How to Ensure Your Website Resonates
In many ways, content creation is as much a passion as it is a career. The desire to create and express ourselves is a fundamental part of what makes us human. And although content marketing can scratch that itch to some extent, content created for your business is not artistry.
It’s part of a strategy.
The thing a lot of people don’t realize about content marketing is that you cannot simply sit down and write whatever comes to mind. You need to be purposeful and deliberate in what you create. Whether you’re making blog posts, videos, infographics, or something else entirely, each and every one of your creations must be made with two things in mind.
- Your audience.
- Your end goal.
As you might expect, those two are interconnected. Successfully achieving one’s content marketing objectives demands an understanding of one’s audience. Because without that understanding, it doesn’t matter how good your content is.
So how do you develop an understanding of your audience? How do you determine if the content is strategically-aligned to your brand? And finally, how do you go about defining your content marketing goals?
Let’s break this down by section.
Researching Your Audience
You probably have at least some concept of the people to which your products and services appeal. You know, in a very general sense, who you need to draw in with your messaging. Before you start working on your content strategy, you need to drill down to specifics.
You can leverage the following sources for this research:
- Social media. Specifically, pages and accounts operated by your competitors. Look at the people who most frequently and actively engage with your competition, and see if you notice common traits.
- Internal survey data. Consider offering incentives to people who purchase your products or services so that they’re motivated to respond.
- Facebook Audience Insights. And other similar tools.
Defining Your Goals
Before you start working out the details of your content marketing objectives, you need to know who you are. Your brand identity may not play a direct role in content marketing, but it will inform everything from topic ideation to the language you use in your content.
Your brand identity consists of:
- Visuals. Logos, colors, fonts, etc.
- Your mission statement. Why your brand was founded, and what you ultimately want it to achieve.
- Messaging. Words that describe your brand, slogans, common statements, and sentiments.
Sit down and brainstorm everything you currently know about your business, and figure out where you want to be in the near future. Focus on defining an objective that’s specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant. You may also consider the use of smaller milestone goals.
Aligning Your Content
From here, it’s simply a matter of answering the following questions:
- What does your audience care about?
- What entertains your audience?
- Why is your audience interested in your brand?
- What causes your audience to seek information?
- To what concepts and ideas is your audience resistant?
There’s a bit more to strategic content marketing than we’ve covered here, of course. But for now, this should suffice as a primer.