Key Ingredients for Content Strategy: Audience, Content...and Engagement?

By Marisa Peacock (@marisacp51) Aug 5, 2010

While the content vs. context debate rages on, the issue of content strategy remains. Many of the comments on our previous post reminded us that context can’t exist without content. Today, we will talk about content strategy recipes and key ingredients.

A Recipe for Content Strategy

Effective content can’t be appropriately created without a sound strategy. Yet, there are so many ways that content can be developed, refined and enhanced in an effort to engage users in a conversation.

If we liken content strategy to a recipe, there are many ingredients, but only a few that are absolutely essential. We could spend all day talking about all the extra things you can be doing, but instead we’re going to address what we consider to be the three main ingredients of a content strategy.

1. Define Your Audience

You’ve probably been asked this question before, but you start anything, ask yourself “who is your audience?” Don’t confuse this question with “who is your target audience?” as the answers may not be the same. Most likely, you have people who buy your product – who are they? What do they do? How did they learn about your product? By taking the time to understand their behaviors and interests, means that you don’t have to guess. You’ll know exactly how they work, making it easier for you to write and produce content that meets their needs.

Now, ask yourself, “who do you wish was buying your product?” and learn more about how they access information and how they behave online. Compare your results. Do you see any overlapping data? Do both groups engage in social media? Do they have large budgets? Are they influencers or connectors?

Hopefully, learning more about your current and future customers has helped you develop a persona for your product. You product will talk and act similarly. The tone of voice will be familiar and will ask the right questions.

Key Questions to Ask

What is driving their interest? (Cost, time saved, packaging & design, functionality, convenience, etc)
Are they engaged in current events?
Who influences them the most in their industry? (Bill Gates, Tim O’Reilly, Rupert Murdoch, Steve Jobs, Ben Bernake, etc)
Will a blog meet their needs?
How long do they spend on our website?
What is the most frequently downloaded document?
How do they purchase your product? (online, phone, in person, email, etc)
Do they use social media? (If so, how many followers and fans do they have? What kind of information do they post?)
What are the words they use to describe what they want in a product/service?

Tools to Use

Klout: an easy to tool to measure one’s influence on twitter
Google Alerts: set up to see who’s talking about customers and why
Collecta: a real-time search engine with an auto-refresh feature that allows you to see the most recent mentions about you in blogs, articles, comments, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.

Resources

2. Refine Your Content

Now that you understand more about how your customers think, feel and act, you can begin to mine and refine your content appropriately. This doesn’t necessarily mean starting from scratch. Most likely there’s already a lot of content on your website or in your brochures. That content was good enough to get you current clients. But now that you understand them better, look at it through their eyes.