What makes a good content strategy and why is C3 important?

Inbound marketing, based on a developed and well maintained web presence in multiple channels is by now a staple in any marketing infrastructure. The motor of an inbound marketing is all about keeping your customers informed about your business and constantly reminded that you might have an offer that will help them. the fuel for this effort is INFORMATIVE CONTENT.

Content strategy needs to focus on 3 components.

Defined Target Audience.

Companies with strong sales and marketing alignment get considerably more sales closed. You need to make sure that your marketing team gets feedback from the fields so that you can gear your marketing efforts and your marketing messages to a truly relevant and interested target audience. You will also need to understand the buying journey your customer goes through in purchasing your product and who are the other stakeholders in the buying chain. You will need to understand where in the supply chain are you located and at what stage of the buying process you want your potential customer to be aware of your business, so that your solution will still be the most pressing need in the decision to buy.

Timing is everything. If your content does not reach your customer in time, you will miss the window of opportunity for a purchase process to begin. Sometimes there is more than one point in the buying journey in which is it important to remind your customer of your existence. You need to make sure your information is getting to the right people and the right time.

Clear Marketing Messages

Your inbound marketing strategy will include definitions of your target audience, various personas it includes and their buying journey. On the other hand your product is analyzed for its unique benefits to your customers. With these components you can create memorable marketing messages that keep your customers informed about your business, while taking into account your customers point of view – their problems and challenges, available competing solutions and where your best entry may be with an offer that is unique.

For creating concise marketing messages that will help your customers understand why they need your product or service, and why they should work specifically with you, the first step is to understand your customers needs deeply. You also need to understand how your potential customers will be searching for a solution to the challenges they face. Using the right terminology and key words in your informative content is an important factor in its success. Make sure you do not talk past your customers.

Focused Media Channels

You may have excellent content, but if it is not distributed and promoted, no one will see it.
Digital marketing is all about statistics and volume, so what you need is exposure in multiple platforms. Some of your customers prefer to received their information in charts and graphs, others as videos and others as an eBook. Some customers read a professional magazine while others comb YouTube or other social media channels for information. some customers search systematically for professional information and others bump into it as they surf the web for fun.

So how to get to all these people? Two important things:
A – Know your target audience’s habits and how and where they prefer to search for the kind of information your can provide about your solution.
B. Create varied content and make sure to distribute it in multiple channels. The success of your marketing campaign depends on its starting volume. 3% of 1 Million is more that 3% of 1000.
Make sure the principles of scale work for you.

To  learn more about content strategy you can also check out this video.

 

This is why we developed the C3 method at OKR Content.

C3 is short for Create, Curate, Cut!

These are the 3 stages that lie at the based of creating varied content to fuel your inbound marketing machine.

Create – research and write the first piece of content. Here are the major questions to be asked before  you invest considerable energy and funds in creating the content.
What is the topic? How and why is my customer interested in it? how is my solution best represented? What is the format most advantageous for presenting this information to my customer?

Curate – collect supporting content and reuse content already created to enhance a message and remind the customer of your solution. This is the key to creating enough variety and volume for exposure without over-investing in content creation efforts.

Cut – use smaller pieces of content to promote each piece of content you have collected. change the format in which it is promoted to spread the word in as many channels s can be effectively done. Once again the goal is to create diverse information for multiple channels, so that your marketing campaign enjoys the positive effect of scale.

With C3, INFORMATIVE CONTENT is delivered to your customers at various points of contact, at different times, in optimized yet diverse formats, thus creating the exposure that will ensure your marketing message gets through.

You thus get the right message to the right person at the right time!

Everything you do online for your business should be done with an INFORMATIVE CONTENT strategic thinking in mind.  Whether its a video, a social media post, a blog, an article, a webpage, a landing page, an interview, a podcast, a presentation, a brochure or a webinar. It all starts with text that entails your majors keywords and marketing massages. the final format for creating the content will be guided by the information you have gathered regarding your target audience, their needs and researching habits.

A content strategy is a synergy of various parameters. the whole effort is worth  more than its parts. working holistically on INFORMATIVE CONTENT, using the C3 method will create extra value for your marketing.