In previous posts we have talked about how to create and implement a content strategy. We have gone over the basic of content planning and how to adapt it to the customer journeys. Now it’s time to talk about how to distribute your content.
After all the work that we have put into creating a great content, it will be a shame if you don’t promote your content through the right channels. And it’s now when your customer persona plays an important role. How do you think your customers and prospects will access your content?
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.
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).
When you have realized that having the right content is important to promote your brand, your products and get new customers, it’s time to start planning and organize your work. Content creation and content management is not about creating content without a plan. You must think first, and then create your content.
The first thing you need to understand is that create new content is not free. It will either cost some of your time or, most of the time, also some or a lot of your money. That´s why it´s important to have a plan before jumping into the creation phase.
Few days ago, I was talking with a friend who needed help promoting his business. He had come up with an idea to generate more customers with a new service that he could easily implement in his company. “This sound like a good plan”, I told him. “But I don´t know how I can implement it, my customers don´t know they need it”, he said.
This may sound familiar. Many times we come up with ideas about new products and services, good ideas, that we don´t know how to share with our customers. They´re many things you can do to try to solve this, but we are going to talk today about one: content generation and content management.
Cuando definimos una campaña de marketing siempre nos fijamos en los medios que vamos a utilizar y diseñamos un flujo o funnel para lograr captar la atención del cliente y llevarlo a lo largo del proceso de compra. YouTube se ha demostrado como una herramienta muy útil donde combinamos agilidad y grandes impactos entre el público más joven (y no tan joven).
Pensar en YouTube como un canal más de comunicación es difícil. Muchas empresas y profesionales aun consideran este medio como algo poco atractivo y que genera menos impactos pero, si nos atenemos a las estadísticas, cada vez son más los usuarios que dedican innumerables horas a consumir contenido en YouTube.
El gran desarrollo que hemos vivido en la velocidad de conexión que disfrutamos actualmente en nuestros hogares ha permitido el crecimiento de negocios que hasta la fecha nos parecían extraños. Este es el caso de pay on demand o pago por consumo que utilizan diversas plataformas.
Hace tan solo unas décadas, la velocidad de conexión que un usuario promedio podía contratar no pasaba de los 20 Kbit/s y actualmente puede sobrepasar fácilmente los 100 Mbit/s, algo que ha permitido un rápido crecimiento de los negocios basados en Internet y, especialmente, la posibilidad de pagar por el contenido que consumes.
A different view 