Planning Your Content Marketing Strategy

Before you start writing any content, it’s worth making a few considerations such as your audience and planning how the content will be created and by whom.

Determine Your Audience

Before you start writing it can be very useful to determine something about the demographics of your subscribers/visitors. For example: age ranges, interests, gender, education level, income levels.

Google Analytics can be quite useful for this, assuming you have sufficient traffic. Alternatively, you may know your customers personally in which case you can try to create a profile for them from your own experience.

If you determined that 80% of your website visitors or customers are male aged between 50-60 and educated to degree level, may well influence the way you write.

Understanding Your Audience’s Buying Decisions

netmonics aida buying decision diagram 3

To understand the process a prospect may go through before becoming a customer, let’s consider the AIDA (awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) model which suggests they move through a series of steps when trying to make a purchasing decision. It can be useful to take this into account when finding articles to write about and deciding how to write.

Here are the 4 steps of the AIDA model in more detail:

Awareness
A visitor to your website realises they have a problem i.e. that a gap exists between where they are right now with something and where they want to be in the future. They are also aware that you have something to offer that could help or solve their issue.
Interest
The visitor decides to find out a little bit more, researching the topic usually by searching Google to find out more. Perhaps reading blogs, watching Youtube videos etc. and of the information on your website. This can also perhaps involve a trial of your services/product if applicable where they also get an impression of what it would be like to buy from you. They may also try to see if you look credible, look for alternatives, compare products and solutions.
Desire
The visitor decides that your offer is of value and has developed a certain amount of trust in your services/products.
Action
The visitor becomes a customer and assuming they are happy with your products and services will keep buying from you, becoming a loyal customer and also tell others about you.

Appoint a Content Manager

If you’re setting this up for a company with at least two employees, someone needs to be responsible the coordination and publishing of the content. Depending on the scale of your operations, this doesn’t have to be a full time job but sufficient time needs to be allocated to achieve the desired outcome. This person may or may not be the same person(s) who writes the content but a coordinator who can take responsibility for agreeing what needs to be published, who will create the content as well agreeing the deadlines.

Create a Publishing Schedule

Set a schedule so that content can be published at regular intervals. There are several reasons for this, firstly the search engines tend to favour websites which publish content on a regular basis. It also means that you can send out a newsletter with a summary of the latest pages/posts at regular intervals too which helps remind your subscribers of your company ready for when they make their buying decisions.

What is Content Marketing?

Finding Topics to Write About