Written by Fani Sánchez
Index
Content marketing is a promotional strategy that uses the generation and publication of content as a means of attracting the attention of users, positioning ourselves as a reference in our sector, gaining their trust and earning their loyalty. It is an Inbound Marketing strategy, and is one of the most effective and least intrusive methods of attracting and retaining customers in the digital era.
Content marketing relies on the creation and distribution of valuable and relevant content to the target audience of a given industry or business in order to attract new users, and ultimately get those users to become customers, or at the very least, leads.
What is so special about content marketing?
“Content is king,” they say, and not in vain. Content marketing has been on everyone’s lips for several years and is widely used by many brands, media and entities of all kinds. It is a digital marketing strategy that works, because offering free, useful and quality content will immediately get a positive reaction from Internet users. This, in turn, will increase the reputation, trustworthiness and visibility of a given resource, generating engagement by users, who will talk about it and take the initiative to share it and spread it in their circles.
Some common types of content marketing
- Websites. The most basic, our own website. A portal can contain a lot of useful information for the users who visit it. There is a big difference between content marketing and simply filling a portal with content, which may or may not be relevant.
- Infographics and images. A well-made infographic, that is, with valuable information, properly summarized and visually appealing, can be incredibly useful as well as effective.
- Blogs.
- eBooks.
- Videos.
- Webinars.
- Presentations.
- Podcasts.
- Articles and news.
- Research and studies (white papers).
- Recommendations and best practices.
- Rankings and statistics.
- Infographics.
- Guides.
- Frequently asked questions and answers.
- Photographs.
- Comparative analysis.
- Glossary of terms.
- Survey results.
- Integration and redistribution of third-party content (mashup), etc.
Companies can use the different means of their online presence (website, corporate profiles on Social Media sites, communities, blogs, forums, etc.) to generate, publish, share and viralize all these contents. There will be some that will be ideal for posting on the corporate blog, while others will form a section of their own within the website, for example, a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section, or simply form part of the conversation on social profiles on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
How to design a content marketing strategy
Knowing our target
We must first define the profile of our potential customer: what kind of person is interested in what I am offering, what is he like, what interests him, what kind of language does he use, what kind of websites does he visit, what social networks does he have open profiles on, what influences and how is he documented in his purchasing decisions?
If our customers are other companies, we should also try to identify the profiles of the people involved in the purchasing decision or in the supplier selection and contracting processes. What kind of training do they have? What concerns them when selecting a supplier, deciding on a purchase or making a recommendation? What is their behavior on the Internet: sites they visit, forums they participate in, social networks where they have open profiles, media they consult…?
- Purchase motivations: Once we are clear about who our potential customer is, let’s make an empathy exercise to put ourselves in their shoes and guess what their main purchase motivations would be. And surprise: although the product may be the same, the profile of the target audience may be radically different and, in that case, so will be their buying motivations.
- Objections: Equally important is to consider each target’s objections to completing the purchase to include counter objections: sales pitches that precisely try to overcome skepticism and doubt in potential customers. Identifying these possible objections and anticipating them by offering the appropriate explanation or argument will help us to achieve more sales. Being aware of the main purchase objections helps us to understand which explanations we should advance without waiting for our potential customers to ask for them. By doing so, we demonstrate our understanding of their needs and our readiness to respond to their requirements.
Whatever these competitive advantages may be, we must list them and then identify which of them are really significant and differential for our customers. To do this, it is very useful to match our competitive advantages with the main buying motivations of our target.
By doing this exercise, we will be able to select those competitive advantages, those tangible and intangible aspects in which we stand out from our competitors, which, in addition, are important for our potential customers when making their purchase decision, making a difference in our favor.
These competitive advantages are what we must convert into sales arguments by presenting them not as characteristics of our product or service, but in terms of advantage or benefit for our customer.
Potential customer search behavior
Identifying the information search habits of our target in relation to our service or product will help us to decide where to invest more resources to generate and make our content visible:
- Variety of choices: when we need breadth, variety and immediacy of results, we mostly turn to search engines. They continue to be the fastest and most efficient way to find the answer to the widest variety of queries.
- Specialization: when the user needs depth of information and ease of comparing similar offers, he/she prefers a vertical search engine, if available. For example, when searching for a hotel, looking for a house or renting a house, we will use specialized portals such as Booking or Yaencontre.com. Sometimes we will navigate directly to these vertical search engines to find the product or service we need and, other times, we will reach them through the result in a general search engine such as Google.
- User opinions: when we value above all the opinion of other users regarding a product or service, it is possible that we start our research by launching the question among our social networks, looking for that reliable advice backed by a personal relationship. Depending on the type of search, we will use different social networks: LinkedIn for a professional recommendation, Facebook for a personal recommendation, etc.
Disseminate our contents
From this analysis, we could generate the type of content that really interests our users, captures their attention and allows us to establish a relationship with them in which, over time, they will feel involved (engagement). This relationship of trust is, today, the necessary prelude to a commercial relationship, to a purchase.
These involved users will also actively participate in the process of disseminating our content. For this to happen, we must be alert to detect what types of content generate resonance: posts that receive many comments and are shared on social networks, Facebook posts with many likes, retweeted tweets… Resonance is what can make a content be shared virally and, for this, it is important to know the “resonance frequency” of our potential customers in order to be able to “tune in” to that frequency whenever we can. A key tool for this is Buzzsumo, with which we can analyze which contents have been the most viralized and linked to regarding a specific topic.
References:
How to make content marketing relevant, transcendental and adapted to your users.
How to write Web content according to Jakob Nielsen
