Whatever our objectives are for marketing ourselves (establishing a reputation as an industry expert, selling a book we’ve written, or finding a new job are just a few ideas that might apply), our personal brand can help us familiarize our target audience with the facets of our character that make us an appealing investment.

In other words, they reflect our personality.

Brands have a personality, too, and it’s up to the marketers responsible for promoting them to discharge this personality to their target customers. Social media offers an invaluable opportunity to do this well. In our modern world, a consumer’s investment in a brand doesn’t necessarily take the form of a purchase. It might be a Facebook “Like,” a word-of-mouth endorsement, or another piece of content that ultimately leads to a loyal fan. Regardless of the action, maintaining a consistent brand persona is absolutely critical to success.

But there’s a problem. All of the social media touch points we employ to create and sustain our brand online require ongoing maintenance. And the individuals maintaining them have personalities of their own.

This issue has grown particularly thorny with the rise in popularity of sites such as Twitter and Pinterest. In order to retain an audience and attract new followers, brands must post regular updates. Brand marketers have two options: They can delegate this job to an in-house employee of the brand, such as a member of the marketing team, or they can outsource it to their interactive agency’s social media division. Time constraints often make the latter the more sensible choice, but outsourcing social media efforts requires a thorough understanding of the brand voice. How can brand marketers be sure that the updates made on behalf of their brand are consistent with the persona they’ve worked so hard to create?

Developing a social media style guide

The first step in safeguarding your brand online is to create a social media style guide. You already have something comparable for your offline marketing materials, ads, and site design — a brand style guide that meticulously outlines everything related to the way your brand’s presented, from the required minimum clear space around your logo to your acceptable typeface. If it also includes information about copy lingo and image tone of voice, all the better; this can become the foundation for your social media style guide.  

While, like your brand style guide, your social media guidebook should feature very specific guidelines about your brand tenets as they relate to the production of online content, it should also focus on two things in particular: tone and imagery. Together these two elements can get you and your staff through every social media content development situation imaginable.

The tenacity of tone

Brand tone is important not only because it conveys to the consumer the overall character of your brand, but also because it distinguishes you from your peers. It’s a brand’s most powerful tool and, therefore, will require the most attention from those responsible for managing your brand’s social endeavors.

Some possible considerations:

• Does the language used in your previous online content portray a brand that’s warm and fuzzy or staid?
• Youthful or mature?
• Feminine or distinctly male?
• Is it represented by formal or informal language? Is that language exclusively English?

Subject matter aside, a Facebook post on the “Dora the Explorer” Facebook page (“Beautiful Dora cakes, made by our fans! ¡Fantástico!”) is going to sound very different from a post on Monster Energy’s page (“Props to Monster Energy riders Paulin Gautier and Tommy Searle, who just bossed the Motocross GP in Bulgaria”). Using contractions such as “wanna” or “lemme” in a Facebook post might be deemed acceptable by a brand like Adidas, just as terms such as “rad” and “chillin’” might be commonplace in Converse tweets, but they aren’t choices competitor Nike tends to make.

These are important distinctions, particularly if you’re about to hire a social media manager who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish or uses nothing but contractions in everyday conversation. If your hires go on to break from the copy tone that consumers have come to know and understand as being specific to your brand, your loyal customers may begin to question whether they know your brand at all.

The implications of imagery

The emergence and growth of social media applications that focus entirely on photographs has required brand marketers to take a closer look at the way images reflect on the brand persona. The way in which Instagram and Pinterest take the persuasive power of pictures to a new level, creating engagement between consumers and brands based entirely on visual cues, demands that the imagery put forth on behalf of your brand is coherent.

One of Instagram’s claims to fame is its filters — a series of photographic overlays that change the look and feel of pictures taken with a mobile phone. While brands can expect to see more Instagram marketing opportunities now that the service has been acquired by Facebook, some are already using it to upload images to a Facebook page.

Even something as seemingly trivial as an image filter warrants careful study when it’s going to be made public as part of a brand’s persona. Brands must therefore educate their social media managers in the acceptable language of their visual assets. Would a company like Apple, with its clean lines and cool color palette, be comfortable applying a retro-looking Instagram filter to an image of the latest iPhone? Probably not. But it might be just the thing for In-N-Out Burger, which has a history that dates back to the 1940s and still maintains a vintage look.

With a site like Pinterest the challenge is similar. Here again marketers must put their brand persona in the hands of social media managers tasked with pinning (or tagging) photographs that have some brand relevance; but if a brand fails to define its pressure points, the results could be damaging.

For example, would Diapers.com be comfortable pinning a slightly revealing photograph of a breastfeeding mother? What would happen if Whole Foods pinned an image sourced from an article about genetically modified tomatoes? These are questions brands must ask of themselves and talk about with their employees — who, let’s not forget, have interests, beliefs, and a comfort level all their own — in order to avoid potential embarrassment and controversy.

The branding opportunities provided by social media are beyond compare, but so is the importance of sustaining a brand persona when faced with the infinite production of online content. Recognizing the different ways in which you can define your brand can help. So, too, can relaying these to the people who, regardless of their own personas, can create a seamless portrayal of your brand.

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples. 

This group has influence, money, and decision-making power. Indeed, its members are not just consumers; they are self-ordained experts who are accustomed to sharing their opinions and impressions of companies and products (both positive and negative) with the world!

They are known as the millennial consumer, or the digital native.

Who are digital natives?

Born between the mid-1970s and the late 1990s, digital natives have grown up during our current golden age of digital technology. Now in their mid-teens to mid-thirties, people in this generation came of age knowing how to interact with technology and are comfortable using it to their advantage.

Currently, digital natives represent almost a quarter of the total market and by 2017 it is projected that they will have more spending power than any other generation in America.

They are called digital natives because digital connectedness is in their DNA. Communicating through technology is a way of life for them, and they are, at all times, connected to their social networks through various devices.

Consumption habits of digital natives

The cool thing about digital natives is their ability to incorporate technology and social media to become more effective in business and client relationships.

Their content consumption habits differentiate them from more traditional consumers in that they are:

• Multi-platform consumers: Digital natives could be watching “American Idol” while simultaneously sharing that experience with their Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and even their texting buddies!
• Multi-device consumers: They consume content on different devices, such as their laptops, smartphones, and tablets.
• In charge of the conversation: They want to determine when and how content is delivered to them — interruption marketing is offensive to them.
• Disinterested in opinions of those outside their close social group, but are super-interested in what their friends think.
• Hyper-connected: Their stories and word-of-mouth messages travel faster than any news network. Their thoughts and experiences are shared in real-time through updates, tweets, pictures, and video.
• Very loyal to Facebook and will not be committing to Google+ anytime soon (here’s some evidence of this, straight from the horse’s mouth).
• Enthusiasts of marketing that is honest and authentic.
• Engaged: They don’t just consume content and information; they interact with it via digital expressions, such as updates, shares, re-tweets, etc.

How these habits influence content marketing

As you consider the habits of digital natives — their hyper-connectedness, their interaction with content and with one another — you begin to see that the social effect they have on consumerism is extremely powerful. So much so that brands are no longer defined by their own marketing messages but rather by the collective experiences of these young consumers.

When these experiences are shared online and offline, they become future guides for other consumers seeking input before making their own purchasing decisions.

So as brands try to figure out how to influence digital natives through content marketing, they must think about creating content that is engaging and share-worthy, and that enhances positive experiences amongst millennials.

How to influence digital natives through content marketing

First, understand that their habits regarding content consumption mean that you cannot entice digital natives with traditional mass marketing. Thus, you have to identify the best ways to deliver content through the six elements of engagement (defined in the Razorfish Liminal Report):

#1. Value

Above all else, digital consumers want to feel valued. They expect you to go out of your way to support their needs. This means that you have to create content that generates feelings of appreciation on their part. Examples:

• Create content that solves their problems and shows empathy to their concerns.
• Listen to conversations (e.g., on Twitter) that are not necessarily about your company and then respond to questions not directly aimed at you (e.g., Best Buy developed Twelpforce to answer people’s questions about electronic products in general).
• Listen and talk with customers on your blog or social networks, and make sure to add a personal touch that resonates with them (e.g., sign off Facebook updates with your first name (especially if you have several administrators on your page).
• Respond to questions (both online and offline) in such a way that they know you are working diligently on their behalf.

#2. Efficiency

Digital natives want quick and efficient service. Your brand should demonstrate that you value their time and energy. So create content that is easy and quick to access and that directly answers their questions. Examples:

• Create mobile-friendly content.
• Ensure fast download time of website content.
• Don’t “post and run” — respond quickly to blog comments, Facebook questions, and tweet chats.
• Eliminate cumbersome steps, processes, or requirements on your site that create user friction.
• Keep your content brief and to the point (try using infographics to capture short attention spans).

#3. Trust

Millennial consumers want to know that brands they do business with can be trusted. Credibility is established through honest, transparent, and authentic engagement. Examples:

• Drop the PR-speak or legalese from your organization’s content.
• If something goes wrong, apologize publicly on your social networks (particularly on YouTube).
• Don’t advertise; instead, deliver content that shows them “how-to” solutions to problems and ways to improve their lives or jobs.
• Remove yourself from the brand story as much as possible.
• Encourage their loyalty by giving away lots of free content without expecting anything in return.

#4. Consistency

Digital consumers do not want any unpleasant surprises. They will feel more secure if your branding, messaging, policies, and attitude remain consistent and reliable. Examples:

• Your brand message must remain consistent (remember what happened when GAP tried to change its logo?).
• Your content must deliver on any promises made.
• There should be no clash between policy and actions (e.g., if your Twitter profile says that you follow back everyone who follows you, be sure to do exactly that).

#5. Relevance

The digital consumer’s world is an “egosystem,” where everything revolves around himself or herself. They have empowered themselves through technology and their social graph. The only opinions that really matter are their own and those of their social network. So create content that is relevant to them. Examples:

• Digital natives love cool stories – share stories about interesting things that involve your staff, employees, and other customers.
• Use highly interactive content to encourage their participation (e.g., interactive white papers, flipped webinars etc.).
• Use highly targeted Facebook ads that show how their friends are connected with your brand.
• Offer them content that is customized to their needs and preferences.
• Do not waste their time with boring or generic messages.

#6. Control

If there’s one thing that digital consumers are deeply aware of (even if company executives and CEOs are not) it is that they are in control of the conversation and, ultimately, the relationship. Rather than fight it, brands can use this to their advantage by empowering customers to become brand advocates. Examples:

• Create platforms for user-generated content. 
• Ask customers to contribute content to your blog.
• Invite customers to tell you what kind of content they want (crowdsourcing).
• Create situations that give customers control while strengthening their emotional connection to your brand (e.g., Cisco Networking Academy normally invites select customers to become its Facebook Page administrators for periods of time).

Key takeaway

As technology changes, people change along with it. That might not always be good news for brands, but it’s something that they must accept and appreciate. The best way to truly accept this new digital culture and the business landscape that it has created is to observe, learn, understand, and then become involved with the digital native in order to create new opportunities for business and content marketing.

Over to you: How has the digital culture changed the way you do content marketing?

Cellphone photo image via Shutterstock

Yes, content works well when it comes to driving consumer demand. And, in turn, existing demand can create an ideal opportunity to deliver valuable, informative content. Yet marketers don’t always recognize how holistically these two marketing functions are linked to each other and to the various stages in the customer’s buying process — an oversight that needlessly complicates the job of any marketer.

Fortunately, there are some successful strategies for aligning and delivering content that will (to borrow a phrase from Hollywood’s latest storytelling success — “The Hunger Games”) turn the odds of a purchase ever in your favor.

During Content Marketing Institute’s latest webinar, Content to Customer: Aligning and Delivering Content According to the Buying Process, Eloqua’s Joe Chernov and Elle Woulfe shared a framework to help marketers address the most pressing customer goals and create the types of content that will work best at each phase of the purchase funnel.

What’s in a lead?

While many marketers simply identify any potential customer as a lead, according to Joe Chernov, Eloqua’s VP of Content Marketing, this term leaves out vital information about customers’ content interests, and their current mindset and motivations behind those interests. The broad usage of the term also fails to take into consideration important details you may have already gathered through earlier engagements they’ve initiated with your company. For these reasons, Eloqua uses the following four categories to more clearly define potential customers and help content marketers direct their communications more effectively.

• Suspects: A Suspect is every possible person who fits the criteria of your target market but hasn’t yet taken any action after accessing your content. These are people who could be interested in buying your products at some point down the line, or they may have just come across your content through an interest unrelated to a purchase.
• Prospects: When consumers in your target market have actively supplied personal information in exchange for more of your content, they become Prospects. This group includes consumers who have searched online for information on products that are relevant to your business, but who might not be actively engaged in the purchase process at the moment.
• Leads: In the Eloqua framework, Prospects that fit your consumer profile and have demonstrated a desired behavior or intent are referred to as Leads. At this stage, you know this consumer has an interest, and your use of content can help you determine if they are sales-ready.
• Opportunities: When your content has helped to put you in touch with a consumer who fits your buyer persona and is looking to make a purchase, you’ve created an Opportunity.

The right content for the right stage

Once you have categorized your potential customer, it’s time to create and deliver content. Whether they are ready to make a purchase now or are just window shopping, your goal should be to support their current informational needs and move them through the buying cycle.

Suspects

What information they want: Suspects are looking for companies to share what they know as an organization — not what they sell. So the content marketer’s goal at this stage is to get content to spread from person to person in the hopes that the more people it reaches, the better the chance that it will reach a potential prospect.

What content works well: According to Joe Chernov, a blog should be the hub of your content wheel in this phase. He also advises content marketers to avoid using forms when communicating with Suspects, as anything that interrupts consumers’ ability to view your content is a surefire way to blunt its spread at this stage of the marketing game.

Some content formats that do work well here include:

• Infographics
• Non-demo videos
• Curated lists (e.g., 20 Women who Rock Content Marketing)
• “Infotainment” content       

Best platforms for delivering content to Suspects:

• Blogs
• Social networks
• Branded outposts (e.g., your company’s video channel or other owned media platforms)
• Partner sites

Prospects

What information they want: In general, Prospects are looking for content that feeds their professional interests and provides a service, whether it be helping them solve a problem, giving them some targeted business tips, or arming them with information that can help them get buy-in from team decision-makers.

From the content marketer’s perspective, the goal at this stage is to collect information on people you haven’t established a relationship with yet, and to gather more information from those you have. This makes the Prospect stage a good time to start using forms as a gateway to your content.

As it’s all about conversions, at this stage, Joe Chernov recommends that marketers deliver content that speaks to Prospects’ fears and pain points. He also advises marketers to make sure they are pairing the channel they use with the role, as not all channels work for all titles.

Content that works well for Prospects:

• Email
• Advertising/Display
• Direct mail
• Events (both online and in-person)
• eBooks/Guides
• Chapters from physical books
• Licensed analyst reports
• Webinars

Leads

What information they want: Like Prospects, Leads also want content that addresses their business pains. But they differ in the types of information they will find most useful, and not all hand-raisers will turn out to be sales-ready decision makers.

At this stage, Elle Woulfe, Senior Marketing Programs Manager at Eloqua, advises marketers to focus on communicating with what she refers to as the sales-accepted lead — those with the Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing (BANT) to make a purchase decision.

Woulfe supports the use of progressive profiling at this stage — where you determine what information you already have on the lead, and then ask only for information that is missing. This allows marketers to gather more useful information without overwhelming the potential lead with repetitive requests. She also urges marketers to follow a Golden Rule of Content: Ask if the content you are pushing out is advancing the customer’s process.

Content that works well for Leads: Woulfe has found that product-related information works well here, as long as the consumer is comfortable with the level of content you are providing, and advises marketers that this is the stage where automated nurturing can begin to transition to an actual sales rep.

Preferred content formats for reaching leads include:

• White papers
• Case studies
• Demo videos
• Product comparisons

Opportunities

What information they want: Once your content has created an Opportunity, it’s up to you to help the consumer make a purchasing decision that they will be satisfied with, and to make that decision quickly. This includes providing clear, transparent pricing information because, as Woulfe says, you are better off supplying this information proactively than waiting for your competitors to do it for you. For content marketers, this also means staying involved — nurturing the buyer all the way through the close of the deal, and not relying exclusively on the sales rep to deliver content.

Content that works well for Opportunities:

• ROI calculators
• Pricing sheets
• RFP generators and templates

Woulfe also warns content marketers that just because these may be “dry” topics, it doesn’t mean that they can’t be presented in a vital, exciting way. She also encourages marketers to consider bundling their best Opportunity-stage content into a single buying center.

If you missed the live webinar, you can still benefit from these and other insights shared by Eloqua by viewing the archive version here. You can also download the slide presentation here. 

Try these strategies for assessing whether your content marketing efforts are reaching the right audiences.

Analyze your referral traffic sources

Most business sites receive traffic from a mix of referring sources, which might include social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter; social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, or Reddit; and links from websites on similar topics.

Social bookmarking sites often send the most traffic — in fact, StumbleUpon accounts for more than half of all U.S.-based social media traffic, according to a recent report. But, even when the numbers are high, you may not be reaching the audience you’re seeking.

Consider the common audience demographics of your referral traffic sources: If you run a business-to-business site, does traffic from individual-focused sites like StumbleUpon and Digg fit your mission, or should you focus your promotional efforts on business networking sites like LinkedIn?

Likewise, while Digg may send substantial traffic to a particular article, its user base is male-heavy and not particularly wealthy: A typical Digger brings in less than $50,000 a year, according to Ignite Social Media’s 2011 Social Media Analysis Report. While exposure to a large audience can often boost your site’s SEO rankings, relying on such sites for traffic isn’t an effective long-term strategy when you’re searching for qualified leads.

Focus instead on promoting your content to related industry blogs, and through your company’s existing social media channels: Though traffic rates may not always be as impressive, visitors from these types of referral sources are more likely to engage with your content and achieve the conversions you’re looking for, such as newsletter sign-ups and e-commerce purchases.

Look at your keyword search results

You’re not done studying your site analytics, yet. Next, take a look at the search terms that are driving traffic to your site.

If you sell sofa-beds, but are posting about — and getting search hits for — your dog rescue efforts, you’re probably not using your blog effectively as a marketing tool. Rescuing pets is certainly commendable, but the people visiting your site to read about how you saved Shadow aren’t likely to shell out for a sleeper sofa.

If many of your most popular website search terms are for terms that are only tangentially (or not at all) related to your core business, it’s time to start thinking more strategically about creating content that relates to your business goals. Start a secondary blog for the side project or hobby that’s bringing in keyword traffic, and focus your main site on content based around keywords that your target consumers are likely to be searching for.

Pay attention to user engagement measures

Are visitors bouncing away from your site within a few seconds, or do they tend to linger for a while, browse through your archives, and maybe even sign up for your newsletter? If your website visitors rarely view more than a single page at a time, it’s a sign that they’re either not your target audience, or that the content you’re producing isn’t compelling enough to entice them to stay. (For tips on creating content that pops, read Heather Rast’s recent post.)

Take a survey

You can learn a lot about your website visitors from your analytics metrics, but the best way to tell if you’re attracting the right prospects is to simply ask them. Use a free survey tool, such as SurveyMonkey or KwikSurveys, to create a list of questions to assess your users’ demographics, and their likelihood of using or buying your product. Keep in mind, however, that most visitors who fill out surveys are already engaged, so they may not represent your audience as a whole.

The bottom line? High traffic is nice to have, but if it’s not helping you reach your business goals, it’s just costing you bandwidth. Take the time to analyze your content strategy and marketing approach so that you can target the right online prospects every time.

Outreach is an important part of any content marketing campaign, but even a robust outreach strategy can have lackluster results if it is simply tacked on at the end of a campaign. Instead, you need to embed outreach into your marketing strategy every step of the way.

Here, we’ll take you through some best practices for integrating outreach considerations right from the start of your content marketing strategy. We’re using an infographic as our content example, but keep in mind that this process can be applied to most forms of content creation — from articles to apps and more.

Traditional content marketing campaigns

A typical marketing campaign for an infographic consists of (roughly) the following phases:

1. The content brainstorm: You and your team start coming up with ideas for an infographic.
2. Content research: Data is gathered, and your team’s concept is finalized.
3. Content creation: The idea and content are handed over to the designer.
4. Content outreach: You launch your work and reach out to third parties to help you promote the content.
5. Content tracking: You follow up on your launch efforts and measure how successfully your content performed.

If you only start thinking about your audience at Step 4 of your creation process (as in the phases above), you’ve already missed some key opportunities to connect your content with your audience.

How to embed outreach into every step of your strategy

1. The content brainstorm

Why outreach planning makes sense here: If your primary purpose for developing an infographic is to attract a lot of visitors and/or gain a lot of links, it makes sense to have a clear picture of your target audience before you even start brainstorming.

What you should be doing: Make sure there’s someone on your team who understands the internet and knows what messages spread easily. Think about who is most likely to be engaged, and build a profile of them — where do they spend time online, what are their interests, and what do they value (humor, transparency, freshness, etc.)? If you do not have someone on your team experienced in outreach, consider using market research to get to know your audience better.

As you brainstorm, check your ideas off against these user profiles, and either eliminate or tweak any that wouldn’t be appealing. Be tough — it can be hard to ditch an idea you love, even if it doesn’t fit your audience.

You can also estimate how far your infographic will spread based on your user profiles. For example, if you are working with a niche topic, either confirm that your client/boss will be happy with a small but focused reach, or come up with ideas that can broaden the scope of your subject matter.

A tip from the pros: Anything that is cause-based usually does well (e.g., the environment, poverty, and animal welfare subject matter). The reason? People want to spread the word in order to affect change.

2. Content research

Why outreach planning makes sense here: With an idea in place and a profile of your audience developed, gathering data that speaks to your outreach targets is essential in ensuring your project is a success. If you gather data that alienates readers, your efforts will have been for naught.

What you should be doing: Consider what you know about your audience: What do they tend to write about? Are resources and credibility important to them? Do they prefer information that is funny or information that is to the point?. Apply these questions to the data and only use the information which results in positive responses.

A tip from the pros: Have a third party review your data to get honest feedback. Have them pick apart the data and ask tough questions, no matter how minute their concerns may be. Thinking about your content from all angles and covering your bases ahead of time will effectively help pave the way for the outreach phase and prepare you for any curveball thrown your way.

You may also want to test your outreach plans on the people who were sources for your data. This is a form of egobait, in which you build relationships with the people who helped build the infographic in hopes of getting coverage for your piece on their sites.

3. Content creation

Why outreach planning makes sense here: There are many approaches you can take to present information in an infographic, from fun to no-nonsense. A businessperson is not going to share something that looks unprofessional with peers, no matter how engaging the content, so you’ll want to keep your audience in mind as you develop the look and feel of your content — including your design, tone, and voice.

What you should be doing: Use your audience profiles to create a brief style guide for your infographic. Consider reaching out to a few people that fit within your audience and use their feedback to help you edit and perfect your project. This phase can also create a bit of buzz.

A tip from the pros: Determine whether you’re presenting this content in the right way. For example, infographics are fun but expensive and they work best for presenting data-heavy information that is more digestible in a visual format. If your source material doesn’t fit that description (i.e., you find your infographic is essentially blocks of text telling a story), you’ll get a better ROI if you go with something simpler, like a data-rich article.

4. Content outreach

Why outreach planning makes sense here: This one’s obvious! You need to conduct outreach so that people know about your project. You want to acquire new traffic or linkbacks. So if you only post your content on your own website, only your current audience will see it.

What you should be doing: Use as many different tools and methods as you can to source prospective contacts. For example, use advanced queries to find bloggers who are discussing your project topic. You should also use social media platforms to find people who are talking about your infographic. For example, maybe people are tweeting about your content, but aren’t hosting it on their sites. Reach out to them and ask them to host it. Remember, using your infographic’s organic social success will help you find new leads and develop creative ideas for getting more coverage.

A tip from the pros: Make your audience’s lives as easy as possible — it will greatly increase your conversions. For example, you can give contacts an embed code so they can easily post your infographic on their websites and social profiles, and even suggest some intro copy, if appropriate.

5. Content tracking

Why outreach planning makes sense here: There is no point in just watching from the sidelines as your infographic gets going online. If you know your audience well (which you should by now), you’ll be well positioned to get involved and push it a bit harder in the right places.

What you should be doing: Keep an up-to-date record of who you’ve reached out to during your launch, and make sure to follow up with anyone who hasn’t responded. Use language that’s appropriate to your profiles and, if the situation is right, consider picking up the phone instead of emailing.

A tip from the pros: If after all your attempts you still do not succeed in getting coverage from a specific contact, ask them for constructive feedback on why they aren’t interested. This will help you better understand your audience and hopefully create more successful projects down the road! 

Creating great content requires more than skilled writing. It requires market research and personal conversation so that your content will anticipate the audience’s needs and be well targeted to address those needs.

Before you start to write, you need to know what information your readers will want to see on your blog, website, or social networking campaign. You need to know what will be relevant and important enough to command their attention.

So, how will you learn what’s on their minds?

You will ask, of course. But also offer a premium to thank them for their time and show that you value their input. Their information is vital to your business, so it’s in your best interest to offer something of value in return.

Luckily, this is relatively easy to do: Think of ways you can make their lives easier, more fun, more informed, or more efficient. Here are five ideas to help you learn more about your content’s audience:

 1. Create a contest

• It helps you inform clients that an event is coming up, that there is a fee to attend, and that they can reduce their costs if they register online in advance.
• You promote the seminar, your expertise, your questionnaire, and your business all at the same time, and offer clients a money-saving opportunity to increase their knowledge.

As you read these ideas, we hope you were thinking about marketing, because that is what it all boils down to: hard-as-nails internet marketing. Call it content or whatever else you want, but don’t lose sight of the fact that the purpose is to make you and your business more well-known, more of an asset to your clientele, and more successful, overall.

One last thing: Be sure that you treat your content and social networking campaigns like a ball of string — an integrated effort where finding any part of it leads you to the whole. Ain’t nothing better than that.

If you’ve used any of these techniques, let us know how they worked for you by sharing your story in the comments below. 

How do you consistently develop content that pulls prospects and customers in, meets their needs, and does so right when they’re ready to consume it? To help you in this mission, here are seven easy-to-follow tips:

1. Understand the type of content your prospects and customers need

For your time-crunched readers, your content has to answer the key question, “What’s in it for me?” Therefore, content must help, educate, inform, or entertain in order to convey your value.

• To start, you will want to go beyond your audience’s basic demographics, psychographics, and past behaviors to create specific marketing personas — a composite of reader attributes. (Here are some tips that will help you get started creating your personas.)
• Once you have a clear idea of who your customers and prospects are, get a feel for the kinds of information they will want at each step of the purchase process to ensure you are delivering useful, targeted information at the right time.
• Further, be sure to use your readers’ language — not marketing-speak. Employ your audience’s way of talking, including their vocabulary, to validate your insight. Remember the content doesn’t have to be text! (Here are 13 content format options you might want to consider.)

2. Tell a story that will make your content memorable

People remember narratives with a beginning, middle, and end — not an endless recitation of fact after fact.

• The easiest formula is to state the issue you’re examining, give evidence to support the problem’s answer, and finish by clearly showing you’ve answered the issue.
• Use stories about your product, brand, company, employees, or customers to make content relevant to readers and keep them reading.

3. Structure content to guide readers

It’s helpful to make an outline of your content before creating it to ensure you are making a compelling case right from the first paragraph.

• This initial paragraph must deliver on your title’s promise while keeping readers engaged to discover.
• Additionally, it must support search optimization by incorporating the keywords upon which the piece is focused.

4. Hook readers with a strong headline

While the headline doesn’t have to be the first thing you write, it’s important to make sure it is composed in a way that will draw readers in.

• Entice prospects with thought-provoking questions, issues, or arguments, but don’t give away all your information in the headline or they won’t read further.
• Whenever possible, incorporate relevant keywords.
• Once you’ve finished writing, review your headline to ensure it’s strong and consistent with the rest of your content — you don’t want readers to feel like you did a bait and switch on them. 

5. Give readers evidence

You can’t always expect that readers will take your word for it when it comes to your content’s assertions. They know you’re motivated to gloss over information that might show your offering to be less than stellar, so you need to back up your information with proof.

• Provide readers with information that illustrates your points with examples.
• Use photographs, illustrations, and/or videos to make your point.
• Incorporate customer reviews and testimonies to support your case.

6. Facilitate content consumption

Consumers seek targeted information to answer specific questions at each step of the purchase process, so be sure to make your information as easy-to-read and visually inviting as possible.

For example, many readers are likely consuming your content on a mobile device while they’re on-the-go, reading it in small chunks of time while they are in between other activities or concurrently while they’re doing something else.

• To keep their focus, remember that less is more, so make your content easy to scan quickly.
• Use simple language that will be clear to your readers, so they don’t get frustrated and lose interest.
• Write in short sentences using an active voice.
• Whenever possible, write three- to five-sentence paragraphs, and avoid long blocks of text.
• Furthermore, you should highlight important phrases and make lists to help readers quickly scan your content.

7. Edit and revise your content at least once

Don’t hit send as soon as you’ve finished your piece. Rather, check for misspelling and poor grammar first — regardless of how short your turn-around time may be.

• Poor writing, including foul language, diminishes your content’s credibility.
• It’s also helpful to have another set of eyes double-check your content.

Creating content that consistently pulls prospects and customers in at every step of the purchase process requires practice. These seven tips will help ensure your content is aligned with your audience’s needs during the buying cycle, and will give it a fighting chance of breaking through the message clutter to get their attention.

Do you have any other tips that help you consistent develop content that lures prospects and customers in?

Photo credit to rzrxtion/chris m. via flickr

Sun Life Financial is a leading Canadian-based international financial services company that provides insurance and investment products for both individual and corporate customers.

The Challenge: Engaging with early-stage leads

Prior to exploring content marketing, Sun Life Financial had created branded sites for its  insurance and investment offerings. The organization had a solid SEO strategy that drove people who were searching for financial solutions to its websites. However, Sun Life knew it was missing a huge opportunity to connect with early-stage leads — the people who were wrestling with financial problems but not yet looking for a solution.

The Journey: Aligning marketing goals with new buyer behavior

Sun Life’s digital marketing team studied how social media is changing buyer behavior. It learned that today’s buyers like to conduct research online before they speak with a sales representative or an advisor.

“We saw parallels between the financial path to purchase and other verticals, such as consumer electronics,” says Darin Diehl, AVP of Sun Life Canada Web. “In both cases, buyers are often intimidated before making a purchase.”

Sun Life was impressed with Best Buy’s content marketing strategy and how the retailer had created BestBuyOn to educate consumers. The content-driven site entertains consumers while informing them about how to select and get the most from their electronics.

“We felt that by adopting a similar strategy, we could remove the intimidation factor,” says Diehl. “Creating educational content allows people to better understand their problems and opportunities. It also gives them knowledge and a sense of empowerment when they are ready to take action.”

The Solution: Using engaging content to educate customers and move them through the sales cycle

Sun Life realized that it needed a site with content about the financial, health, and working life challenges its customers face. The company created an editorial sub-brand, called ‘BrighterLife. The Brighter Life tagline for the new site is, “Sharing ideas about money, health and family.” Although the business goal of BrighterLife is to direct leads to Sun Life’s product and service pages, the site focused on education, and kept Sun Life’s branding to a minimum. 

The Implementation: 5 keys to a successful launch

Here are five things Sun Life learned, and wanted to share with other organizations, from its successful launch of BrighterLife:

1. Get internal buy-in: Sun Life’s first challenge was getting internal buy-in for the project. To do this, the content marketing team had to evangelize the idea. They explained the benefits they hoped to achieve, such as:

• Reaching potential customers earlier in the buying process and having the opportunity to move them down the path to purchase.
• Providing advisors with a stream of approved content that they can use to engage clients and prospects.
• Improving Sun Life’s brand image by giving consumers educational and plain language content about issues that they care about.

2. Understand your voice: Once the project was approved, Sun Life’s next big challenge was choosing the right voice for its content. The company started by gaining an understanding of their audience’s needs, wants, fears, and desires. To do this, they conducted internal research and reviewed studies that shed light on Canadians’ financial challenges and opportunities. From there, they created journalistic content that educates consumers about these concerns.

“It’s often hard for marketers to have the patience not to rush to their offers,” says Diehl. “However, content marketing lets you create an early connection with your audience that builds loyalty to your brand. Developing this level of trust starts with quality, compelling and useful content.”

3. Get support: Sun Life hired High Road Communications to build the site and an editor with a media publishing background to oversee the content. The company also works with freelance journalists who write objective and educational articles for the site. Sun Life found that engaging freelance journalists is also more economical than hiring internal staff to write content.

4. Encourage customers to take the next step: Although the content on BrighterLife.ca is educational, Sun Life, like all businesses, still needs to attract new customers. That’s why it placed clear calls-to-action, such as banners or buttons, throughout the site. The team also added text at the end of every article that encourages readers to connect with an advisor or visit one of Sun Life’s branded sites.

5. Don’t let industry regulations stop you: Sun Life faced another challenge: financial marketing regulations that can make it hard to develop engaging content. These regulations can also delay the publication process.

“All our content goes through an approval process, which can be challenging when you want to be timely and relevant,” says Diehl. “We’ve managed this by thinking ahead about what’s on people’s minds seasonally and developing other ways to turn content around faster.”

From idea to launch, it took Sun Life just over a year to launch BrighterLife — but it took just six months from the time they picked an agency to the site’s soft launch. The company held a soft launch for Sun Life staff members to test the site. Then, the digital marketing team used the internal feedback to tweak the site, and officially launched BrighterLife on Sept. 19, 2011.

The Results: Converting new customers with engaging content

Sun Life wanted to attract 10,000 unique visitors per month at the launch. So far, Sun Life has surpassed this goal and has set aggressive growth targets for next year. Sun Life has also received positive press coverage and has seen evidence that the content is converting new customers. A percentage of BrighterLife’s visitors click the Advisor Match banners that are placed throughout the site. They then complete a form and become leads for Sun Life advisors.

“Anyone who uses content marketing should take metrics very seriously,” says Diehl. “We have a dashboard that tracks our traffic and how well we are engaging visitors and moving them down the path to purchase. The content marketing strategy helps us align our goals with the needs of consumers.”

Due to BrighterLife’s success, Sun Life plans to bring a similar content marketing model to its businesses in Asia and possibly the United States. The company also wants to expand into the B2B space by offering BrighterLife’s content to employers who purchase their employee benefits packages.

Now, go ahead and play this creation by Doremus for Logitech.

The Brand Content Challenge: Global to Local

I’ve been asked how to create global content with minimal localization and translation while taking into account local needs. This video is a great illustration of how to approach the task.  Unlike conventional B2B content that focuses on products, this video puts storytelling and emotional connection first, and then weaves the products into the story in an organic way. 

The 5-Step Brand Content Solution: Identity to Broadcast

1.  Discover the brand identity:  At a macro-level, marketers need to understand why the brand exists, and then communicate that to the audience.

Logitech is a well-known computer peripherals brand. Chad Thompson, Worldwide B2B Marketing Director at Logitech, and Joe McCormack, Creative VP at Doremus, tried to unearth the new spirit of the Logitech B2B brand in their campaign.

With ubiquitous connections and on-the-go mobile devices, work and personal boundaries no longer exist; any place can now serve as an office. Logitech identifies itself as offering products that are designed to help business users work in offices, wherever they may be; thus, the idea for “The New Office” was born.

2.  Start with crisp strategy: Three marketing strategies were in play here to bring the Logitech brand persona to life.

• Reclaim relevance:  Showcase Logitech products’ compatibility with new technologies to solve “office anywhere” challenges.
• Cross-promotion: Focus on the usage models. Here, Logitech redefined the categories not by devices but, rather, by the concept of “workspace”. Four workspace categories are relevant to the Logitech brand: larger/open workspaces, smaller office spaces/cubes, home offices, and to-go workspaces (e.g., a café; the airport). This strategy of focusing on the category, rather than on a specific product, also allows for cross-selling of multiple products.
• Engage customers: Redesign websites and customer-facing interfaces or collaterals with new creative to reflect the new brand promises.

3.  Create stories to scale:  Once they identified the “why” (brand essence) and the “what” (marketing strategies), Logitech and Doremus created the “Welcome to the New Office” campaign.

From the get-go, they set their minds to creating video content that could easily be distributed throughout different regions. Because of this, the creative content could not heavily tie into rituals, local customs, cultural differences, or too many dialogues. Yet, the story framework needed to be familiar and understood by all audiences, regardless of where they live. This video, featuring a dad making dinner for his kids and attending a meeting, is something that small business owners or working professionals, like me, can relate to.

4.  Find a great director: Once you have a good story and script, the next step is to find a director who can bring the story to life in a visually compelling way.

Given that the budget was tight, it was even more essential for the Logitech team to find a director who would be attracted to good storytelling. They were very lucky to find Eric Steinman, who loved the script and was willing to work astutely within the tight production budget.

5.  Make it happen.

The original script had more dialogue.To make it work more globally, the team worked hard to find visual ways to “show” the dialogue without words. They also made casting global. The shooting took only one day in Los Angeles, using non-union talent. The whole process from planning to production took three months.

A good product markets itself. A good story idea attracts collaborators who want to be part of it.  The secret is to find the humanity.

Really take the time to pinpoint scenarios that highlight your audience’s pain and present the solution in a very human, simple, and universal way.  

(Special thanks to Joe McCormack of Doremus, who shared his insights and thoughts for this article.)

While this is a great practice for marketers who may struggle to find the time, resources, or budget to create the volume of content they need, it’s a challenging undertaking, to say the least. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to distributing content, as different groups will choose to engage with your assets in different ways, often depending on which social platform they are using. This means you must be constantly tweaking your approach, and messages, to meet your audience’s changing needs without compromising your style or integrity.

As an example, take a look at how my team recently marketed a webinar across four different social channels. 

Background

For a period of eight weeks, we promoted an educational webinar about the latest best practices for online lead generation. The promotions began with a targeted email campaign, a press release, and various announcements on social sites. As the event drew closer, and in the time immediately after the event, we wanted to keep audiences engaged (especially those unable to attend) by socially sharing information and real-time updates, as demonstrated below: 

LinkedIn

The LinkedIn community is a goldmine of influencers and other audiences craving educational content, particularly for B2B marketers. It’s also a place for people to gather and share ideas, best practices, and challenges with others in their industries or job roles. In general, marketers tend to do more content sharing and less self-promotion on this platform, so as not to jeopardize their reputation or deter their audience.

In addition to announcing the event on two groups I am an active member of, we also communicated how members of our own LinkedIn group could get involved, such as by submitting questions prior to the event or by following the event hashtag on Twitter. We also posted poll questions, so group members who would not be able to join the webinar could still provide their feedback, and shared the output from the webinar after it had ended.

Here are a few of our sample messages:

How to follow the event in real time:

Extending the webinar’s poll to LinkedIn group members:

Sharing the webinar output with LinkedIn group members:

Twitter

Twitter is a great tool for promoting content because you can broadcast messages quickly to a very broad audience. We used Twitter to promote the webinar event, announce speakers, and encourage people to submit their questions prior to the event.

Because the Twitter community is so vast, messages can be a bit more brief and informal than on LinkedIn groups. You can also leverage the “live Tweet” concept to share information, in real time, by using a well-communicated hashtag, which we found to be quite valuable. Using a hashtag, you can provide snippets of information, or “teasers”, to engage your community and encourage those outside your group to tune in and hear what they might be missing. Check out a few examples below:

Facebook

Our audience is not as active on Facebook as it is on Twitter or LinkedIn, but we still use this platform to share photos and articles and have discussions. The tone we use is similar to what we use for our LinkedIn group, but with a conversational style that fits in with conversations throughout the Facebook community.

Our Facebook posts ended up being somewhat of a blend of the Twitter and LinkedIn posts, as you can see from the examples below:

Blog Posts

Blogs are an incredible and, some would argue, essential content marketing tool (to learn more about why, check out this post by Joe Pulizzi, called 6 Steps to Successful Blogging).

Instead of providing a recap of the entire webinar on our blog, we chose to focus on the Q&A portion of the event. Why? People can go and view the webinar at any time; but what we wanted to demonstrate was how valuable the thoughts and opinions of our viewers were. By addressing their specific questions, rather than just highlighting our own webinar content, we were able to communicate how valuable we felt the audience’s contributions were:

What are some ways you’ve distributed content across multiple social sites? In what ways have you altered your messages to suit those different groups? Share your experiences in the comments section below.

Image courtesy of opportplanet via Flickr