Focus on what you already have: Developing the right content

Content development can be daunting, but producing content to target your personas is absolutely invaluable to drive engagement with your audience. A well executed content strategy is absolutely essential!

Understanding your buyer personas is important before embarking on creation of a content strategy, only when you can start thinking and feeling like your potential buyers, are you in a good place to produce content that will add value to these people. There are so many reasons to develop a content strategy, our top 3 key benefits include:

• Getting your audience to know and understand what you offer
• Reinforcing your expertise and differentiators
• Content brings huge SEO benefits, is great for driving more traffic and conversions and also provides you with fuel to power your other channels.

Where to begin tackling the creation of a content plan

Start with the pain

Get under the skin of your target audience’s pains and challenges. Think about topics that not only promote your expertise but link to the challenges faced. If you’re helping solve a problem, providing advice or even linking to something that may be of benefit, you’ll reap the benefits of engagement from your audience.

Brainstorm your ideas

Bring your SMEs and business development people on this journey. Get practical, grab a blank piece of paper, in the middle draft down a key challenge. For example, it could be ‘drug solubility’ – a topical issue in the sector. You can then spend time coming up with ideas to create smaller satellite clusters of content around these central issues. On this one pain point you can build so many different pieces of content in various formats to appeal to your varying target personas.

Plotting the content

Think about buyers in the sector, it’s really rare they purchase and contact you on day one of introduction, sometimes you hit lucky, but usually it’s more of a back and forth journey, building trust and demonstrating expertise. Think about how your content varies throughout the sales funnel, it should change from being informative to more defined solutions to support your services or offerings. The clearer picture you can paint on how you solve challenges, the more likely you are to convert your buyer.

Preferred format and channel of choice

Know your buyers, if your buyer is a scientist, go ahead and write a two-thousand word paper because they’ll read it. However, if your buyer is a C-suite exec, make it a smaller, digestible piece, because this person will simply not have the time to digest a two-thousand word paper. Know who you want to engage and deliver your content in the format that appeals best to them. Additionally, map out where your buyers access their information and position your content where it’s easy for them to find it. Example – our buyers get to Friday and they’ve been so busy they haven’t been able to read media alerts throughout the week. So – we developed a Friday industry news update so they can read it in 15 minutes and digest all of the key things that have happened that week. Pain point eased.

Tone of voice

Keep it consistent. How you sound as a brand is so important. If you’re trying to pitch yourself high-end, make sure your brand and tone of voice matches this. If you’re more informal and quirky, make sure you’re consistent with this. If you haven’t focused on ensuring your content is consistent and sounds the same across the board, this can be confusing and dilutes the power of your overall message.

Create a content calendar

Be realistic. Think about how you can make the most of what you have. If it’s a blog post, think about how you can repurpose this to make the most of it. Fuel your social channels, create a video soundbite, create a more in depth white paper and use this one piece of content to power a whole suite of resources. Focus on a theme or a topic and make this easy to access across all of your channels. You can also use this method to measure exactly who is engaging with what, when and for how long = key information to develop further content to appeal to these people.

Content can seem daunting but once you get going, it’s actually really powerful and the positive knock on effect will help power future content. Our team are content geniuses so if you’re looking for inspiration, drop us a line and they’ll be more than happy to help, no-strings-attached!