A different view by Jaime Porta

We are now ready to start creating content. We have prepared our strategy, defined our objectives and we have our plan ready. Now we are faced with the question, what kind of content do we want to create?

It´s common sense that not all the content is interesting to all users. We have many different users, who experience our products or services in different ways and they are at different stages of the customer journey. A newcomer is looking for very different information than a regular user. And it will also be different when targeting a potential customer. Many experts recommend creating a buyer persona, but I would rather recommend starting with your customer journey first, as part of the strategy, and then creating different buyer personas to define the specific content to create.

What does this mean? Most content managers go straight to creating their buyer personas, as it is easier to visualize the customer’s needs when you put a name to it. This serves as a representation of your target audience, but it´s also limited to your own vision and, as you should create several buyer personas, you need to define the content you want for each one, at the same phases of their customer journeys. Imaging, for example, that you want to create recipe videos to promote your product. Just as an example. And you create your buyer persona, Martha. Then you decide she’s around 30 years old, loves chocolate and doesn´t have much time to cook. So, you define some recipes that Martha could potentially like, that would make her buy your product and, once at home, keep cooking. Then you define Mark, and you need to start the process all over again.

Instead of starting with you buying personas, think about your customers´ journey. In a way, customers are like a team whose competencies you want to improve. I invite you to read the post “Problems in competency management” to learn more about how to build your team’s competencies. Unfortunately, this is an old post and is in Spanish, let me know in the comments if you´re interested so I can write an English version of it.

Basically, we can use the idea of competency management to define which content we should create, based on our customers’ journey. If you don´t have the time to read the post I recommended or you cannot read Spanish, here is a short version. We must all go through four phases related to our level of competence: we don´t know that we don´t know, we know that we don´t know, we know that we know and we don’t know that we know.

Now think about your customers. First, they don’t know your products or services and most of they time they don´t even know why the need them why they should pay for them. Your first piece content should solve this problem. Then your customers are aware that they need to know more. They want to know more, so they seek information on how to get the most out of your products. Over time, they hopefully become heavy users and even start using your products creatively, in their own way, because suddenly they no longer know that they know. They just do.

When I arrived in Mexico, the team didn’t have much time to create content. Being a small team, there were too many things to do to support the business and they were already struggling with the daily tasks to think about create new content. So, first we create our plan, convince our boss to give us some budget and create a team to make content for us. Next, we defined our goals: we wanted to create mostly Mexican recipes, with which our customers and potential customers could identify; we needed some basic recipes, so that customers could make the best of the product in their daily life, and some processes where the Thermomix could be the perfect kitchen aid; and we needed some top recipes, where people could get inspired. Thanks to all that work, I also learned and started to love Mexican food. Now I usually cook it for my family on a daily basis. Recipes like the “Chile relleno”, or “Sopa de tortilla” or one of my favourites, “Coctel de camarón” are among those recipes we produced. I would get extremely happy when I would bring some of those recipes home and my wife, who is Mexican, would look at them and exclaim «this was made by my grandmother!!!». She even started cooking some. And she doesn´t even know how to cook.

That’s when you know you’ve made the best content. Over the years, we have produced a lot of content. And by the luck of being the type of content that it is, we have been able to enjoy it a lot, trying new flavours, ways of cooking or rediscovering old and traditional recipes. We have distributed them in books, Facebook, newsletters, cooking classes and a long etcetera. But let’s talk about who to distribute your content in the next post.