A 3-part process to simplify your content marketing (and you’ll know exactly what to write)

Content marketing is not just a weekly writing exercise. In fact, you need to produce something that will drive traffic and conversion.

Sure, you have to write about a topic that excites you. Otherwise, the lack of enthusiasm will come out loud and clear.

However, you also need to make sure that the topic is relevant to your ideal audience.

Proposing content ideas every … one … week might seem like teeth are being pulled.

Not anymore if you have my favorite content strategy document by your side …

This 3-part process also solves the mystery of why those “buyer personas” (aka ideal customer profile, avatar) still don’t work for you …

There is nothing wrong with building a buyer image. And you are not doing anything wrong.

You’re missing the next two pieces of the puzzle … because, somehow, many training and marketing programs make you do the personality exercise and leave you hanging.

As a coach, consultant, individual entrepreneur, or small business owner, you need a strategy document that you can act on, not a PowerPoint drawn up to present to the boss who would take it to the boss’s boss.

Analyzing documentation pages is counterproductive.

In this article, my goal is not to show you how to create the most comprehensive content strategy document ever, or one that has ever been used to market a Fortune 500 company.

I’ll show you how to capture the most relevant information and optimize research and best practices into something digestible and actionable. Your Content Mapping document will be concise and useful; it will be something you can pass on to any freelancer or contractor to ensure consistent content creation and promotion.

The Content Mapping document is made up of three components and will show you exactly what content to create for your business:

1. Buyer’s person

If you need it.

However, many questions about the buyer’s personality are BORING and unhelpful.

If you’re not getting inspired by the common templates that ask you to fill in age, race, income, and marital status, try this:

Tell a story about the person to describe their situation in relation to the relevance of your product or service (if you have different offers, tell a story for each).

What are you thinking, how are you feeling, and what are you doing? What is your desired outcome and how would it make you think, feel, and act?

What have you done to try to solve your challenges? What worked, what didn’t work, and how is her approach different from anything she has tried?

Congratulations, you’ve just found out why she’s relevant to your ideal customer, how you can uniquely position yourself, and how to reach her from an audience-centric angle.

2. Customer journey

Your customers or clients will go through a “life cycle” with stages from when they first meet you until they make the decision to buy from you.

Together, they form the customer journey. To make it more organic, consider it from a storytelling perspective – explore the journey of your ideal client’s hero and how you can bring transformation to them at every stage.

Normally, the three stages are Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.

At each stage, your potential customers are looking for different content, tools, and resources to help them. For instance:

In the consciousness stage, they are looking for solutions to a problem, but they don’t know you exist. You can attract these people to your website by creating content that presents a solution to that challenge.

(For practitioners with a unique focus or esoteric modality, I often recommend adding some additional educational or “getting started” content to present a set of vocabulary that helps your audience articulate their challenges and desired outcome, while positioning the ability. of their experience to deliver the results.)

In the Consideration stage, your potential clients are weighing different options to solve their problems. Let’s say you are trying to lose weight; They could work with a health advisor or they could opt for diet pills. They look for content that helps them understand the pros and cons of their options.

At the decision stage, they selected a solution and looked for someone to provide that solution. They look for content that shows them why they should choose one provider over the other.

Customer-directed content at each stage talks about why they need answers (telling them what they need to know about themselves, you, and your products or services) to move to the next step.

3. Content mapping

Once you’ve clarified your buyer persona and customer journey, you can create a grid and fill in the blanks.

You are mapping the different stages each person goes through and have the structure to generate content ideas that address any particular stage for a specific person.

But why stop here? You have to promote your content for it to be effective. You can make a note of where you want to distribute the content to make it more effective.

For the awareness stage, you are more likely to drive cold traffic through social media posts, ads, or PPC. For the later stages, you can include email marketing and retargeting ads into the mix because you will be targeting an audience that already knows something about you.

This may require a little research on the audience or a little digging into your existing data. Don’t delay in getting it perfect … you have to start somewhere and when you start implementing, you can always come back to fine-tune your strategy.

The content distribution channel can, in turn, inform how it delivers the content. For example, if your persona hangs on Instagram or Pinterest, you probably want to focus on visual content.

4. Additional ideas

As you are putting together this document, you will probably come up with ideas that you would like to develop but that do not fit the content mapping framework.

You can capture these ideas or information as an appendix to your document, for example, promotional channels, content formats, title brainstorming, brand voice, graphic elements, etc.

Last but not least, make it a living, dynamic document so that your persona and your content idea evolve as you and your business grow.