What does a business model and goals have to do with your content marketing campaign? Answer: better, more relevant content geared to what you want to accomplish.
Creating content that attracts your ideal prospects takes crystal clear writing. That’s because you’re not there with your prospects to explain what you mean.
You have to anticipate the thought process of your website visitors so you can come as close as you can to a conversation online. And the last thing you want to do is waste your visitors’ time with company-centric copy.
That’s just asking them to click away.
So as I’ve said in previous posts, creating this kind of special copy takes some planning. We’ve talked about your Content Marketing Plan as similar to writing a short book about your business.
We started with your Marketing Story. How you differentiate yourself from your competition by getting personal about you and your brand. You want customers and prospects to feel like they know you and like your brand.
Now let’s consider...how do you do business? Who are your best prospects? And what is your campaign objective?
Your Business Model with Clear Objectives and Goals
The next chapter in the book about your business is a description of your business model. Are you a brick and mortar store or office or do you sell only online? How are you set up to serve customers and what do you want your content marketing campaign to look like? Most importantly, who are your ideal customers?
For example, I wrote a Content Marketing Plan for a manufacturer who decided to focus on two of its products. The audience for the products consisted of two groups: 1) mid-to-high-income families and individual consumers and 2) the contractors and distributors who installed and supplied the products.
The goal of the campaign was to get the attention of as many of our mid-to-high-income consumers as we could. And get the attention of contractors who did not have these products top of mind in their everyday work.
In another case, I helped an executive coach. Our business model was to invite owners and managers, focusing on women, to take a short quiz online. The quiz was to help them discover the constraints holding them back from their full potential. Our coach then responded with an introductory and inexpensive analysis. The visitor became a client.
There were three levels of education to which the coach’s new client could subscribe. The first was the test above, then an in-depth analysis of one major challenge, and finally, a complete map and lifestyle prescription.
So the primary objective of our content marketing was to get the attention of business owners, top tier employees and professionals and lead them to our website to take that initial, quick quiz.
I give you these two examples from my own experience to help you see the real world thinking that goes into the process of making content creation easier and more effective. I like to get specific with my clients as to how we’re going to serve customers. And, what exactly are our goals. It makes it easier to drill down to exactly what your content marketing needs to do to deliver a decent return on investment.
My Business Model
In the Business Model and Goals chapter of my own Content Marketing Plan, I decided to get away from promoting my company, NKB Marketing. I switched to promoting myself as an individual freelancer.
My company logo on Facebook was a circle with NKB in the middle, which I switched to a headshot of me. I rewrote my homepage headline and lead to include my new unique selling proposition, “individual attention.” And I rewrote my About page in the first person.
My content marketing campaign focuses on getting leads from business owners and marketing managers who strive to improve their current websites and social media marketing. Also website owners who understand the importance of great content but don’t have the resources to constantly create new webpages, emails, blog posts, and social media.
Like the first two examples, I want to use content marketing as a way to build my authority and get my marketplace to know, like, and trust my brand.
The thing to remember is, with a thought thru business model and clear objectives, you can do the same with your content marketing, too!
Next chapter in our Content Marketing Strategy Plan is, "Our Prospects’ Problem." After all, that’s what you do, solve people’s problems.
Until next time,
Nick
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