What is the most common grouse of a digital marketer or even a digital marketing team?
There is not enough content!
Some online marketing firms work with a couple of content creators while some teams employ a horde of them. All of them are tasked with a single objective: produce ‘fresh’ content for online readers to lap them up. The goal of this process: entice more of these readers to visit the landing pages of the brand, buy something and add to the revenue.
As a digital marketer, I have walked down that path numerous times for innumerable number of brands and companies.
My takeaway?
If only things were that simple!
As a marketer, you know that the online reader, who is also a potential customer, can be in any stage of a journey from knowing about the brand to buying something. Grab any of these potential customers and the journey graph is different. For example, one may have just heard about the brand, one may be simply checking around for options before hitting ‘Buy’ while someone else may have already decided to buy and is just waiting for that final winning offer.
Surely, all of these online readers cannot respond to the same CTA (Call to Action!). You will need something different for each of your online reader because their needs and expectations are so dissimilar.
Lesson learnt: you cannot second-guess your readers and churn ‘fresh’ content, in the hope that they are all reading it up like the next book from Salman Rushdie.
You need to figure out a way to know your readers so that your job becomes easier. Once you know and segregate your content, you are in a better position to write to them directly, addressing more pressing concerns in their minds.
As someone right said, if you are writing for everybody, you are actually writing for nobody.
All said and done, how do you find that right marketing mix of readers?
Help arrives in the form of:
- Google Analytics: Use the goal completion mechanism to find out how much of your objective you have managed to attain. Dig deeper into the data collected through this process. Find out more about their line of thinking to develop content aimed specifically at this group.
- Twitter: Followerwonk is your answer to audience segregation and understanding on Twitter. Use this tool for analyzing followers, conducting some research on your competitors and finally figuring out what kind of content you need for them. Hit ‘Analyze their Followers’ after keying in your Twitter handle. This will give you a good, insightful idea of your followers.
This same line of thinking applies to Facebook as well, if you feel that your audience is more active on it rather than on Twitter. Go to Facebook Fans and then to ‘People Engaged’. You will know more about fans who are active on your platform.
- Google Predictive Search: Check for your brand on Google. Do not hit ‘Enter’! Let the predictive inputs roll out. This is a gold mine to find out what kind of searches is being used in your domain of business. Can you write something along those lines or pull some topics out? Do so only if your readers fit the bill. Do not do it if it does not feel like content for your kind of readers. You are the deciding factor here. Choose judiciously
The Final Word
Knowing a motley group of readers online takes a lot of hard work and research. If you want to make the most of content marketing, you need to do that research or get a digital marketing expert to do it.
Rather than hiring another content writer, get a professional researcher on board for these inputs. Pass this along to the couple of writers you have. Spin your content on these insights. That will be more effective than injecting loads of content into a disinterested online readership.
Finally, play to your strengths. If your reader or potential customers are young, make the content strategy heavy on videos and infographics, rather than blogs and articles. This is simple common sense that can take you way ahead of your competitors.
Write in with other ideas that you have on this one. I’d like to discuss them as well!
0 Comments