Content Marketing – Target Personas

If you want to attract important and necessary traffic to the site, you need strategically thoughtful content marketing. But how to create a thoughtful content strategy? What to do, what methods to use to attract the desired organic traffic? It’s pretty simple:

1. You begin with a study of the target audience;

2. Focus on the key queries they are looking for;

3. Based on these data, determine the best type of content that suits them;

4. A unique style is selected;

5. And the scheme is developed frequency of repetitions of advertising.

Having mastered this not complicated technique, you can easily create a truly powerful content strategy that will really work and attract the necessary traffic. And now, let’s stop at each stage a little more. So…

Step 1. Create a portrait of the target audience

Yours should be about what is interesting to your customers. Therefore, before undertaking its creation, understand who your target audience consists of. Who do you see as consumers of your content?

The best way to understand the audience well is to create portraits – invented generalized images of your ideal clients. They will help you understand customers better and make it easy to find content that interests them. To create a portrait of the client will need to explore the market and customer base. At first glance, it is boring and difficult, but, in fact, everything is easier and more interesting.

Step 2. Make a list of key requests

Your audience determines all of your content: its essence, shape, style, and, most importantly, the topic. Therefore, if you want to drive organic traffic with content marketing, you should cover the topics that your audience is looking for. You just need to understand exactly what they are looking for. And here’s how to do it.

1. Get to know your target audience. The better you understand it, the more effectively you can create relevant content.

2. Select the 5 key queries that your audience is looking for. It should be narrow, low-frequency requests, because the user needs content created specifically for their niche. And, since we are talking about one area, these requests must be related to each other.

3. Well study the topics that interest your audience. If you find a topic that your target audience likes, do not take the time and resources to create content that will reveal this topic in detail.

Step 3 :Determine what type of content your audience prefers.

Why did we create a client portrait? To determine the type of content that is interesting and needed by the target audience. Most firms use a wide range of content types.According to research , these are the following types:

Experiment with different forms of content, but do not particularly disperse your attention. Along with the experiments, concentrate the greatest marketing effort on any one form in which you can achieve great success.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the most commonly used types of content in which you can find your niche:

Blog. This type of content should be recommended to all companies – for some it will become the main source of useful leads. Just do not forget to optimize your posts for search.

Infographics. Of course, it depends on your target audience, but the use of infographics and visual effects in the content is an important thing.

Email. Some content marketers fully focus on email newsletters. You can use email in different ways. An interesting option: instead of waiting for comments on blog posts, you can simply give users the opportunity to respond to emails – also a kind of communication.

Social networks. Not every company has its own blog, not every company conducts emails. But each company can be present in one or another social network. Some companies found their audience on Twitter or Google+.

Video content. The problem with this form of content is that it costs a lot and requires a lot of effort. At the same time, if the video content is made qualitatively, then it really works.

Audio content. The peak of the popularity of podcasts may have already passed, but this form of content is still alive and well. Today, a lot of people receive information, to a greater extent, auditory – on their way to work or home, in the subway, on public transport, etc.

To understand what type of content you need to focus on, answer the following questions:

What are your potential customers searching on search engines?

Why do they need it?

What problems are they trying to solve?

What type of content will make them stop, click and take a targeted action?

And remember: do not decide for the audience – what type of content will fit it.

Step 4. Develop your own style and personality.

You must admit that you are likely to reach out to people who are like you, right? In the same way, it is most likely that you will be liked by people who resemble you. The same is true for content marketing, be it B2B or B2C. Content consumers will be drawn to the company that best suits their character and personality. It is not enough just to know what type of content your audience needs – you also need to figure out what style it should be.

Step 5. Develop an ad repeat rate scheme

Well, you found out who your audience is, what they want, and in what form they will get it. Now you need to understand how often this will happen?

1. Find out how often you need to publish content. The frequency of posting to a blog is, of course, different from the frequency of tweets. It is safe to say: the more effort and resources is required to create this or that type of content, the less often you will create it.

2. Determine the frequency based on your audience. When can they access this content? How often? When they are more likely to see them.

3. Schedule the publication of content. When you have determined the frequency of your content marketing, based on its type and your target audience, it’s time to start planning. After all, planning is the key to successful work.

What is the result?

Now that you are familiar with this strategy, look at it again. Remember, you won’t attract hundreds of thousands of visitors by working on content marketing for just a few weeks. Attracting organic traffic is a slow and systematic process. Therefore, work, improve and do not stop there.