Last week on the Bowery Capital Startup Sales Podcast, we hosted Georgiana Laudi, the VP of Marketing at Unbounce. With Georgiana, we explored the topic of Customer Focused Content Marketing. Unbounce allows users to build, publish, and A/B test high-converting mobile-responsive landing pages for their campaigns without relying on technical teams. In this episode of the podcast, Georgiana reveals how she and her team tackled the challenge of diving into a content marketing strategy. She speaks on the importance of talking to your customers, knowing how to target them, and being creative when it comes to content. We’ve taken Georgiana’s 5 tips for guiding your content strategy and summarized them below.
(1) Remember Content Marketing Is a Long Game. An effective content strategy allows you to offer significant upfront value to your customer, but is naturally a long-term play. It takes time to develop a reputation and leverage distribution channels to effectively reach your target audience. At the same time, content creation consumes massive amount of time and often monetary resources. The reward for this is customer loyalty. As you begin to add value at every stage of the customer journey it becomes increasingly difficult for the customer to leave. It is also important to track the result of your strategy throughout this process to be sure you are getting sufficient ROI on your investment and iterating when necessary. Simple KPIs around each stage of the customer journey should be established to measure success.
(2) Talk to Your Customer. While it sounds obvious and even cliche, the best way to know what will resonate with your customers is by simply talking to them. A customer will give you the most accurate account of the problems they are facing and the value you can provide. What are their biggest challenges and what do they ask you most often? There is always a value-add opportunity in answering those questions. Once you’ve identified your customers key pain-points, it becomes remarkably easier to create enticing content that will appeal not only to them, but to a broader subset of similar use-cases.
(3) Get in Front of Your Target Audience. Often times, customer focused content marketing strategies face somewhat of a chicken and egg problem. Dedicating time to content doesn’t make sense unless there is an audience to consume it, but you won’t have an audience yet if you’re just beginning to produce quality content. A solution that Georgiana offers to this is to produce the best possible content, and subsequently attempt to publish it where you know your target audience “hangs out”. Georgiana explained that she spent a lot of time authoring articles and making appearances on sites like Hubspot and Moz because she knew her audience would be there. Alongside this, she advises to be sure you are creating content in a format that your target audience is used to consuming. This could mean webinars, podcasts, blog posts, or all of the above as long as it makes sense in the context of your customer.
(4) Create Buyer Personas. A buyer persona is a prefabricated identity template that contains assumptions about who your customers are or who you’d like them to be. This is a data and research driven approach to creating a clearer picture of your target audience, and can prove extremely helpful when determining how to tailor content. These personas should be considered in the context of the broader customer journey with content being created for each aspect of engagement (typically: awareness, evaluation, and growth).
(5) Be Scrappy. For many early stage companies budget may be a limiting factor. However, even without extensive monetary resources there are still ways to create effective content. Everything comes back to getting in front of your customer, and one way to do that is sourcing content from an outside expert. This will not only tend to result in great content, but also enables the possibility of leveraging that expert’s following. Other strategies for internal content (on a budget) can be as simple as twitter chat sessions, Tumblr blogs, or site FAQs. As long as the message is properly targeted to reach the correct end-user, it isn’t necessary to pour capital into a content campaign.
If you found Georgiana’s 5 techniques on Customer Focused Content Marketing helpful, listen to the full episode with her here and subscribe to get a new episode of the Bowery Capital Startup Sales Podcast every week.
Customer Focused Content Marketing
