A Customer-Centric Content Marketing Strategy Targets Their Needs & Wants

When your content marketing strategy puts your customer 1st, you create a fruitful environment for building content marketing offers and tactics designed to appeal to, help, and inspire your segmented audience. Great content "pulls" prospects to your website: engaging content brings them back and converts them in to leads and customers.

Here's where it fits in the overall Busywriter Content Marketing Process.

diagram of where the busywriter content marketing strategy fits in the marketing process

I understand you don't want to start your content marketing process by spending time building a strategy. You have things to do, and problems which need fixing right now. How we do this is to build the strategy in tandem with creating content campaigns designed to inspire customer, lead and prospect action.

Be Findable, Gettable, & Helpful

Your pages need to show up in search to make you findable. When your intended audience can't find your unique solutions to their problems you don't make an impression or a sale.

To be "gettable" is to be understandable. Are you talking to your target segments in an appropriate language? Are you proposing solutions written and presented from their point of view? Make all your messages about them.

Helpful. Sure, there's lots of helpful blog posts cluttering up the web. How helpful are your content elements? Does your campaign have a beginning, middle and end that poses a problem and shows the solution? Be a problem solver with your content.

Problem Solving Is Job #1 For Your Content

I think this is where the majority of businesses fail with their content marketing efforts. They forget about their audience and end up concentrating on themselves and their own problems.

This creates a vicious circle wherein the business is trying to make content that matters and the content is flawed because the business has lost customer–centric focus and is now preoccupied with the problem of creating content.

The Problem Problem

When you get back to the basic reason for content marketing, it's to build a systematic marketing pipeline which creates sales–ready leads in order to grow the business. Logically, that would mean your content should be focused on the problems (wants) of your customers.

And your content also has to help you sell your stuff. If it doesn't help you sell and create customers, then it's wasted effort and time.

Any piece of content (or collection of pieces, such as a campaign) must do two incredibly basic things well:
* it must attract attention
* it must communicate what is intended to be communicated

Not a lot of content is very good at attracting attention and most content barely has a purpose let alone the express intention of communicating something specific. When looked at critically, some of the stuff out there, content your competition's publishing can be classified as noise. Make better content. Beat your competition.

What this means is: if you improve your content marketing elements:

to include purposeful messages
intended for your target audience
saying things they want to hear

...then you're going to be incredibly successful.
A Category Winner.

Because you'll be outperforming 98% of the crap that's "out there" and your competition won't understand why you're beating them up consistently.

Great content, this mythical "engaging" content cuts through all the crap online and gets you noticed, because people only read what they want to read.

Why does content suck?

I think that 98% of all online business content sucks because of three things:
1) it doesn't solve any problems
2) it's not what people want to read
3) it's hard to read & consume

People only read what they want to read. That's a human fact. And you need to understand that your online content isn't actually read or consumed in any traditional manner, say as a book or magazine is read. Your online content is judged, skimmed, approved or not, and after that almost instant cognitive process your content is then selectively viewed and partially read.

Because people have a very large skepticism filter (sometimes called a BS Meter) your online content is rarely accepted at face value. Your content is always facing this very human process that attempts to eliminate wasted effort and time.

Does your content do all this?

1) attract attention
2) communicate what is intended to be communicated
3) solve a problem
4) is interesting to your target
5) is easy to use
6) appears honest and transparent
7) inspire visitors & leads to do something

If not, maybe you should reconsider your content marketing strategy, process and the nature of your content.

Discover More About Relevant Content Campaigns

It's through planned campaign tactics (such as email, offers, and social) and engaging content elements that you reach and inspire visitor action. Click through for more information on Customer 1st Content Campaigns.

Shorten The Lead-2-Close Cycle

You can use the Busywriter tested and proven, F500–based "Customer 1st Content Marketing Strategy" to create a customized marketing pipeline. It will systematically drive consumers through your website from stranger to highly–qualified, sales–ready leads for Sales to close in their funnel.