With 5.6 billion google searches being made every day, there is now more content available online than ever before. Your content needs to stand out in a sea of information, and captivate your target audience. The key to a successful content marketing strategy is creating content that provides true value to your audience.

Every time you create content, consider what you have to offer your audience, and what would make them choose your content over that of your competitors. This blog will provide simple steps to help you generate content that your audience loves to consume, and eagerly anticipate.

Create your buyer persona

Before jumping straight into writing any piece of content, you must have a clear understanding of who you are trying to target. Creating a buyer persona is the best way to determine your target audience. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your audience, based on research and educated assumptions. Consider the attributes of your target audience, including but not limited to:

• Demographics: what is their age, gender, income and location?
• Motivation: what are their personal and professional goals?
• Challenges: what challenges are they experiences that you can help them to solve?
• Common objections: why wouldn’t they buy your product or service?

Determine what your target audience are interested in

Once you have developed a well-researched buyer persona, you will have clear insight into the motivators and pain points of your target audience. This will give you a good idea of what content would be interesting and relevant to them.

To validate your assumptions, you can use a range of tools to determine what your audience is interested in, based on the keywords they use when searching online. Google Trends is a free tool which allows you to explore trending topics and track interest in a topic over-time. It also displays related topics and queries, and allows you to segment data based on categories such as interest by sub-region. Other paid tools such as SEMrush can also be used to conduct keyword research and gain insight into the interests of your audience.

Create content that aligns with your buyer’s journey

The key to great content marketing is delivering the right message at the right time. To do this, you need to create compelling content that is relevant to your target audience at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Prospects go through three stages on their journey to becoming a customer:

• Awareness: your prospect is experiencing a challenge and is doing research to better understand their problem.
• Consideration: your prospect has defined their challenge and are actively looking for solutions to solve their problem.
• Decision: your prospect has formed a list of potential vendors who could solve their issue, and are trying to narrow down the list to make a final decision.

Some content will be more or less relevant to your target audience depending on where they are in their journey. For example, a prospect will not be interested in customer testimonials if they do not yet relate to the challenges you have solved for your customers. Likewise, blogs about product benefits won’t be relevant to a prospect who already understands the benefits, and has moved on to actively seeking vendors.

It’s your job to be a trustworthy source that can guide your prospects smoothly through the buyer’s journey, providing timely and relevant information at every step. Your audience will love having their decisions made easy by trustworthy and relevant content that addresses their pain points.

Create content for your existing customers

In addition to creating content for your prospects throughout the buyer’s journey, ensure that you also create content aimed at your existing customers. Customers often experience a decline in attentiveness once a company has gained their business, which damages trust and leaves a sour taste. In contrast, offering your customers helpful and relevant content will help to improve customer engagement and retention.

Continue to prove your value to your customers through content such as webinars, training, and relevant support resources. If you are unsure of what content would be most helpful to your customers, you can ask them directly. Your customers will love feeling like your business truly cares about what is most important to them.

With all of the above in mind, you are now equipped to create valuable content for all customers, no matter what stage of the buying journey they may be at. Have any questions? Feel free to reach out to the team at Eloquent.

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