Our observation is that many companies, including VSEs and SMEs, do not necessarily have the right approach to make digital content. They are often tempted to produce random content based on good ideas or desires.
They certainly publish a lot of things, articles, customer cases, guides, white papers, but they too often do so in a disorganized way without a guideline and ultimately with perfectible efficiency. A content marketing strategy must be defined with an editorial line, an editorial calendar in order to produce relevant content.
What should be the guideline for effective content?
A good guideline for a digital content strategy is to put the customer journey at the center of your concerns. In other words, the content you publish must address the areas of interest, the issues specific to the Internet users you are targeting. But expectations are different depending on the maturity of the prospect in his buying cycle.
He may just want to learn about a concept, be in the evaluation phase or final selection of a solution. So, you have to know your customers, think about their journey to send them the information that will answer their questions and thus capture their attention.
Which are the errors to avoid?
In fact, many companies sell before they even take an interest in the prospect’s needs. Few of them bring up the problems of their customers and prospects. User behavior must be analyzed before any content is produced. Workflow scenarios must be built to be adapted to each of the personas with specific angles of attack.
Let’s take an example with a company that sells office furniture and fittings. Some potential buyers are waiting to know the possibilities of connectivity, others want to ensure quality designs, others need to develop in flex office and want to understand what it is … The angles of attack will then be very different and formats as well. Be careful, all this stems from a methodology and a strategy built upstream.
It is complicated to develop content that is consistent with customer journeys and this for many reasons. On the one hand, your audience is multiple, for example, different types of decision-makers, influencers, users participate in the purchasing decision in a company. You also have different communication tools and platforms at your disposal and the formats of written content, interactive video, animated are multiple.
How to make content effective?
We must act on all these parameters to produce relevant content adapted to the audience, without forgetting to be of course creative. In addition, the content strategy must be in the long term, it takes time to establish a profitable relationship with an Internet user and make him a customer.
How do you create engagement with content?
The quality of content is very important, you only have a few seconds to convince a user to read an article, a white paper, or watch a video. Once convinced, the Internet user can spend a lot of time reading and listen to you, but to get there, you have to provide them with quality content. If you only focus on quantity you will find it hard to stand out in the cacophony of the web. It is therefore essential to prioritize the quality of your content rather than its quantity.
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