Venn diagram professional life vs. product with arrow to the interface
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2025 9:37 am
GOALS AND HOW TO MEASURE THEM
The most important part of this exercise: finding answers to the big questions.
Why create content at all?
What does success look like and how can you measure it?
Be sure to set precise and concrete goals so that you can better measure your achievement and change them more easily if you find out over time that you have set the wrong goals.
That was our first goal:
Increase blog traffic (unique visits) for four categories (membership, church, training, and talent) as well as the directory pages themselves compared to the previous three months and the same three months last year.
It was a pretty low goal, but for us it was all still an experiment and achieving it would give us the confidence we needed to move on to longer-term goals like “increase brand influence as measured by backlinks and direct traffic” or “reach 1,000,000 monthly blog sessions.”
Countdown to half a million installations
Now... ( Source )
There are many types of goals you can pursue with a content marketing initiative, but I suggest focusing on one of the following areas:
SEO: Strengthen Google rankings, increase organic traffic and improve placement for long-tail keywords.
Brand influence: Build relationships with influencers and industry groups, increase referral traffic from backlinks and shared articles, increase direct traffic and branded searches, and gain followers and community on social networks.
Engagement: Increase the number of comments, likes and shares, as well as time spent on pages, pages per session, conversion rates and subscribers.
Notice what's not on this list? Don't worry, monetization is covered in Lesson 3.
AUDIENCE
Who will read what you write?
And why?
It's definitely worth taking the time to roughly characterize your ideal reader .
Everything depends on this reader profile: the types of content you produce, their writing style and how you distribute it.
Capterra's CRM persona
An exemplary characterization for our CRM blog
Is it a potential customer, someone who is already a customer, or an influencer in the industry?
What stage of their career is the person in? Do they prefer reading blog posts or watching videos? Do they prefer using a PC or mobile devices? What are the biggest problems they are currently facing?
We used customer interviews and lead data, as well as sites like Yahoo Answers , Quora , Answers.com , and the AdWords Keyword Planner to learn as much as possible about our potential readership before we even put pen to virtual paper.
CONTENT TYPES
Having a written content strategy also helped us crystallize a philosophy that has often helped us grow:
" We want to write consistently up-to-date guides and particularly insightful articles that make people poland telegram data see things in a different light [...] and that people bookmark to read multiple times and share with everyone they know. It doesn't always have to be about software or technology, as long as the focus is on the problems our audience cares about and is looking for solutions to. "
In content marketing, especially in the business-to-business sector, there is a quick temptation to only cover topics from one's own area of expertise: software companies only write about software, manufacturing companies about manufacturing processes and law firms about contract law.
Not only do you limit your content to potentially boring topics and focus a lot on your own products - consciously or unconsciously - but you also misunderstand your audience through such restrictions. Your readers want to learn something or be entertained, not to be wooed.
Software users, purchasing managers, and in-house legal counsel are people who exist outside the narrow space in a Venn diagram that represents the intersection between their professional lives and your product or service.
Poor content strategy
To build a long-term, loyal audience, establish trust, and cast a wider net, you need to provide useful, authoritative, and entertaining content that touches your ideal reader's entire business life and helps him or her become better at all areas of their job.
The most important part of this exercise: finding answers to the big questions.
Why create content at all?
What does success look like and how can you measure it?
Be sure to set precise and concrete goals so that you can better measure your achievement and change them more easily if you find out over time that you have set the wrong goals.
That was our first goal:
Increase blog traffic (unique visits) for four categories (membership, church, training, and talent) as well as the directory pages themselves compared to the previous three months and the same three months last year.
It was a pretty low goal, but for us it was all still an experiment and achieving it would give us the confidence we needed to move on to longer-term goals like “increase brand influence as measured by backlinks and direct traffic” or “reach 1,000,000 monthly blog sessions.”
Countdown to half a million installations
Now... ( Source )
There are many types of goals you can pursue with a content marketing initiative, but I suggest focusing on one of the following areas:
SEO: Strengthen Google rankings, increase organic traffic and improve placement for long-tail keywords.
Brand influence: Build relationships with influencers and industry groups, increase referral traffic from backlinks and shared articles, increase direct traffic and branded searches, and gain followers and community on social networks.
Engagement: Increase the number of comments, likes and shares, as well as time spent on pages, pages per session, conversion rates and subscribers.
Notice what's not on this list? Don't worry, monetization is covered in Lesson 3.
AUDIENCE
Who will read what you write?
And why?
It's definitely worth taking the time to roughly characterize your ideal reader .
Everything depends on this reader profile: the types of content you produce, their writing style and how you distribute it.
Capterra's CRM persona
An exemplary characterization for our CRM blog
Is it a potential customer, someone who is already a customer, or an influencer in the industry?
What stage of their career is the person in? Do they prefer reading blog posts or watching videos? Do they prefer using a PC or mobile devices? What are the biggest problems they are currently facing?
We used customer interviews and lead data, as well as sites like Yahoo Answers , Quora , Answers.com , and the AdWords Keyword Planner to learn as much as possible about our potential readership before we even put pen to virtual paper.
CONTENT TYPES
Having a written content strategy also helped us crystallize a philosophy that has often helped us grow:
" We want to write consistently up-to-date guides and particularly insightful articles that make people poland telegram data see things in a different light [...] and that people bookmark to read multiple times and share with everyone they know. It doesn't always have to be about software or technology, as long as the focus is on the problems our audience cares about and is looking for solutions to. "
In content marketing, especially in the business-to-business sector, there is a quick temptation to only cover topics from one's own area of expertise: software companies only write about software, manufacturing companies about manufacturing processes and law firms about contract law.
Not only do you limit your content to potentially boring topics and focus a lot on your own products - consciously or unconsciously - but you also misunderstand your audience through such restrictions. Your readers want to learn something or be entertained, not to be wooed.
Software users, purchasing managers, and in-house legal counsel are people who exist outside the narrow space in a Venn diagram that represents the intersection between their professional lives and your product or service.
Poor content strategy
To build a long-term, loyal audience, establish trust, and cast a wider net, you need to provide useful, authoritative, and entertaining content that touches your ideal reader's entire business life and helps him or her become better at all areas of their job.