It's a new year, and it's up to you to seize hold of your Content Marketing mix and blend up the right combination content formats to help your buyer personas find the solutions to their pain points. Not to mention an opportunity understand the role your brand can play in helping them.
To achieve the perfect complement within your content marketing mix, there are a couple of considerations you need to factor in to ensure you select the content elements that compliment one another and further your business objectives.
These include:
- Your company's resources. Naturally you're going to want to consider the resources available to your marketing team and business before planning your content marketing mix. These include time and financial considerations - for example, if you don't have the resources to produce video content, it's pointless insisting on including it in your mix.
- Your business's expertise. Your target audience needs to be informed and educated to the point where they acknowledge your brand/service/product as the solution to their needs. Your content needs to reflect this, so avoid unnecessarily deviating and producing content that falls outside your area of expertise.
- Your target audience's interests and goals. Your goal should be to find the perfect spot between your business's expertise and the goals and interests of your target audience. Once you have this spot in focus, you can create content that satisfies and delights your buyer personas.
- Your brand's focus. Your content has the ability to reinforce and strength your brand - which means you should be creating content which fits with your brand and company's image.
Once you've taken the above into account, you can start developing your content marketing mix. There are a couple of tips you can take to ensure you combine the right elements and secure the kind of marketing success you've set your sights on.
Take Your Content Strategy to the Top with these Tips
1. Do Plenty of Brainstorming
Before embarking on your content creation process, take the time to sit down and do some thorough brainstorming, taking into account, in detail, the nature of your target buyer personas and their needs, as well as the message you're looking to convey and how you'd like to portray your brand, product or services.
2. Don't be Scared to Diversify
Don't think that you need to stick to blogs as your primary content format. A great content mix encompasses many different formats, from eBooks to whitepapers, video to podcasts, demos, and much more. With so many content formats at your disposal, there's no excuse to create boring, vanilla content - think outside the box and create resources that'll blow your target audience's minds. Just remember that your buyer personas and their stage in the buyer's journey should guide exactly which format you select.
3. Use the Right Tools for the Job
Everyone hits a creative wall occasionally, and when you're trying to come up with content ideas for your content marketing mix it can be a real pain. Fortunately there are many tools available online to help you break free from the shackles of creative block and create interesting and effective content.
A few of the tools we love are:
4. Map with Awareness
A critical key to ensuring your content marketing is successful is mapping it to the specific stages of the buyer's journey experienced by your target audience. This means aligning your purpose for your content, along with how you intend to present it, with the stages of awareness, consideration and decision. The efficacy of your content depends entirely on how carefully you map and plan content around these stages.
After all, you wouldn't go about serving a dessert to a hungry guest expecting a starter, or an main meal to a diner expecting a sweet treat. In the same way, you need to ensure you satisfy your target audience's hunger for great content with the right pieces.
When it comes to implementing successful content marketing you can never go wrong when you turn your focus entirely on your target buyer personas, and always strive to educate, entertain, inform and delight them. Let them guide your efforts, and make sure you know them inside and out before you start creating content. And don't be afraid to be creative and innovative - let your content stand out from your competitors. So what are you waiting for? Go cook up your own brilliant content marketing!
