We love to make plans, well, most of us love to make plans. We plan our vacations, what to do on the weekend and, of course, we analyze and plan before we launch into a new business venture. Why should content be any different?

The first thing you should do when thinking about your content strategy is define your goals. What do you want to achieve with all this? It can be something as simple as helping your customers use your products to generate more leads and sales. I always recommend defining SMART goals: they should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound.

When first meet my team in Mexico, working for the Thermomix brand, I soon realized we needed to work on our content. I don´t know if you know the Thermomix brand. It´s a cooking appliance that helps people prepare amazing recipes. So it was important for us that our customers and potential customers were inspired with new recipes and ideas for cooking at home. Our biggest challenge was that we were a small team. The company had started its business in Mexico for a few years and I was asked to come and help promote sales and set up the marketing team and strategy. At that time there were only three of us on the team, and we had to do the same work as other countries with larger teams (and of course more sales).

So, we could not fail or make a false step. We could not afford it. Fortunately, we were a great team, with very committed people, and they knew how to give everything they needed to make our strategy a success.

By now you probably thought that the solution was easy, just make recipes. And you’re right. But you can´t just start making recipes. That’s where the plan and strategy come into play. What recipes do you want to make? If you have read before that we wanted to inspire our customers, you´ve probably thought of a recipe that has inspired you in the past. Some fancy recipe or trendy, the kind of recipe that you can see in Instagram. But if you do it this way, you will have a beautiful content, but it probably won´t help you increase your sales.

When you think about the content you want to create, you should also think about the objectives you want to achieve. I´ve said it before, one of the first things you must do when thinking about your content is define your goals. And remember that they also have to me SMART. So, with this in mind, you can´t just say “I want to create content to increase our sales”. A more realistic approach is to say “I want to create good recipes to inspire new customers, so they can use the device two or three times a week during the first 6 months after purchase.”

Before I continue, let me make a small note that is relevant to understand the previous point. At Vorwerk we used the NPS (Net promoter score) to measure the probability that a customer would recommend us to their friends and acquaintances. I introduce the NPS when I was working for the brand in Spain, and during that time we were able to identify a correlation between the NPS results and device usage. After many surveys and many hours of research, we came up with the conclusion that if a customer used the device at least two or three times a week, the probably to be a promoter was really high. Therefore, it was much easier for us to train the company and the teams around the question of “how many times do you use Thermomix per week” to identify promoters and possible detractors than the core NPS question “How likely would you be to recommend…”. If you want to know more about NPS, I recommend you read the post “The importance of KPIs in achieving medium-term objectives”. Unfortunately, it´s in Spanish, but let me know in the comments if it’s relevant for you to translate it.

Now that we have define our goals, we can start working on the type of content we want to make. To do this, we need to think about the customer journey. Our customers may need different types of content depending on stage they are in. The content that a prospect wants is not the same as the content that a heavy user wants.

If you want to read more about how to adapt your content strategy to your customer journey, please check out the next post.