3 Tips to Help Develop Your Content Marketing Strategy

Creating quality content tailored to your audience is a must and can establish a deeper connection between your customers and your brand. Use these three tips to develop your content marketing strategy.

Understand your brand voice and archetype

Each piece of content you produce should be a representation of your brand. Documenting and understanding your brand strategy and keeping a consistent voice across all platforms is an important aspect in maintaining your image.

Pinpointing your brand archetype can set the tone for your messaging and customer experience. Your brand archetype provides human-like characteristics and values that people can understand and can make you stand out against your competitors.

Examples of brand archetypes:

• The Hero – This archetype often leaves their customers feeling strong and empowered. The hero is often contributing content that will create a positive change.

• The Idealist – This archetype centers everything around working towards the greatest common good. The idealist values authenticity, collaboration, altruism, and self-confidence.

• The Storyteller – This archetype values empathy and compassion. The storyteller is very charismatic and has an intuitive understanding of the world.

Understand what your audience wants

You should always be giving your audience quality content that is easy to understand. If you’re unsure about what your audience wants or needs, start doing some research that will help you better tailor your content and position yourself in the market. Keyword research can help you determine what people are searching for around your topic, product, or industry and is a great place to start. You can also leverage current customer and web data, which can be helpful when benchmarking and goal-setting. For more information on how to use your data to create content, check out our blog post: When Worlds Collide: Numbers Tell the Great Stories.

Going beyond a promotional level, it’s important to connect with your audience emotionally. Understand the trends your audience is following; do they care for the environment or recent global events? What are their lifestyle habits? Once you better understand your audience and their interests, you can create more detailed messaging that will resonate with them. In addition to tailoring the content you produce; you also want to tailor it to properly fit the platform you’re using to share it.

Shuffle your content

Continue to keep in mind that your content should always offer value to your audience, whether it’s informative or entertaining, or even both. If you primarily produce content in one or two formats, try experimenting and adding a new format into the mix. Do you see your audience interacting with content elsewhere? Infographics? Blog posts? Visuals? When you understand the content that your audience is reacting to and the platforms they’re using to get that content, it can help you when creating your own.

For more information about how you can develop content that your audience will care about, watch this Two Minutes with True with Tony Fanizzi about branding and content strategy. Need help with your content? See how True approaches communication strategy and content strategy.