Content Matters....

How you engage with your customers matter, how you present your brand and represent your corporate DNA matters. We create content strategies that matter. 

Creating a content strategy

Step One: What have you got? 

What content do you have? For that matter, is it any good? Is something you tabled and filed away 3 years ago useful? Open up that folder deep in your hard drive and take a look. Put it in a spreadsheet and label it like so: Unique identifier, Page title/document/url, then Type (video, pdf, word doc., graphic etc.), and finally Notes (is it good? what it’s about?  This is our content inventory. 

Step Two: Who Are You Trying To Reach? 

You are not the audience, nor is your team. Your needs, motivations are likely much different than your customers and prospects. You may have a deft grasp on your industry, services, and benefits but your customers do not. 

Step Three: How do you reach them?

Google has tools to find keywords and phrases your potential customers are using to find information. For the most part your customers still have to come to you. 

Step Four: Embrace your inner geek

Create some customer and prospect segmentation in place. Think Demographics, psychographics, technographics, geotargeting, there are so many useful and nerdy ways of slicing and diving your customers. Remember this, we all like the series Mad men, but these days it’s way less about swagger and three martini lunches than analytics. Embrace it.  

Step Five: Know your customer's needs

Consider holding a persona development workshop. It’s simply skteching out the distinct groups of people you are trying to reach, labeling them by their wants/needs/circumstances, and assigning values to each one. With each persona, you form an outline of the content that will satifsy their needs (flesh out what type of content would most appeal to them, channels, etc. Do not limit yourself. Consider creating values as opposed to eliminating anything. 

Step Six: Mind the Gap

Now the difference between the content you have and the content your audience needs is your gap analysis. With this information, you’re ready to construct a strategy for the acquisition/creation, production, maintenance, and governance for your content marketing initiative.