What Advice Can Improve a Marketing Manager's Content Marketing Strategy?

What Advice Can Improve a Marketing Manager's Content Marketing Strategy?

In the fast-evolving field of content marketing, we sought advice from top marketing professionals to sharpen your strategy. From obsessing over your audience to mastering audience understanding for platform choice, here are the top five pieces of advice offered by a CMO and a Brand Manager, among others, to elevate your content marketing game.

• Obsess Over Your Audience
• Create Multi-Objective Content
• Trust Customer Insights Over Data
• Understand Audience Preferences Deeply
• Master Audience Understanding for Platform Choice

Obsess Over Your Audience

If I could offer just one piece of advice to a Marketing Manager looking to improve their content marketing strategy, it would be this: Obsess over your audience, not your content. Here's why:

Content is a means to an end, not the end itself. The ultimate goal of content marketing is to connect with your audience, build relationships, and ultimately drive desired actions (conversions, purchases, sign-ups, etc.).

Focusing solely on creating 'great' content can lead you down a rabbit hole. You might craft beautifully written pieces or visually stunning graphics, but if they don't resonate with your target audience, they'll fall flat.

Understanding your audience intimately helps you create content that's relevant, valuable, and engaging. This means knowing their needs, pain points, aspirations, and preferred channels for consuming information.

How to put this advice into action:

Conduct in-depth audience research: This could involve surveys, interviews, focus groups, social media listening, and analyzing customer data.

Develop buyer personas: Create detailed profiles of your ideal customers, including their demographics/firmographics, psychographics, and online behavior.

Identify your content pillars: What are the core topics that you want to be known for?

Develop a content calendar: Plan your content in advance to ensure consistency and quality.

Map your content to the buyer's journey: Create content that addresses each stage of the journey (from awareness to advocacy).

Focus on providing value: Ask yourself, 'What problem does this content solve for my audience?'

Track your results and iterate: Use analytics to see what's working and what's not, and adapt your strategy accordingly.

By truly understanding your audience and prioritizing their needs, you can create content that resonates, builds trust, and ultimately drives business results.

Be patient, experiment, and keep learning what works best for your unique audience and brand.

Create Multi-Objective Content

High-quality content that stands out in today's saturated environment is expensive and time-consuming to create. To be sure you're using your resources most efficiently, prioritize making content that meets two or more business objectives. All content marketing has the goal of connecting with your audience and increasing brand affinity, but if you could create content that also gauges interest in a new product feature, furthers a cause your audience cares about, or improves your customers' shopping experience, your content would get more mileage than a piece just focused on brand awareness goals.

Trust Customer Insights Over Data

Focus more on the topics you know your audience cares about, but you can't find data to 'prove' them. So much of the time, we're looking for the data to tell us we should write that content, or talk about that topic or keyword. And when you go to your tools—Ahrefs, Search Console, etc.—you have no data. But, you have three sales call recordings where this topic has come up in the last four weeks. Make that blog. Publish that social post. Talk about it. Because it's obviously important. I've had clients see 'search vol = 0' in the tools, and been picking up over 4,000 clicks/month all because they trusted the customer over the tools.

Understand Audience Preferences Deeply

One piece of advice I would give to a Marketing Manager looking to improve their content marketing strategy is to prioritize understanding your audience. This involves not only knowing their demographics but also their preferences, pain points, interests, and behaviors. By gaining insights into your target audience, you can create a campaign around content that resonates with them on a deeper level, leading to brand loyalty.

Master Audience Understanding for Platform Choice

Know your target audience. Research the likes, wants, and interests of your audience. Balance creativity with practicality to capture their attention. By mastering your understanding of your audience, you will also know the type of content and the platforms where you can reach them. For example, if you are targeting seniors aged 50 and above, you are more likely to reach them on YouTube than on TikTok.