With the year coming to an end, we have seen a ton of articles on ‘trends’ for the new year. No matter which strategies are used, what platforms are explored and how it reaches your audience, the cliché stands true time and time again – ‘content is king’. Marketing efforts provide a return on investment only when the content provided resonates with your audience. Content is the critical ingredient is developing trust with your customers, effectively engaging with them and constantly adding value.
The key is to cut back the fluff and really understand what is it that makes your audience tick. Of the various ways one can find, here are some tried and tested ways to develop and deliver consistent, engaging, fresh content:
Tracking them down
What are your customer journeys? What encourages them to explore your website, where do they begin, where do they go. Heat maps can help get a deeper insight into what interest your customers. Tracing down customer profiles and their personas will identify their very need to come to the website. Targeting issues and topics that impact the broader customer experience can go a long way in engaging audiences and keep them coming back for more.
Mind Maps to unleash your creativity
Once you have build customer personas, the next best thing to do is identify the subjects that impact each of these personas. Mind mapping is a graphic technique of pinning down all the topics that one can think of pertaining to one subject and represent them in an effective visual manner. Getting a good understanding of all the subjects that interest these customer personas gives rise to a range of topics that are indirectly or directly related to your product or services. This should help build up relevant content.
Plan and produce with a content calendar
Once the topics and segments that interest the audience are identified making a schedule will help build on these topics and put them under relevant categories. Preparing a content schedule will ensure all direct and indirectly related topics are touched upon through out the year.
Networking opportunities to get the inspiration
Something as traditional as word of mouth still does have far reaching impact no matter how digitally advance we get. Breakfast meets, lunch and learn sessions, meets with influencers and industry leaders, coffee evenings , event wrap ups post major industry events etc could give birth to a number of topics that will engage relevant audiences. Use the networking opportunities that suit you best, partner with fellow industry peers, brain storm on topics that are hot and probably are not! Then go back to your content calendar to fit them all in!
Research and findings
Conducting surveys and opinion polls allow customers to get directly involved with the company. Apart from an opportunity to gather priceless data, surveys and polls give an opportunity to stay in touch with the customers to further communicate the analysis and findings and conclusions of the exercise. Candidate survey results, quotes and testimonials obtained as part of this research can be plugged into the content schedule.
Important dates and events
Important events and dates relevant to your business and over all industry can be an excuse to write about them. Seasonal topics, milestones for the business and accolades received can all be shared and celebrated with your audiences by developing interesting content around these themes and getting them involved.
‘How to’ guides
Frequently asked questions, ‘how to’ guides and ‘Top tips’ are one the most effective ways to drive engagement with your customers. Providing help and guidance to the end customer encourages them to keep coming back for more help.
All of the above can help in building relevant fresh content on a regular basis, where as a content schedule will give a plan to help deliver it across various channels, driving better engagement and hence higher return on investment from all the efforts undertaken.
Read more about Customer engagement VS Customer conversion here.
