience. Factor in great web design, and you’ve got a recipe for success!

5.    It’s great for your site’s SEO

There are plenty of SEO benefits to content marketing. When you consistently publish valuable content, you’ll be able to eventually rank for more keywords on search engines.

You’ll have a highly engaged audience on your site, meaning they’re not going to bounce right after they land on your page. You’ll have many people linking to your content (search engines love this!) which will help boost your rankings on search pages.

How to Write Content for Your Brand: Having a Unique Voice in Writing to Stand Out

Branding, Content creation, content marketing, Small Business Marketing, ,

branding with content marketingContent marketing is the new buzzword when it comes to online marketing. SEO was sooo 2001. Social media has been and gone. It’s now all about Content Marketing. Whilst I don’t actually agree with these statements, it does throw up an out of the ordinary and problematic situation for brands that are now engaging in content marketing. The problem is that everyone is doing it! So how are you going to break through the mass of content and make your writing and your message stand out? In this article, I take a look why giving your content a voice is crucial to whether or not your content marketing efforts succeed. Hold tight, this could be a bumpy ride (for your existing strategy).

The Internet is Awash with Content with No Voice

Every man and his dog now have a blog. Kids are even being told to start a blog when they get to college in order to, ‘get their name out there’. Most of these blogs are truly terrible, but sometimes the content is actually pretty good. Millions of blog posts get published every day. Thousands of eBooks go live too. The competition is crazy!

That’s bad enough for businesses, but when we combine this with a tool such as Feedly and we’ve got a real problem. Feedly, if you don’t already know, allows you to read articles from all across the internet in one single location. It strips away all of your website branding and presents the reader with just the naked content. It’s a great tool for readers, but when it comes to publishing content it throws up an interesting problem. How does the reader know that the content is yours?

Why Do You Need a Voice?

It’s worth thinking about this question for a second. If you just write content to appear for certain search terms and not much else, I guess a voice isn’t vital. You’re aim, in this instance, is to appear in search engines and gain impressions. You don’t need a voice for that. However, most businesses write content for more than just impressions. They want the readers to sign up to an offer. Or they want them to subscribe to the mailing list. If you want the reader of your content to do more than just read what you’ve written, if you want to connect with them and incite an action on their behalf, you need to have a voice. A voice that they will want to hear more of, that will help to convert them from readers to advocates of your brand.

Why You Won’t Find Your Voice Today

Luckily, finding the voice of your brand probably won’t happen overnight. Why is that a good thing? Well, can you imagine your blog all of a sudden reads totally differently than how it has done for the past six months? Your existing readers are going to wonder what is going on. Worst case scenario, they may all leave you. So luckily, a true voice can’t be found overnight. It’s something that develops as your business grows.

Feedback from readers is perhaps the biggest driving force behind this. Develop your content around what your readers like. Do they prefer a humorous tone? Do they like facts and figures? They may be more creatively minded and as such prefer rich graphics and images.

These are all things that you can gauge from your existing audience. Engage with them. Talk to them. Ask them. They are your biggest advocates and they are the ones who will make content marketing work for you. Without them, you just have content.

Getting a Head Start

So whilst you won’t be able to develop your voice into a finished product today, you can begin to put things into order now. Think about whom your ideal customer is and why they read your content. Are they looking for some light-hearted reading after a hard day at work? Do they need some cold-hard facts that they can reel off to their boss in the middle of a heated debate? You probably already know your target audience, so begin to think what they would want. There are a few companies who do this incredibly well and you could learn a lot from them.

Buffer is a social media posting tool, but there blog has an incredible voice that attracts their ideal user. The blog is transparent and adheres to their culture. Its popularity shows just how well received the content is.

Coursefindr is another start-up that has really nailed its voice. It’s aimed at kids from the UK that are looking for a university degree. When you read their content, you can really tell that it knows how to talk to them. Whilst it’s got all the facts and important stuff that teachers and parents look for, it delivers it in a manner that the students find interesting and engaging.

Finally, Seth Godin is a thinker/author/speaker who knows that his readers are bombarded with content every day. Instead of aiming for blog posts that surpass the 1,000 word mark, he writes short posts that you can read before you get out of bed in the morning. Each post has a real focus and he uses his words wisely.

What ‘Your Voice’ Will Look Like

As you learn more from your readers and begin to think about who your target reader is, it’s important to make sure you keep your voice steady through each article or blog post you write. My personal preference for doing this is to have a ‘living document’ that you continually update. I use bullet points so I can easily see what makes up ‘the voice’. Points such as, ‘to the point’, ‘funny’, ‘professional’, ‘juvenile’, are the types of words that I would include.

I also like to have these printed off and stuck to the wall in front of my screen. It acts as a constant reminder for how I should be writing any content and also allows me to switch between writing styles more easily. Of course, if you’re only writing content for your own brand, then you may be able to get away with just the digital version that you can refer to before proofreading your article.

In essence, finding your voice is a never-ending journey. It’s a fun one though, and one that is well worth the effort. Your content will be recognised by readers more easily and you’ll see the benefits in the comment box beneath your articles too!

If you’ve already got your voice, let me know how you keep yourself on tone when writing. I’m always interested to hear how other people work!

About the Author

Lewis Love is a professional Marketing Consultant, specialising in new media. He’s the author of the bestselling book, Facebook Business Basics.

What is Good Content to Google?

content marketing, How to, Organic SEO, SEO

digital contentUsing content as the foundation of your SEO strategy is not a new concept, but the definition of “good” quality content is ever-changing. Although the Panda update punished sites with thin content, there still are sites which use such content to rank higher. It might help temporarily, but will definitely affect in the long run.

Good content:

  • Drives traffic through searches related to your industry
  • Builds authority in the eyes of users and search engines
  • Increases engagement with your brand on social media

So what can be termed as good content?

Content in 2014 will not be just limited to the pieces of text you will add to the website or blog. You will need to think outside of this and make sure to develop a range of different media like videos, presentations, whitepapers, infographics, how-to’s etc. These become your assets and can be one of your best sources of links. Basically, you have to provide content which is useful to the end user.  Google’s Hummingbird algorithm, though not in full effect is going to become more and more of a player as search becomes more mobile and voice oriented. Therefore, be sure to include questions and answers as well as location data, when relevant, in your content. This will provide more value for your end users and the search engines alike.

content marketingNot to forget your site pages, you should be constantly improving your static assets (especially landing pages) to improve conversions and provide the best user experience. Engagement and conversion metrics are not just important to your bottom line, they’re important to Google providing the best results. In a nutshell give the people what they are looking for and Google will reward you with good rankings.

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