1. Determine the Target Audience

Creating a target audience is essential for knowing where to focus your sales and marketing efforts. This helps you to understand who your target customer is and what they care about. This can include:

  • Where they hang out on and offline?
  • How do they like to communicate?
  • What is their demographic information (ex: age range, expertise, location, job title, hobbies, etc.)
  • What are their psychographic information (i.e., behaviors, attitudes, lifestyle preferences, personality types, etc.)
  • What pain points your product or service solves?

2. Create and document your strategy

That one thing is to developing a documented content marketing strategy. It’s that simple. Lay out your strategy, write it down, and you’ve drastically increased your odds of running a successful content marketing enterprise.

Documenting your strategy prevents random acts of content. It helps get buy-in from your whole team. Most importantly, it starts your content initiative with measurable goals and a plan to achieve them. It just makes every aspect of creating content and distributing it easier and more effective.

If your team wants to join the top tier of content marketers, it’s time to get that strategy written down. Here’s how to get started.

  • Start with the Why
  • Establish Overall Goals
  • Document Your Audience
  • Plan Content for Each Stage of the Buyer Journey
  • Draft Specific Goals for Content at Each Stage
  • Plan Channels for Amplification
  • Create an Editorial Calendar

3. Remember: Content is (still) king

So, why does everyone believe content is king? Well, basically because without it, there is nothing to get you connected with your customers.

These days, you don’t skip on creating great content if you wish to be successful in marketing your products or services.

The rise in popularity of content marketing is largely thanks to how much it is about the customer rather than the marketing or the company.

This attracts more people and gets them more involved.

4. Build marketing partnerships

Partnership marketing can be defined as a mutually beneficial marketing relationship between a firm and another organization. Now, this definition is admittedly pretty broad – but that is because most marketing partnerships will have their own unique attributes.

Many marketing partnerships start small and grow overtime as two firms get to know one another and find what works best for each party. We’ll explore more details below but here are some examples of partnership marketing activities:

  • Build do follow links on relevant blog posts
  • Social media blasts sharing new content or upcoming events
  • Email swaps promoting your respective services or content
  • Co-produced and co-promoted webinars
  • Live events targeting the same prospects
  • Conducting a new piece of research together

5. Be the solution - start helping customers solve a problem

Solving a customers’ issue should be the goal of every one of your people.

But typically in the past, when an issue escalated to a certain point, help desk service or customer service reps (CSRs) were told to escalate these calls to a supervisor or manager.

The guide covers the following topics:

  • Critical thinking in customer service
  • Rules to help customer service people think critically
  • Basic customer service problem-solving scenario
  • Concrete steps to solve a customer problem

Keeping customers happy can boost customer loyalty, corporate productivity, and business profitability—goals for every company out there.

6. Make it personal

Personal touches and one on one engagement results or is driven by the need to make an emotional connection above all else. Millennial in particular are looking for that emotional connection to a brand - which can result in brand loyalty - and word of mouth referrals and online reviews. Bring it down to brass tacks and consider what makes one a loyal customer. As an example, a seating host at a local pub may know ones favorite spot or the waiter may bring ones favorite scotch to the table. A restaurant owner always knows its best to personally address consumers while getting personal with consumers equates to more emotionally connected customers. It is human nature and despite massive shifts and advances in technology, the human touch still counts for a great deal in marketing and communications.

Before personalization became a brand in itself, marketing was always about making it personal. Keeping it personal is more of a challenge with marketing automation but the basics still prevail. In order to acquire and retain loyal customers, and keep followers engaged, personalized one-to-one marketing is no longer an option, but is a requirement.

7. Develop insight into why a new customer would use your business.

Determine the core need that your product or service will meet. Is it to help your customers get through the day more easily? Do their job more efficiently? Your offering should solve client problems or meet customer needs better than the competition. Create buyer personas for your ideal customers to better understand their needs and guide communication with that audience.

When you put your customer at the core of your business, and combine it with Customer Relationship Management (CRM), you collect a wealth of data, which gives you a full 360 view of the customer. This data can then be used to enhance your customer’s experience.

For example:

  • You can use customer data to understand buying behavior, interests and engagement
  • You can identify opportunities to create products, services, and promotions for your best customers
  • You can use customer lifetime value to segment customers based on top spenders


by,
Swagat Mahindrakar
Blog site - Technology Trends Site
Website - TechnologyTrendsSite