In the new informational economy, traditional advertising, based on saturating the environment with branded media in order to create a subliminal familiarity and thus affinity with a supposed emotion of need and the proposed solution, a strategy fundamentally based on centralized broadcast technology, is increasingly eschewed in favor of user-supportive based models which rely on the notion that potential customers will voluntarily and judiciously seek out information related to solving their problem, literally on their own terms, by self-curating their exposure through activities on the internet such as making keyphrase searches via search engines and asking question on social media.
One approach to advertising that has evolved in response to this new form of customer behavior is Content Marketing.
Content marketing is the art of creating awareness of your business by populating the internet with informational resources that help potential customers achieve their goals and plant the seeds of understanding that you can serve them in ways that a) they cannot serve themselves, b) they are not being served currently, or c) they cannot be served by competing products or services. Thus they are compelled through exposure to your content to seek out your help.
In this post I’m going to explain the basics of how content marketing works and show you some of the essential tools and strategies I use when implementing it for clients.
The good news is, as long as you are truly an expert in your field, content marketing should be relatively easy. The great news is, even if you’re not, the platform I’m going to show you is a great foundation for learning about what you need to become an expert in in order to be of value to your customers, and creates a framework from which to develop a self study program for becoming expert – research that can result in the generation of the content that is critical to the content marketing paradigm.
Step 1: Create a Message Map
A Message Map is a mindmap-like tool designed to help you articulate the fundamental value of your product, the essential characteristics of your product that create this value, and the key facts and figures that support these characteristics. Creating a message map will not only encourage you to clarify for yourself what the fundamental value proposition of your product is, which may result in rethinking some things, it will also enable you to see the different “chains” of value that run through your business, which will serve as foundations for different content batches down the line.Here’s how to create a message map.
Step one: decide what the fundamental value of your product or service is (in other words, what’s in it for me?) to all stakeholders. We’ll call this “home base”.
What do I mean by all stakeholders? I mean everyone in the world who will directly or indirectly be affected by your product. This includes the business owners, employees, customers, community members, and strangers. We are conditioned to think of a the value of a product as being different for a customer (works well) than for an owner (profitable) and even to exclude others like employees and non-customers from the equation. But the best products in the world offer to bring value into the wold that is good for everyone, no matter how you cut it. Coca-cola (or rather McCann-Erickson) knew this when they sang “I’d like to teach the world to sing (in perfect harmony)”. Who can disagree with that? And it works even better when your product is actually good and equitable for everyone (unlike Coke).
This statement of value should be able to be articulated in 23 words or less. Don’t go longer. Why? 23 words takes about 7 seconds to say – the length of an “elevator speech” – or in other words, about the length of time you have before someone is going to decide they either care or don’t care about what you’re saying. It’s brutal, I know. But pay attention to the body language of the person you’re talking to next time you bumblingly explain the vague, qualified ideas behind the product for which you have not done some form of this exercise.
Remember, if you can’t explain it to your grandma, you probably don’t understand it.
Let’s take an example. Say you are marketing a small homestyle facility for the elderly – an assisted living. You’re fundamental value to all stakeholders might be your creation of “a home and family where seniors who struggle with independence can thrive”. This is great. Everyone has grandparents, or aging parents, or is aging themselves. Everyone believes home and family are good, wholesome things worth preserving in our increasingly rationalized and isolating society. Everyone values independence. The beneficial scope of this goal is not limited to financial stakeholders or customers only. It’s intrinsically good for the world.
Step two: list 2-4 (3 is probably ideal) characteristics of your product, service, or company that enable you to achieve this value goal. Think of these not as constituent parts of your value, but as the superpowers you have that enable you to create this value where no one else is. We’ll call these “proof points”. So for our example, your proof points may be:
1. Family style living
2. Easy communication with administration at all levels
3. Professional healthcare ownership and management
If you are doing this as a mindmap, you should now have three bubbles branching off of your home base, and what you have so far is good start: a value proposition supported by three demonstrable proof points.
Step three: list positive points. What you want to do next is bolster these proof points with specific evidence. Try to generate three each. We’ll call these “positive points”. This is where you can start to bring in hard facts and figures that indicate your abilities in more objective ways, but they may still be conceptual at this point. Facts and figures can always be introduced down the line by adding evidence points for these positive points. So if you are constructing positive points for proof point 3, you may have something like:
1. History of successful ownership of multiple healthcare companies
2. 35 years experience in geriatrics
3. RN supervision on site
If you do this for each your proof points, you will end up with a mindmap containing 9 positive points branching off of 3 proof points branching of your home base. You have created an archetypal message map, which will serve you well in creating your content marketing strategy. But first, we have to work on Customer Personas.
Step 2: Discover Your Customer Personas
Naturally, for any business, there are different types of customers who have different needs and who will therefore seek out and be compelled by different information. To reach these people with your content, you need to create content that is tailored to their specific characteristics. For example, older people will look for information in different locations than younger people. Highly informed people will ask different questions than novices. People who use your product for one reason will need different information than people who use it for another. To know what kind of content to create, medium to use, and approach to take, you need to have a picture of what these different types of people are like.So the next step is to create a profile of each of the different types of customers you think will seek out your content. For our assisted living example, this might include the adult children of seniors, spouses of seniors, and formal referral sources such as discharge planners. For each of these personas, you need to define essential characteristics relevant to reaching them with your content. A typical example of the questions you might ask is the following:
- Age Range
- Key Responsibilities
- Major Concerns
- Key Stressors/Pain Points
- Key Purchase Drivers
- Role in Purchase Process for Family
- Places Most Likely to Find Information
- Preferred Content Medium
Once you have answered these questions, you know who you are trying to reach and have a lot of insight into things like 1) where to reach them, 2) what they want to know, and 3) what’s at stake.
Now things are starting to get exciting because with the insight you’ve gained through doing the message map exercise, you can begin to see how different customer types will discover the basic value proposition of your business through different journeys of information discovery. In other words, some customers will begin their journey seeking information about the content in one outer node of your map, and other customers will begin on another.
For example, adult children of seniors who are primarily concerned with the emotional and social well being of their parents may be more inclined to begin their search looking for homestlye, family-like assisted living environments. Discharge planners may be more concerned about the medical standards present in the environment they are referring patients to. You are already part of the way to a strong formalized content marketing strategy.
But the customer’s journey from awareness of need to purchase of your product is more complex than this simple appeal, and that’s where the next step comes in.
Step 3: Use the Buyer’s Journey Analysis
The Buyer’s Journey is a model for understanding the behavior of potential customers based on understanding their mindset as they pass through a series of phases. Picture the journey like a funnel, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, representing the fact that many people enter but few people make it to the end. The funnel is split into 6 sections, each representing a discrete phase.
The widest section at the top is Awareness, where the individual is simply aware that they have a need or pain of some kind, and the status quo of their world is loosened.
Below that is Interest, where they want to find solutions and start to discover products, brands, and trends.
Below that is Consideration, when they begin to evaluate specific products and services, and engage sellers.
Below that is Purchase, the phase at which a potential customer commits to a specific solution, and may feel the need to justify this decision.
Lower still are the Post-Purchase phase, where the customer has expectations of a good product and may become an advocate for your brand, and the Re-Purchase phase, where the customer may consider expanding their usage of your product.
How does this integrate with the other information we’ve gathered? Each of these phases in the customer’s journey corresponds to an appropriate type of action taken by you, the seller, which will inform the kind of content you produce.
Awareness: Focus on the problems and pain points potential customers experience. Define and characterize the nature of the problem as you see it and contribute to a growing awareness of the issue. Think big picture.
Interest: Focus on solutions. Educate prospects about the available solutions to their problem and provide data for comparing different solutions.
Consideration: Focus on specifics. Show what it’s like to work with you, evaluate your products next to others, and highlight the experiences of previous customers.
Purchase: Focus on validation. Immediately reward conversion with supplemental information that will make starting to use your product easier or more effective.
Post-Purchase and Re-Purchase: Focus on continuous learning. Stay in touch and cultivate loyalty by adding value to your customers’ lives through continuing to educate and inform them. Keep this content exclusive and high quality.
Each customer persona that we’ve defined depicts a potential buyer who will journey through these phases of interaction with your product and will either be stimulated to continue further down the funnel toward commitment or be compelled by another product and move out of your funnel. Each persona has different resources, interests, and needs while in each phase of their journey, in essence resulting in 6 variations of each persona. So if we defined 3 customer personas, by accounting for their different characteristics while in different phases of the buyer’s journey we have now defined 18 distinct types of people in need of 18 distinct types of content with which to interact.
Your number will vary depending on the number of customer personas you generate but regardless of the number, the next step is where the magic happens.
Step 4: Correlate Your Content
What you want to do now is chart out your customer personas in rows with the phases of the buyer’s journey (and corresponding content focuses) heading the columns. If you actually chart this out, it should look like the following table:
I’ve made this spreadsheet available for you to download and use here.
This table is both a visual representation of how to think about content generation, and also a helpful tool for getting started. Use this table to determine what content you need to generate in order to reach each type of customer, by determining who they are (persona) and what content they will need (phase/focus).
This is where the message map comes in. All the buyer’s journey analysis does is give you an empty framework, it doesn’t imply any specific content, which is of course subject to change based on your industry. Your message map supplies you with information about the various constituent value propositions inherent in your product or service, which are linked together as “chains” of value (positive-point -> proof-point -> home-base). Each of these chains should correspond to at least one different type of customer, or persona (if some don’t, you should rethink the accuracy of either your proof points or your customer personas).
To create the content for each of the 6 versions of each of your customer personas, you generate content embodying one of these chains of value, and then generate 6 different versions of it designed to be relevant and helpful to individuals in each of these 6 phases. For our example, using the “family style living” value chain, you can imagine that a blog post about the poor social development of seniors living in care facilities might appeal to someone in the Awareness phase whose pain point is the emotional and social well being of their parents, whereas a blog post about what our assisted living does differently with respect to social programs compared to other facilities or paradigms might appeal to someone in the Consideration phase.
Naturally each of these phases will be better suited to different formats, which will assume different mediums, serving sizes, frequencies, tones, etc.
Content Types, Sizes, and Frequencies
Here is a quick reference for the formats of content that are most likely to be appropriate for different phases of a buyer’s journey:
| Time | Words | Media |
|---|---|---|
| 7 seconds | 23 | Headline, tweet, sound bite (daily) |
| 2 minutes | 400 | Blog post, news release, video, infographic (2X/week) |
| 5 minutes | 1,000 | Magazine article, contributed articles, long video (monthly) |
| 20+ minutes | 4,000+ | White paper, eBook, speech, webinar (quarterly) |
This matrix of customer personas, buyer’s journey phases, and content focuses is the core of your content marketing strategy. If you’ve made it this far, you’re doing great, but not quite done. Once you’ve decided on the content of each unit of communication and selected the appropriate medium, length, etc, only the logistical details remain.
Step 5: Plan Your Channels
Once you’ve created the content that will be relevant and helpful to the multiple types of potential customers you have deduced using the tools above, you’ll want to address how you are going to distribute and interact with this content. This is called a Channel Plan. Some important considerations will be 1) where you are going to distribute your content, 2) what its structure or format is going to be, and 3) what specific action you are going to encourage the customer to take.Examples of 1 could be: your blog, twitter accounts, mailing lists, etc. You may need to take stock of your existing media properties and decide that you need to add, subtract, or modify your use of these properties to reach the customers you now better understand the needs of.
Examples of 2 might be: long form educational blog posts, vs service/support oriented conversational interactions on Twitter, vs question and answer sessions on Quora. Each of these not only reaches a different audience with different needs, but serves different infrastructural roles in the legacy of your content. For example, blogs allow you to cross post content and create a strong network of search engine indexed pages that will stick around for a long time, whereas Twitter allows you to reach a large number of people in one quick blast and have real time conversations, but the communications are relatively ephemeral.
Examples of 3 might be: buy your product, contact you for more information, sign up for your email list, subscribe to your content, or any number of other actions. Each communication should be proactively designed with the goal of encouraging the user to take steps of increased commitment, or in other words a “call to action”. If your product is of actual value to your audience and your content effectively communicates this, taking this action will be natural.
Other considerations that may be helpful to include in your channel plan are tone (funny, authoritative, candid, technical, etc), frequency (it’s helpful to have a quick reference for how often this type of communication will take place), and the customer persona being addressed (always keep your audience in mind).
An simple channel plan might look something like this:
| Channel | Type | Structure | Tone | Call to Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Twitter Account | — | — | — | — |
| Assisted Living Blog | Blog | Cross-linking high value blog posts about a range of healthcare topics | friendly, authoritative, professional | Click through to main about page |
| Monthly Newsletter | — | — | — | — |
Step 6: Schedule Your Editorial Calendar
The last step in building a basic content marketing strategy is creating an Editorial Calendar. Timing is everything. People make different decisions based on the time of year (think before vs after tax returns, summer vs winter), the time of the week (do you spend more time on Facebook weekday nights or weekend mornings?), the time of the day (how long will it take you to open email received at 7am vs 1pm?), and so on. It is critical to take into account when your content is most likely to be engaged and plan to publish the type of content at the time that optimizes this likelihood.Likewise, your content may unfold in a narrative fashion, with the sequence of publications being an important factor, and designing this sequence around a real world calendar is key. For example, you may wish to publish 3 blog posts per month, each addressing a different phase of the buyer’s journey for of 3 different personas, resulting in 18 posts that have to come in a very specific order. To effectively keep track of this, you will need a calendar. You may also wish to keep track of other details such as: keywords optimized; calls to action used; accompanying communications sent; author; etc, so you can modulate these in future publications. To approach this systematically, you will need a calendar. And if you add onto this simple blog example other channels such as Twitter, Facebook, newsletters, etc, the schedule clearly becomes unmanageable without a calendar.
There are numerous tools for handling scheduling and project management for large teams, and what works for you will largely depend on what is already integrated into your’s or your teams workflow. At a minimum, an editorial calendar will include a calendar or spreadsheet of dates on which can be specified: the significance of the date if any (holidays, sales, seasons, product launch), the content to be posted on that date (including the ability to add multiple events), and whatever metadata you plan to take into account in your scheduling (author, keywords, call to action, etc). Ideally, the events can be viewed or sorted by this metadata. At a minimum, it must be easily and quickly readable.
—
Viola! That’s it! If you implement these tools and do the work of generating content based on their guidelines, you will be putting into place a basic but formalized and robust content marketing strategy. If you are a small business, it is likely that doing this will put you miles ahead of your competition in terms of your discovererabilty and appeal to potential customers. If you are playing with the big boys, some more detail and additional steps will be required, but this is meant only to serve as a basic introduction, as well as be easily implementable by virtually anyone. These same tools will scale to meet the needs of larger businesses too.
Do you understand the value of a good content marketing strategy but need help putting it into place due to time, personnel, or knowledge constraints? I’d love to help your business gain traction on the internet by creating high value content for the good of all, so let’s chat.
