Content marketing think like a publisher chapter 4 what kind of content are you

“The first rule of knowing what kind of content you’ll create is knowing who you’re creating it for.” The title of this chapter is something of a trick question.. Sure, content marketing

4

What Kind of Content

Are You?

“The first rule of knowing what kind of content you’ll create is knowing who

you’re creating it for.”

The title of this chapter is something of a trick question.

Sure, content marketing means developing content

around your business, your products, and your services.

But that content isn’t supposed to exist in some

you-oriented void Content is aimed externally: at customers,

prospects, buyers, brand advocates, bloggers, the media,

people participating in social networks, and potentially

employees (if you’re recruiting)

So the first rule of knowing what kind of content you’ll

create is knowing who you’re creating it for This will not

only help you determine what kind of content, but also in

what form and where content will appear Blogs?

YouTube videos? Tweets?

You’ll never know until you begin creating personas.

Personas?

Personas are used in digital marketing for many purposes, not just content

market-ing They’re woven into website design, usability, navigation, advertising, and

mar-keting messages They’re used in offline scenarios, too, particularly in the retail

sector The idea behind personas is that you can’t connect with your customers

(and other constituencies) if you don’t know who they are Obviously, you can’t

know each person individually, but do a little research, and different audience

seg-ments start falling into pretty well-defined characters with distinct characteristics

Although books have been written about the art and science of developing user

personas, the idea is to boil your audience down to a handful of distinct

individu-als, each representing a group you’re serving—or trying to reach Personas have

names, faces, and real personalities

Following are three example personas:

• Jill is 28, and a highly competitive person, both at work and in her

per-sonal life Social status is important to her, and she appreciates these

qualities in others She tends to make impulsive decisions and is quick

to turn to the Internet to accomplish tasks so long as she is able to get

what she needs quickly and efficiently She seeks verifiable results and

quantifiable bottom lines Social interaction in the process of a business

transaction is not important to her She’ll willingly pay more to get

extra benefits or features Jill is unmarried and does not see marriage in

her near future

• James, 36, is Internet savvy and is online in excess of 10 hours per day

He has multiple email accounts and does all his shopping and banking

online, often from his iPad or iPhone James works for an ecommerce

company and has just purchased a modest one-bedroom condo in the

suburbs outside a large metropolitan city

• Stacy, 34, is a soccer mom and the main shopper for her family, living

in a semi-rural community Outside of using email to communicate

with friends and family, she’s intimidated by technology and

inexperi-enced with the Internet She is well educated and usually confident, but

she doesn’t really trust online shopping sites that require credit card

information, and she’s leery of joining social networks She’s heard too

much bad news about identity theft and privacy and thinks it’s safer

just to avoid these potentially risky areas

Your content won’t connect with customers (or prospects) if you don’t know who

they are, and it’s unlikely they’re some amorphous mono-person They’re disparate

individuals who likely fall into half a dozen or so distinct categories People in each

of these categories search differently They discuss different things on different

P a r t I I W h a t K i n d o f C o n t e n t A r e Yo u ?

social networks How they decide what to

buy, or what to recommend to their friends,

family, or colleagues at work, is different and

distinct They have different predilections

and different preferences Instead of creating

content for everyone, you’re talking to Stacy,

or Jill, or James

So how do you go about creating personas?

Start by digging into data Look at website

analytics Where are people coming from?

What keywords and phrases do they use to

find you (and your competitors)? How does your conversion data pan out from

those metrics?

You can use a variety of tools to collect and parse this data, as well as social media

listening tools, services that break out a site’s demographic information, and

serv-ices such as Flowtown and Rapleaf that tease social network data out of your email

lists (assuming you have them) Then there’s that tried-and-true method: the

cus-tomer survey (Offering the chance to win a $50 Amazon gift certificate is a great

way to encourage participation.)

After you’ve collected all this data, analyzed it, and segmented it into personas, it’s

important to regularly revisit persona profiles After all, they’re not etched in stone

When personas have been developed, you’ll know who you’re talking to and

writ-ing for You may even get a clearer idea as to whether pink or cerulean blue should

be the dominant color on a web page or in a photo or video You’ll have a clearer

understanding of where your personas congregate online and how you might

approach them

Think of it this way: If you were trying to get a pretty girl to go out with you, you’d

likely adapt a radically different approach when coming on to the bookish graduate

student in the library, as opposed to the flamboyant party girl in the red spangled

dress at a disco

Well, wouldn’t you?

Every business has its own set of unique personas Some have only three or four,

whereas others have a dozen or more Although all your content marketing

initia-tives ought to be addressed directly to one of your identified personas (although it’s

perfectly possible that one content initiative may cover two or more profiles), all

content marketing tends to fall into a specific set of categories

Let’s consider them The next few chapters break down the different content

cate-gories

17

C h a p t e r 4 W h a t K i n d o f C o n t e n t A r e Yo u ?

“Your content won’t connect with customers (or prospects) if you don’t know who they are.”

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