Three steps to follow before you start with Content Marketing
Content marketing.
You must have come across this term, a couple of times. Maybe, you heard it from your friends, colleagues, or maybe, you read it on the internet. Now, you think that it’s a good idea to implement for your business. It makes total sense. After all, 53% of the businesses use content marketing to engage with customers. So, it’s exactly the right time to jump into the wagon.
But, here’s the thing, you don’t know where to start.
Initially, it will be challenging to write down a step-by-step plan or a full-fledged strategy. Especially if you run a small business where most of the daily tasks have to be handled by you.
However, you can surely start with the first three steps to lay down the foundation for your content marketing. And, the best part is that it’s not difficult. You need to know your business, your customer’s pain point, and what difference you want to make in their lives.
Telling your brand story
This is the part where you should know your business. With business, it’s not only about the product that you sell, but it’s also about the belief, vision, and the thoughts on which your brand is built. Think of this as the pillars of your content marketing plan. It will hold up the structure making its presence felt in a very subtle way. How? Let me explain
In your house, you spend most of your time in the living room, bedroom, kitchen, and maybe some leisure time in your garden. How often do you hand around the pillars? Hardly, isn’t it? You don’t feel the need to do that because they’re just tall structures fixed to the ground, and just doing their job. But, even if you don’t spend much time with them, you still know how important they’re job is. It holds the entire place together, bearing the weight.
Your brand story will carry the weight in your content for a long time. You don’t necessarily have to mention your mission, vision, or values explicitly in your blogs, landing pages, or e-books. All you’ve to do is that you keep developing content that will make a difference in the life of the reader.
To give you an example, if your company makes headphones which can be trusted for premium sound quality, then you need to make sure that it resonates with all the aspects of your website.
Here are some pointers which can help you start thinking:
- What should be the title of the home page of your website?
- How will you design the “About us” webpage and how will you breakdown the content such that, it helps to build the reader confidence?
- Is your team getting the needed recognition in the current website?
What’s the purpose?
Your brand story is a long term plan. Just like the pillars in every construction, it’s existing and visible, but in a subtle way. It’s the base of all the content that you will build over time.
The purpose of telling a brand story is to stand apart and create an identity for your product. It creates a touchpoint in the mind of the visitor and leaves an impression. It’s something that will move the reader from, “Um, I don’t know” to something like, “Ok, let me give this a try.”
Soothing your customer’s pain point
Every customer has some problem. They face some difficulty, and it’s their desire to overcome their troubles which prompts them to invest in a product or a service. Before you even draw up your content calendar and start writing content, find out what are the customer problems that you’re product resolves. To continue our example, what do you think are the problems of music listeners? What are the complaints do they generally have towards headphone?
- Are they not satisfied with the quality of the music?
- Is the durability of the headphone a concern area?
- Or, is the value for money, which seems to be troubling your target market?
Once you have a list of at least five different problems, then you can pick out only those problems to which your item seems to provide the best solution
Why do you need to follow this approach?
To cut the noise. To keep your content marketing efforts clean and to the point. When you start creating content without a target, it’s pretty clear that you will miss on the shots!
When your content directly focuses on the pain point, it gathers the attention of the listeners. They feel it relevant and there are high chances they will engage with the content by way of clicking on your website link, or other pages in your website
Educating the target market
This is the next step to the previous point. No, I mean, literally.
Now, when you know that what is troubling your target market. It’s time that you educate them. And, by education, I mean, to share specific ideas, suggestions, and tips that could improve their overall experience of using a product or a service.
Again, switching back to the headphone example, you can target content that will enlighten your audience about how to differentiate between good and average quality headphones. You can write an ebook on this topic, or design an infographic describing the steps to compare the difference between the headphones.
By doing this, you will not only educate those customers who usually invest in headphones with poor sound quality, but you will also enlighten them about the other aspects which they should look out for before investing their hard earned money.
This step, if done diligently, will create a good amount of following over a period of time.
How does this help the other activities discussed above?
When you go out there and publish content with the only intention that you want to improve the music listening experience of the reader, then it -
- Creates a branding for your product. It will convey the values of your company which will help you to win the customer confidence
- It solves customer problems and now they are aware of what they should do to avoid them
Wrapping it up
Content marketing is a long-term plan. It’s a treacherous journey and should be taken with care, after putting in some thoughts.
It’s easy to get lost and forget the objective of what do you actually, plan to achieve with your content marketing goals. However, if you follow the above three steps, you will get a lot of clarity as to which direction you need to walk to reach the summit.
Tell your story with heart, relief the pain of the customer, and improve their immunity; to excel in Content Marketing.
