Who Who Is Your Content For? Content Marketing Basics (2)

I welcome you back to the Content Marketing Basics. The earlier post answered the question: Why Content Marketing?  I shed light on various issues that could come up when you want to justify your reasons for adopting and executing a content marketing program. Please note, I wrote ‘Content Marketing Program’, not content marketing campaign. A quick recap of what was covered in the first of this series. I briefly used Joe Pulizzi’s definition of content marketing to explain what content marketing is and what content marketing is not. This bit of the CM Basics will be delve into audience definition with regards to how to make the content you develop and distribute relevant to your audience. Who is your content marketing meant to affect? That is the question I will explore on this one.

No time to check time, the content marketing space awaits us. ‘Aye po gan-an’, enough space dey for allofus.

According to one of the CM Quotes, I wrote about recently, developing wrong content for the right audience is like feeding a lion with salad. You have too many things at stake. You know that. The importance of having a vivid idea of whom you are developing your content for cannot be over-emphasized. Clear audience definition will help you choose the best topics, formats, language and platforms that will make you achieve content marketing that everyone loves.

After highlighting your major objectives for content marketing and setting reasonable KPIs against them, it is time to ask who those who will help you achieve these objectives are. Who are those members of the public you need to convert from casual web browsers to your regular customers? It is not mandatory that you answer these questions all by yourself. You could involve third-party marketing research firms to conduct surveys, opinion polls and so on. You could deploy SMarketing for this purpose.

SMarketing means a perfect blend of sales and marketing efforts to achieve a common goal. The common goal in this regard is defining your audience. It is about coming up with actionable buyer personas. It is about finding out who need to take what actions in order to increase your bottom-line. It is about knowing what to do to motivate these people to take the actions you want them to without being sales-pushy.

So you don’t start wandering about in the content development jungle without a clear direction and end up getting lost patapata in the name of defining your audience, permit me to introduce to you Content Mission Statement. You may be wondering, you this guy, what Mission Statement again? Why don’t you let me just define my audience and move on? Why are you piling up tasks upon tasks simply because I want to create content to engage my audience? Is content development the only thing I will spend my entire working hours and budget on?

Sorry, e ma binu, no vex, hen? The true yarn be this: Content Mission Statement will outline your company’s reasons for creating content, the priorities and perspectives your content marketing will uphold in pursuit of that mission.

Do you remember singing your secondary school anthem every day on the assembly ground back in the days? Did you ever ask then what impact, what values, and what school culture that every day recitation inculcated in you? Did you ever try to factor out what influence that school anthem had on your perspectives of your school versus other secondary schools? I remember mine vividly. Reciting it here and now will only make this post longer than normal. A line that rings bell most times, it is the same line where everybody including the principal’s voice used to rise high in baritone (as in all boiz set up).

‘Loyola, Loyoola, the best in every way,…’ Mehn that is the hook! It really assured us that our College was every special. It is still today for real. Everywhere you meet Loyolans from Ibadan, check them out, we always stand out. Before I cause inter secondary school debate among ol’ boys, back to content marketing story abeg.

You really need to have a Content Mission Statement. Every member of your team who contributes to content development should know your mission statement by heart. This will guide you on your choice of topics, titles, format and platforms which your content will be identified with. This will keep your content program always fresh, unique and original. It will make the content you end up with stand out from among oceans of junk content online.

TIPS: these are questions your Content Mission Statement should answer:

-What valuable experience will our content create for our audience?

-How will our content express itself? What kind of character comes to mind when audience interact with our content?

-How do we sustain this type of content?

-Who should be on our team, who should we partner with to keep this unique, original content flowing?

-In what clear terms do we measure the success of every piece of content?

If every content you create accurately answer these questions and you keep producing consistently, you will be awright, I tell you.

Set clear objectives, mark up KPIs against these objectives, and determine to stick to your mission statement on every piece of content you create, then define your audience by creating actionable buyer personas. A previous post best explains how to create great personas. Now, follow these practical steps to make sure the content you end up creating resonates with the audience you have defined:

-List every idea you can think of that will help you achieve those objectives you have set for your content marketing program. Just list them, yeah, list them. Don’t bother about how feasible they are yet. We shall get there soon. Itemize all possible ideas and concepts that can motivate your audience to do what you want to achieve. For every business objective, write out three to four content ideas.

-Going by the buyer personas that you have created, you should have database of information of your audience on their companies, industries, job titles, job roles, job functions, business types and sizes, vocations, hobbies, primary challenges as related to their work or family, secondary challenges that affect their well-being in general. Your aim here is to know in concrete terms, what really matter to your audience. What will grab and keep their attention is what you should focus on here.

-Now, choose which of their challenges you want to create content to solve. Apart from what solutions your products or services provide to users, look into other ways you can be of value to your audience, whether they are already buying from you or not. Your goal is to stand out among competitions by way of content you give them for free. The money you could have spent trying to entice them with mundane ads, spend such funds on genuinely providing succor for them. They will be grateful to you if your content meets the needs they did not pay for. Remember your content purpose could be to educate, inform or entertain your audience. So, go ahead and create content to fulfil any or all of these purposes and at the same time make life better for your audience.

For instance, one of the early tyre manufacturing companies needed to boost sales. Their tyres were long lasting, car owners were not buying more tyres but the company wanted to make more sales. Instead of increasing advertising budget for their tyres, the company invested in production of maps for their city. They produced detailed maps and highlighted forest reserves, distant recreation venues and leisure places car owners would have to travel long distance to.

Without their maps, most people would not have travelled really far from town, so, the maps turned out very useful to car owners. Wait, did they sell those maps? No, they did not. They distributed the maps to car owners and adventurers for free.

What sense is in dashing out something as insightful and useful as those maps? Content Marketing. How do you mean oga writer? For more people to buy more tyres from this smart company, they had to wear out their tyres. If they had no far distant and interesting places to drive to, they would not wear out their tyres.

One good way to make them travel far and for long hours was to give them the maps that encouraged them to travel to places they would not have gone to in the first place. Boom, car owners and adventurers got the incentive to waka waka about. They travelled more often to distant places and wore out their tyres faster. Then, they had to return to the company who gave them maps for free to buy more tyres to replace the worn out tyres. More tyres were needed, more sales were made. Problem solved!

Sincerely, I am of the opinion that brands should be more empathetic with their audience. Marketers should for once think like customers. They would probably find out what to do get genuine engagement and followership. Can we have less publicity, more sincerity (#teamtalkless)? Can we do less traffic generation, and build more trustworthy relationships with the audience? Content is a good avenue to do this. It is an opportunity to truly solve more problems by consistently adding value.

-Thus, from the list of all the content ideas you outlined earlier, carefully choose those that will truly add value and help you solve more problems. Choose suitable topics, titles that will suggest the kind of extra solution you offer, in the format that is more frequently consumed among your audience, then take it to the platforms they hang out more online.

Directing so much traffic to a website without functional blog or social media pages without engaging posts is like someone inviting you to a party with so much rice, cake, amala, afam soup and fufu but no water, no soft drinks. How does it feel? Have you started eating at a public event before you realize you have not been served water? You asked for water and you were told someone just went to buy water.

Probably there was traffic and it was taking the person for ever to return. Will you stop eating? Will you continue eating and pray you didn’t swallow the wrong way?

You don’t have to bear the cost and logistics for creating great content all alone. Form healthy partnerships with other brands that could provide complementary resources for this mission. They may have unknown research findings, they may have so much information they don’t want to pay to promote. You take those materials and develop them into valuable content.

Synergy is key to a great content marketing program. No brand is an island. All you need is create a win-win-win situation for you, your partners in content creation and the audience the content is meant for. Even if all brands think and act WIN-WIN, will Bet9ja do the same? Stories for dem g’s.

As I wrap up this CM Basics2 (Who Is Your Content for?), I hereby launch the secondary school anthem challenge for old students. If you remember your secondary school anthem daada, drop us few punch lines. Let’s have back2back hits of secondary school anthems to be nominated for this year’s Headies awards. Our Next Rated Act gets a pack of Elegenza biro, so no hating!

To be continued soon. Stick around abeg.