Right Message: What should I say that will resonate with my audience?

Key levers:

Audit content
Content strategy and planning
On-going creation / curation

Knowing your target audience inside-out means that you’ll be able to engage them authentically, rather than employing a ‘see what sticks’ approach to producing content. You’ll want to develop and curate content that converts, backed by a strategy that targets key personas and customer journey stages, with regular production of new content.

Start by auditing your existing content. Is it aligned to your buyer personas, and does it cover your customer journey stages? Identify the gaps, produce meaningful content that speaks to your and continue to audit on a regular basis. Ensure that your audit considers content used by both marketing and sales – essentially every piece of content that buyers will access.

Define a strategy to help identify the content that converts for your audience(s) and create a plan to produce, measure and optimise performance going forwards. Ensure your plan is aligned with available resources – quality is more important than quantity – but also that it supports all areas of the business that communicate with buyers. This strategy should include a manageable approach to ensure content is created and published on a regular basis. Don’t be afraid to reuse and repurpose content wherever performance is strong. Use reporting to inform your content calendar and adjust your strategy.

1. Crawl: It’s a cliché, but when creating content, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. To get started, create a content strategy and plan, however basic. Who do you want to target, with what content, and how often will you produce it?
2. Walk: To take your messaging to the next level, granularity is the key. Depending on resources, start to create content for as many different personas and customer journey stages. Ensure you have a consistent calendar and ‘work’ your content, reusing and repurposing where possible.
3. Run: A complete messaging approach is – as with all marketing – a closed-loop approach. Create your strategy, produce content according to a clearly defined plan, and then distribute, measure and adjust. If you are not already doing so, carry out regular audits of your content to ensure it is correctly aligned to plan and delivering the results you need.