Your sales are not actually about sales. Your product is not about making money. What you have to offer is actually a solution to some problem your audience has, and a killer content strategy needs to take that into account.
Taking a “problem-solution” approach to your content can help you come up with new ideas for content, connect with your audience, build long-lasting relationships, create a strong reputation, and find your audience online.
As you work through this planning process, I recommend creating a working document that you can add to as you go. Write down answers to all of the questions we’ll ask you to consider (yes, all of them!), and by the end, you’ll have a fully fleshed-out content strategy ready for you to get started on.
Here’s your step-by-step guide to crafting a killer content strategy to revamp your marketing and content creation processes for the new year.
Solve Your Customers’ Problems
The first step in planning your content strategy is to know your customers’ needs and how you can fulfill them. To do this, most marketing consultants will tell you to put together a customer avatar. Don’t — at least, not yet.
The problem with starting with a customer avatar is that it typically only looks at the demographics of your customer. Your content strategy will be far more effective if you first look at the psychographics of your audience.
Psychographics are the details of your audience’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences before engaging with your brand — plus their desired thoughts, feelings, and experiences after interacting with your brand. Ask yourself what your customers are feeling right now, and what they want to feel instead.
What Is the Problem Within the Problem?
Now it’s time to dig deep into your audience’s problems. Yes, problem-s, plural.
List out all of the problems that your customers have. For example, if you have a fitness program, then your customers have problems like:
- “Struggling to make fitness a habit”
- “Struggling to lose weight”
- “Wants to build muscle but doesn’t know how”
Those are the obvious, surface-level problems. To really solve them, though, your content strategy needs to address the deeper, tangential problems hiding under the surface. These tangential problems are even more important because they’re the root cause of your customers’ more obvious problems — for example:
- “Doesn’t have enough energy”
- “Doesn’t feel comfortable in social situations”
- “Isn’t sleeping well”
- “Knows how to exercise but struggles with consistency”
Brainstorm as many tangential problems as you can. Then, put yourself in your customers’ shoes and brainstorm where they might go to search for a solution to these problems. For our example, these places might be the obvious (Google or Facebook), or the not-so-obvious (a friend, the drug store, the App Store).
Next, ask yourself what places your customers go to get a break from the frustration caused by their problems. The places (whether physical or digital) that you come up with in response to both of these questions are venues in which you can find and connect with your audience to give them the solution that they want.
It’s key that you incorporate all three of these elements into your content strategy: surface-level problems, tangential problems, and venues.
Be the Solution
It’s time to get crystal clear on the solution only you can provide. Use your content strategy to really show your customers how, exactly, your solution is the best.
Ask yourself:
- How can I provide a solution?
- What do I have to offer beyond my product or service that will help my customers succeed?
- What qualities are different about my brand that make my solution more effective or long-lasting than competitors’?
- What do my customers need to believe about my product or service to see me as the right solution?
Answering these questions is often quite difficult for businesses. If they focus only on their customers’ surface-level problems, then their answers will look something like: “Well, duh. Our audience’s problem is losing weight and getting fit, and we offer a weight loss-focused fitness program. So that’s the obvious solution.”
This is an answer created from a surface-level response. For true success, however, we need to probe deeper and focus our content strategy on those tangential problems that we identified earlier.
On some level (often subconscious), people are often looking for much more than a surface-level solution: for our example of fitness, customers are likely looking for community, accountability, and long-term affordability.
They need help changing their busy lives to fit this new lifestyle (your solution). In order for your target audience to see you as a viable solution, you’ll need to answer to these needs — as well as the surface-level ones.
Create an Amazing Customer Experience
You can have the most amazing product in the world, the most brilliant solution, the most dynamic marketing strategy, and the most devoted team members, but if your customers’ experience sucks, you’ll lose fans by the thousands.
In this part of your content strategy, you’ll explore the buying experience you want to create — and it better be a blast. Map out your customers’ buying journey using these four questions:
- How do you want your customers to buy from you? Will this be an on-page purchase? Will you take a credit card number over the phone? Will you present options via proposal?
- What information do you need from your customers in order to get them to that buying stage?
- How can you capture your customers’ information? (Without twisting any arms, of course!)
- What small but significant information or resource can you offer your customers in exchange for their information?
Too often, companies create whatever’s easiest or within reach for them to whip up and slap onto an opt-in page.
Don’t be like most companies.
Be the brand that listens to its customers so that it can’t help but deliver unrelenting value.
Balance Your Nurture Strategy With Your Lead Time
Now that you know how you want your customers to buy from you and how to respectfully acquire their information, how can you design your content strategy to lead your customers to the next stage of buying? Start by thinking through the nurture process.
First, be honest with yourself about the length of the buyer journey. Do customers tend to go from a Facebook ad to a checkout page in the span of 10 minutes? Or do you have a longer buying process?
The level of commitment you’re asking for is also a factor. For example, product-based businesses may have an average sale of $35 and a short lead time. Meanwhile, subscription-based businesses with an average sale of $35 have a longer lead time because they’re asking for an ongoing commitment.
Once you know how long you’ll be nurturing your customers — from the point of first contact to the actual sale — you can answer the following questions:
- After you have your customers’ information, how will you get them to the next stage of buying?
- Based on the contact information you received, what are some innovative ways to nurture each specific customer via that information?
Are you struggling to brainstorm ideas here? Don’t worry — you’re not alone. This part of the content strategy is often the hardest part for businesses without a lot of content marketing experience. Try having an open brainstorm session: write down every single idea that comes to mind (no matter how absurd).
It might take a bit to get the answers that you’re looking for, but it’s nothing that you can’t conquer with a bit of patience, determination, and time.
Content Should Support Sales
The next step in your content strategy is creating sales assets. For this part, I highly recommend speaking to a few members of your sales team — or, if you’re a smaller company, loop in any team members who serve the sales process directly.
In a panel format, ask your sales team members:
- What does the sales team need in order to support the sales process?
- What questions are your team members answering over and over and over again for leads and customers?
- What else would be helpful?
This brainstorming session will help you to determine what pieces of content you need to create. Probe deeply: What questions are leads and customers asking over and over again? What else would facilitate the buying journey? Keep the ideation momentum going as long as you can, then divide your ideas into two categories:
- Results-focused content. This content exists to show your customers that your solution is viable. It’s best addressed through sales assets like one-pagers, case studies, brochures, and pitch decks.
- Customer-focused content. This content isn’t sales-focused. Rather, it’s designed to build a relationship with your customers. Address these topics via blog content, social media posts, and lead magnets.
Some of the ideas that you brainstorm might require broader changes like website revisions, an FAQ center, or canned responses to common email questions.
Decide which ideas are most important, and then use them in your content strategy to guide your editorial calendar.
Market Your Content
Now you’re finally ready to create that customer avatar — but keep in mind that this section of your content strategy should be two things: short and flexible. You will inevitably have customers who do not fit your customer avatar. Likewise, you will encounter people who fit your customer avatar but are not ideal customers.
That’s OK! Humans are weird and unique like that. Accept it and move on.
This exercise is simply a guide to help you with targeted strategies like running Facebook ads or doing paid marketing initiatives. It also helps you to nail down your brand voice and how you represent that voice in your content to serve your target audience. Ultimately, you’ll translate that data into your content strategy.
In building out your customer avatar, consider the following:
- Are you speaking to men, women, or both?
- How old are your customers? Give a range.
- Where do your customers live? Go as broad as you need to.
- What is your customers’ average household income?
- Are your customers parents?
- Are they students?
- Are they retired?
- Do they have a specific occupation?
When you finish, go back and re-answer the questions about what your customers feel vs. want to feel from the very first section of your content strategy. You’ve done a lot of digging and reflecting since then, and you likely have new perspectives and insights to add.
The Legendary Sales Funnel
Business owners tend to have a love-hate relationship with the sales funnel. It’s a necessary part of your content strategy — but it doesn’t have to be a super high-tech, automated sales funnel full of tracking technology, tagging, and webhooks (like all the dude bro marketers out there seem to think).
If that’s your thing, go for it — but know that you’ll be getting all of that data at the expense of a human quality. A sales funnel should be natural. It’s all about building a relationship with the customer and providing value to those who show interest in your offerings.
A traditional sales funnel follows these steps:
- Brand awareness
- Interest
- Decision
- Action
But there’s a fifth stage, and if you ignore it, then your sales funnel does absolutely nothing for your brand. That stage is retention.
Brands that forget about retention miss out on the opportunity to sell to repeat customers. They lose out on crucial relationship building, word-of-mouth marketing, opportunities to gather feedback, testimonials, social proof — and so much more!
Once you’ve built your basic 4-step sales funnel, really focus on building retention into your content strategy — it’ll save you money, strength your customers’ brand loyalty, and boost your content strategy to the next level.
Which Marketing Methods Are Right for You?
Whenever I begin working with a new company, one of the first things its representatives ask me is, “What do we need to be doing?”
The simple answer is always, “Far less than you think you need to.”
Don’t think that you have to do everything just because it seems like everyone else is. Your content strategy must be unique to your business and your customers, and it revolves around the questions you’ve already answered throughout this process.
For instance, if your customers go to Google for answers, you should plan to offer on-page resources and content upgrades, capture emails, and to nurture your leads through email. Voilà: your marketing methods are SEO, content creation, lead magnets, and email marketing.
Alternatively, if your audience hangs out on Instagram and Facebook, then you want to capture IPA and emails, and retarget via ads and emails. Your marketing methods are social media activity, social media ads, PPC ads, and marketing emails.
Don’t overthink things — simple is often better. Allow your content strategy to focus on doing a few things extremely well, and then optimize over time.
Measure Success
Content marketing can be one of those elusive efforts that doesn’t directly translate into ROI — unless your content strategy tracks the right benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs).
KPIs are the metrics that indicate whether (or not) what you’re doing is working; benchmarks are the milestones in your marketing progress. Tracking the wrong metrics and milestones will skew your perception of your overall performance, so as you finish up your content strategy, make sure you’re looking at the right results.
Benchmarks & KPIs That Matter
A mistake most brands make is to look only at revenue and use that as the measuring metric for their content strategy. However, blog posts, marketing emails, and social media posts don’t translate directly into sales and revenue — so they require different measuring metrics.
Incorporate these metrics into your content strategy to measure these marketing activities:
- Clicks: brand reach and interest
- Website traffic: interest and brand awareness
- Sign ups: interest and intent
- Email opens: effective copy, brand connection, and interest
- Adding items to cart: intent and potential revenue
Marketing is less about immediate sales and more about brand longevity and reputation. So, revenue and ROI aren’t great indicators of successful marketing.
If you’re performing well on click-throughs and sign ups, then you’re likely doing your top-of-funnel marketing well. On the other hand, if you’re performing well on add-to-carts, then you know that your landing pages and product descriptions are functioning well.
Just as a towering skyscraper needs a reinforced steel infrastructure to support its walls of glittering windows, your business needs the content infrastructure that can support the glittering windows of revenue and ROI.
Competitor Analysis & SEO
SEO is a major strategy for attracting inbound leads. So — why save this step for last in our content strategy creation?
It’s simple: If you start your content strategy with competitor analysis and SEO, you’re going to be guided by the wrong information.
Rather than designing your strategy around authentically connecting with your customers, you’re going to get bogged down by looking at what everyone else is doing and wondering things like, “Should we incorporate this keyword for the volume even though it’s not the best fit?”
There are literally millions (perhaps billions) of viable SEO keywords — you don’t need to use the exact same one(s) that your competitors use!
Once you know who you’re talking to and how you want to build that connection, your SEO research and choices will follow naturally. All that will be left will be to sort through the multitudes of possibilities for the most opportunistic (high volume, low difficulty) keywords that fit your audience.
Seeing what competitors are doing is only valuable if you’re doing similar things (so that you can do them better), and it should never override an authentic connection with your customers.
If you’ve gone through this process and answered each day’s prompts honestly, you’ll likely already have a content strategy that’s unique to your business and customers.
Here’s my favorite thing about this process: when you do it right, there’s no such thing as competition.
Master the Art of Getting It Done
One of the best ways to derail your content strategy and marketing efforts is failing to think ahead. Poor planning will leave you with extra stress, rushed work, inconsistency, and missed opportunities. Make sure you give yourself ample time to create high-quality content.
When my team creates content for ourselves or for one of our clients, our content strategy is structured such that we create that content the month before it will go live, thereby eliminating quick-turn pressure while also allowing each creative expert time for quality work.
This also means that our clients only have to be involved during the last week of the month to approve pieces before they go live. However, while we’ve perfected our in-house system to create high-quality content, those less experienced with content creation may need up to 8 weeks to achieve similar results.
If you’re struggling to get content out, consider revamping your content strategy to lengthen your creation timeline and give your creatives a bit more time to work their magic.
Put Your Content Strategy to Work for You
Content creation is a powerful tool for building brand awareness, boosting audience engagement, and avoiding buyer ad fatigue. When you take the time to plan out your content strategy in detail — and in advance — you set yourself up to be the solution to the problems your customers may not even know they have.
Want one-on-one help creating your content strategy? Book a strategy call with Rai Cornell, head strategist at Cornell Content Marketing, and get all of your questions answered in one power-packed hour!
