Secrets to a successful content marketing strategy

Understanding your current audience will help you recruit new customers

The more familiar you are with your current audiences, the better you will be able to communicate with targets. So to establish a successful content marketing strategy for your target, the top priority is to have visibility on your customers. Who are they? What sectors do they work in? What are their centres of interest? How about their habits? What media do they read?

By drawing on the answers to these questions, you can position yourself using key messages that resonate with customers and targets. Armed with detailed knowledge of your audience, its market and key issues, you can construct a long-term strategy that showcases your expertise. Your solutions are great, but it’s your deep understanding of the industry that will interest and attract prospects. Once you’re the market benchmark or have responded to their specific needs, it’s time to promote your products and services!

A good practice is to build content around customer questions. If they ask a question, you can bet they are not the only ones wondering about the answer.

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Content that is perfectly calibrated to your key audiences

Once you know your audiences, you can start prioritising your targets. The golden role is always to give them something useful that they can get their teeth into!

So ask yourself these questions:

• What will my target get out of this content?
• What do I hope my target might do after reading this content?
• What are the future challenges on which you could and should position yourself relative to your rivals?
• How do you make this target aware of the messages from your experts?

The effectiveness of your strategy will depend heavily on how you recycle your content. We recommend switching up formats and themes and being creative!

The fact is, lots of content might be appropriate for your target, whether in a B2B or B2C context. So how do you ensure that you consistently offer effective, high-quality content? By focusing on expertise, evidence and authenticity. There is no one-size-fits-all approach in content marketing. Tailor what you do to suit your brand. One option is to publish customer case studies and white papers with input from internal or outside experts. These will contextualise your messages and give your content the quality needed to establish your firm as a benchmark source of information.

By deploying a thought leadership strategy, you can position your experts as opinion leaders via your different channels, including blog posts, interviews, LinkedIn posts and more. These best practices will enable you to demonstrate your sector/business understanding of the key themes in your market and gradually build up your credentials. At that point, you need to connect back to your solutions, adding clarity and generating engagement.

Spotlight your solutions and expertise with regular content

Once the upstream work is done, by scaling up your top content and interaction channels, you will ensure effective distribution that is centred on your audiences. The trick here is to have well-balanced programmes and ensure consistent marketing activation, so that you send the right messages to your audiences without harassing them.

Regular production of marketing content can anchor your messages over time, put you front-of-mind for your audience, and boost the performance of your digital campaigns. Showcase your expertise by designing your storytelling alongside the marketing for your products and services. This is the only way to properly highlight your qualities relative to rival companies. To achieve this, communicate about the different services that you sell. Always provide your community with clear, consistent, current, engaging and attractive information about your solutions and know-how.

Search engine advertising is a powerful tool for raising your profile and reaching a broader audience beyond your usual target. Mix this channel with organic SEO to position yourself and boost the profile of every page you publish. Controlling the balance of the multichannel approach is essential to the long-term viability of your content strategy. It will set you apart from the competition. This is an important step in showcasing your products. It ensures that you have a clear and effective online presence for your future customers.

A dedicated editorial platform, such as a blog, linked to a multichannel activation programme, such as a newsletter or social media, especially LinkedIn, is the strategic choice to create successful content marketing. A consistent year-round strategy will allow you to address your audience while positioning yourself as the benchmark on key issues, and help you to build loyalty and support within your community.

Here again, don’t be afraid of mixing written and multimedia formats through solutions such as video interviews and web stories that will diversify your communications. Meet the new expectations of your audiences, and give your key messages the place they deserve.