How to build a content strategy
How to build a content strategy
for multiple audiences and purposes
Content is pretty misunderstood. A lot of people think “just throw up a blog once a week” and you’re done! Pick a topic maybe the week before and see how you go.
Another thing is the audience often gets forgotten when they should be coming first! So let’s start right there.
You’ve got 3 audiences to write for:
Customers
Prospects
SEO
And that’s it, so all of your topics should be tailored for one of these. I might be wrong/in the minority, but I don’t believe every piece of web based content should be SEO optimised, because if you’re writing a blog that has been requested by the Customer Success team because customers keep asking the same question, if you keyword stuff it and over-do it on the SEO, then the customer (AKA your target audience) won’t read it.
Since you know exactly who it’s for, write it exactly for them - especially when it’s for customers.
Content for customers
Ask your account managers/customer success managers/customer facing colleagues what kind of questions they get repeatedly, or tough questions they’re not too sure how to answer.
Back when Perkbox was still offering our pulse survey tool, Insights, we often got told by customers that the feedback was great and now they knew their problem areas, but the product didn’t tell them how to fix them. So we did a huge deep dive and created content around the number 1 problem area: internal communication.
So definitely do a session with your customer team to hear what they struggle with, and create content to support them.
FAQ also falls under “customer content”, and so in addition to deep dive pieces, you should also be doing a lot of quick pieces to answer common questions. This will cover your “how do I change this setting” or similar questions.
My best tip for FAQ and help centre content is to offer both a written and a video version of walk throughs. Different people absorb information in different ways, so offer the information in more than one format so your customers actually consume it instead of thinking “I hate reading/watching videos” and closing the tab.
Content for prospects (and sales teams)
Again this one is pretty easy to get topics for, because you can ask your sales team for common objections they get, where prospects have a lot of questions, etc etc, and go from there.
Writing for prospects is harder than writing for customers though, because you can’t assume they understand the product and have that baseline of knowledge to start from.
One of the biggest requests from any sales team is asking for help proving ROI. Here’s where you’ve got a lot of content types to choose from!
Case studies
Blogs
Ebooks/white papers
Videos
Case studies (here’s the last one I did at Perkbox which also includes a video) need to focus on the value the customer received from your product, not what your product can do.
Here is the format I use to run case study interviews:
Tell me about your business in your own words
What challenge were you facing that initially made you look for a solution/what goals were you looking to achieve?
Why did you pick us and not another provider?
After implementing our product, what changed for you? What results have you seen? (if they mention specific challenges/goals in question 2, make sure you reference them specifically, but also ask this question broadly)
Is there anything else you’d like to bring up that we haven’t spoken about?
Question 5 is often where I get absolute gold quotes from, and it usually starts with an “I’m not sure, no not really…. actually” - so make sure you stay quiet and let them think before you end the interview.
And here’s another blog example, addressing ROI and using the start of a new year to drive urgency.
Content for SEO
SEO content should still be reasonably enjoyable to read, but it should also be viewed as kind of an entry point, especially because you want them to click around the rest of your site. The above pieces (customer and prospect content) is more foregiving, you want them to read the whole thing and take away value so if your bounce rate is high it’s ok. But if someone has navigated to your site via SEO and then left straight away, it is a problem.
In the SEO special, Sam Ficek shared some good tips on optimising for SEO (and he has more tips on his blog).
I called out the HubSpot pillar page/topic cluster strategy in that issue as well, which to no one’s surprise, Perkbox used and I have our pillar page example right here.
Content that blurs lines and crosses categories
Of course there’s also multipurpose content that can be customer + prospect (e.g. a new product release), prospect + SEO, and so on etc.
Here’s one last Perkbox example of an SEO + customer piece. This one is another deep dive that came from a customer request (how do I engage the employees who work a different shift to me) but because so many Perkbox customer included shift workers, it meant that an SEO piece could bring in leads and show off our qualifications.
This week’s links
I found this one to just be pretty fun, John Swartzwelder was a writer on the early seasons of the Simpsons and described the process of not just writing an episode but the whole process of being in a writing room with many other very funny people. It’s a long one so save this for some lunch reading!
The 2013 superbowl was interrupted by a power outage, and Oreo made a swift tweet of an oreo on a dark background with the caption “you can still dunk in the dark”. It became a pivotal tweet for the brand and was way ahead of the game in reactive social media marketing (remember it’s 2013!)
How the Billboard Hot 100 chart works and how BTS’ marketing strategy got them to the top of it
Recently an American music critic got mad at BTS because they ‘gamed’ their way to the top of the charts by getting their fans to… buy their music? This is a breakdown of how western artists (like Ariana Grande and the Weeknd) previously gamed the charts with hoodies and non-music merch before a reform took place, and now how outsiders like South Korea’s BTS are getting to the top of American charts.