As a marketer, you're probably familiar with the narrative of content being the most vital element of your business strategy – it shapes how your buyer persona finds your brand and converts from a stranger to a customer. Well, we're here to reinforce that narrative. Again. A plan for a successful business needs to include a plan to produce and structure your content.
Integration with key systems across your business helps increase ROI at each touch point. Are you creating a connected customer experience with technology across your business?
Inbound marketing has brought a lot of change to the way people sell and market with websites, collateral and blogs. The buyer's journey maps out how people move from the stage of realising they have a problem to the stage of finding solutions.
Each customer journey can be documented in the following phases (thanks @HubSpot)
So how does your content strategy overall talk to and nurture people in each of these stages? Websites and blogs all need to be mapped to the buyer journey to make the content on that page resonate with the reader. So where do you start making this work for you?
Business Model Canvas
There are several tools that help you organise your business and one very important one is the Business Model Canvas. This tool helps you map out your value proposition, offerings, customers, revenue and expenditure in a clear and easy way. This allows you to plan and document every area of the business that needs your attention and plan your content strategy accordingly.
You can find out more about this tool from Elle Geraghty at the CSForum.
Content management system
Finding the right content management system is not easy. 'The State of ANZ Marketing Technology 2016' found that most marketers need to understand marketing automation better. Most businesses fail to map their business needs and the content that will drive business success. Having that knowledge of a business better allows for choosing the right technology with the right marketing automation capability.
We recommend reviewing your options on G2Crowd (the world’s leading business software review platform) to see if you've got the right fit with the one you're currently using or one that you're likely to purchase. Informed decisions about choosing technology solutions can have a huge impact on your business and help create a connected customer experience across your website.
Content audit worksheet
Content is everywhere – ads, longform copy, images, videos, stories and metadata. How do you make a plan for valuable, findable and meaningful content?
Start with a clean spreadsheet with required fields that map landing pages, images, videos, PDFs and any other content being used. This spreadsheet will serve as a content evaluation tool that allows you to map out the goals of each page and understand how it aligns with the buyer's journey and customer experience.
Build on your content foundations
Once you're through creating a solid foundation for business and content strategy alignment, you can start to then map out how your website information architecture and UX will work for your business.
There's no point in all those wasted hours spent on creating experiences that haven't been aligned to your business goals and your ideal customer. We're big believers of using semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer (known as buyer personas) to then help you understand your audience and customer experience. Your content strategy will allow your content to better fulfil your business and strategic goals.
Organisation and structure is a beautiful thing. Get your content in place - assess what your needs are and get the right tools to help you towards success.
