3 Ways to Tailor Content Marketing

As content marketing continues to evolve and devices where customers consume it proliferate, marketers must add more and more useful information. Therefore, a calendar of regularly scheduled content marketing should be part of every marketer’s plans because content marketing is the food that draws prospects in and gets customers interested in your firm, brand and/or offering.

Providing more tailored content to meet readers’ needs helps marketers break through the message noise without having to rely on a steady diet of price-driven promotions. To build traffic to your website, emailings and social media, develop a calendar of regularly scheduled content that’s relevant, timely and satisfies customers needs.

Assess your content marketing strategy to determine areas of greatest opportunity. To help you, here are three areas to focus your content.

Product offering. This means non-sales content. Think product support to extend product use. The goal of your content marketing is to build your brand, overcome customer objections, and qualify sales.

  1. What are customers’ frequently asked questions (aka FAQs) about your product?
  2. Is education needed to show them how your product works? Think informal How to videos.
  3. Do you need to provide information to support your sales process? Think white papers and e-books.
  4. Can entertainment help enhance your brand? For example, Will It Blend helped build Blendtec’s brand.
  5. Do your prospects and customers look to your offering to help them save time or make their life easier? Does your content support this?

Customers. Consider your prospects and customers in terms of demographics, psychographics and past actions since customers may make buying decisions and tradeoffs based on non-financial factors. To this end, create appropriate marketing personas. Assess whether your customer base is homogeneous in terms of its approach to your offering or has distinctly different needs. When creating content, consider the following:

  1. Do customers buy your product(s) for personal use or work needs?
  2. What factors attract customers to your product?
  3. Does your product lend itself to providing recipes and/or patterns where you can integrate links to your offering? Lion Brand Studio does a good job of this.
  4. Do your prospects and/or customers need specialized training? This can be delivered via webinar and/or video.
  5. Are prospects and/or customers interested in showing off their use of your product?
  6. Do consumers want to get together to exchange ideas related to your offering? If so, create a series of Meetups or online webinars.

Events. In terms of content, define events broadly to encompass internal milestones and public celebrations.

  1. How do public holidays from Christmas to Halloween apply to your product and/or brand?
  2. Can you develop information around your product’s history?
  3. Do you have special content that’s tailored to your customers’ special life milestones like birthdays and anniversaries?
  4. Do you have content around customers’ interactions with your firm such as email registration or the purchase cycle?
  5. Can you create events around your firm’s milestones and stories? Note: This isn’t an excuse to create more promotional material.

Content marketing requires planning to build your brand, overcome customer objection and qualify sales. The goal is to develop strong information that draws prospects and readers in and overcomes their objections to buying your product.

Are there other categories of content you’ve found useful for your company? If so, please share them in the comment section below.

Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen


Photo credit: Emma Paperclip via Flickr

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