1. Create a Buyer’s Persona 

A buyer’s persona refers to a semi-fictional representation of the target audience of your brand. Buyer personas have been used by brands for decades to market their products and services effectively. Some brands develop a range of buyer personas to capture the different ranges of audiences they are targeting. A buyer’s persona may include – name, demographic details, behavioral traits, personal interests, buying habits, pain points, professional goals, etc. Buyer personas facilitate a better understanding of your audience’s behaviors and interests. This allows you to create content especially tailored for them. 

2. Map Out the Buyer’s Journey

Besides buyer personas, another thing that you should develop early in your content strategy is the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey refers to the steps your customers take, from identifying a problem to making a purchase decision to address that problem. It should be noted that buyers have different goals at each stage of their journey, which is they should be addressed with different kinds of content at each stage to keep them engaged. For instance, if a prospective customer is just identifying the problem, they should not be hit with your sales pitch video. Similarly, if the customer is about to make a purchase decision should not be hit with an article about the issue in the industry. Mapping out the buyer’s journey ensures that your customer gets the right kind of content at the right time that addresses their concerns. 

3. Choose the Right Formats for Your Audience 

As discussed above, content can be created in a variety of formats. Everything from audiobooks to webpages is considered content. As such, picking the right format for your content pieces is crucial. Think about the end goal of your content pieces and the format should align with that goal to maximize its impact. 

4. Optimize Your Content for SEO

To improve its searchability, optimize your content for search engine optimization (SEO). This can mean incorporating relevant keywords, formatting your content into bullets and numbered lists to improve its readability, and adding meta text and alt descriptions for images. 

5. Delegate Content Creation 

Content creation is not an easy job, and it gets more difficult if you have to produce a lot of content. If you do not have enough in-house writers, consider delegating some work to ghostwriters. There are many advantages of delegating content, such as better quality, fewer grammatical errors, reduced timelines, and more creative pieces. 

6. Promote Your Content

Content creation is not enough. You have to promote it to ensure people see it. Spread your content across different platforms to get as many readers/viewers as possible. Some ways to distribute your content include newsletters, paid social media posts, email blasts, and website pop-ups. 

7. Make Use of Tools

Use various strategic tools to get an edge over your competition. Many SEO tools can help you improve your rankings and make improvements in your content. Other tools like Canva and Vidyard help you create videos and images. Various reporting tools measure how your content is performing across different platforms.

8. Identify KPIs to Make Improvements

Reporting tools can help you understand the performance of your content and make changes to your content to improve traffic. For instance, you should have a measurable goal for each content piece in terms of the number of views, or clicks, to analyze results over time. This will allow you to re-evaluate your strategy and make adjustments if you are not hitting your goals. 

9. Create an Editorial Calendar

Sometimes, it might be hard to manage the process of content creation with so much going on (from creating a buyer’s persona to marketing). As such, it is crucial to have a content calendar to know what content to create and when it needs to go out, and what needs to be published. 

10. Improve your Headlines

Headlines are the first thing your audience will read. If your headline doesn’t work, then the content may be a wasted opportunity. Create eye-catching headlines that invite readers’ curiosity. 

11. Make Your Content Interactive

The highest-performing content is interactive content. Audiences like to engage in the content they receive. It doesn’t have to be complicated (quizzes, polls, infographics, etc., are great examples of easy interactive ideas). 

The key to successful content creation is a well-balanced content strategy. The above-discussed content creation will help you get started with the content creation and marketing process.

The post Content Creation Tips to Grow Your Audience first appeared on Publir.

Understanding Your Audience

While your content can appeal to a variety of different audience groups, your goal should be connecting with your regular readers. Tailored content makes your audience feel important and valued. This means that these readers can become promoters of your brand. 

You need to truly understand your audiences and create buyer personas for targeted content marketing. For instance, if you are selling beachwear, you may want to write different content for those who live close to beaches (and visit frequently) and those who live far from beaches (and visit only a few times a year). Curate your content based on your buyer’s persona. 

By creating a buyer’s persona with your customers’ characteristics like profession, age, gender, industry, daily tasks, etc., you can target your messaging to different groups of audiences. 

Assessing Content Quality

1. Relevant KPIs – You can assess the quality of your content by looking at the relevant KPIs, including dwell time, search visibility, and reader engagement. Search visibility shows the website’s content ranking amongst a variety of keyword combinations. Dwell time refers to the amount of time a person spends looking at your website’s content. Reader engagement measures your readers’ interests, thoughts, and opinions. 

2. Use Data Analytics Tools – Instead of assuming what your audience likes or not, use the various data analytics tools to uncover the patterns of content sharing and engagement. Different data analysis tools can tell you how your content is being shared across various social media channels against your competitors. Find out what kind of content is the most successful and tap into that space to create more relevant content for your readers. 

3. Content Audit – Conduct a thorough content audit to reveal the strength and weaknesses of your incumbent content strategy to make improvements moving forward. A complete audit assesses your link structure, current topics, metadata, etc. An audit helps you figure out the shortcomings of your current strategy, thus, allowing you to improve future content marketing campaigns. It is important to note that content strategy is not static, i.e., it should change with changes in market conditions, audience interests, and so on. Therefore, you might need to conduct content audits frequently throughout the year. 

4. Engagement Statistics – The best way to assess the quality of your content is by monitoring your engagement statistics, including views, likes, subscribers, and comments. If you are new to the content creation space, look at what your competition is posting. What generates the most audience attention? Understanding what customers want will help you create content that will cater to their interests. 

5. Check Page Traffic and Rankings – Use Google Analytics to check your page’s organic traffic, the number of keywords, and the ranking of those associated keywords. If you have written something that is of high value for your readers, your page traffic and rankings will organically go up. 
6. Look at Your Competition – One way to assess your content quality is by comparing your content with your biggest competitors. See what your competition is putting out there and what kind of content is trending. Try to make content around similar topics by adding your unique touch to it.

Creating a Sense of Community and Belonging

Creating a sense of community and belonging is crucial to successful content creation and marketing. Your audience should not just be passive consumers of your content. They should feel as though they are a part of a community. One of the ways to make audience members feel a sense of community is by involving them in the process of content creation. Make the channels of communication transparent and incorporate their inputs. Acknowledge and appreciate your readers from time to time for their valuable time. Share content in a way that makes them feel they belong. This can be done with high-quality personalization and customization. Share content that makes them feel seen and heard. Use different ways to ask for your customer’s feedback and opinions in crucial business decisions. For instance, asking them in a poll what they think the next post should be about. This gives them a sense of belonging to a community where their opinion is valued. 
Content creation is an effective marketing practice that publicizes your brand and allows you to reach new readers. A good content creation strategy includes understanding your audience, assessing content quality, and creating a sense of community and belonging. As experts in the programmatic advertising market, Publir offers a one-of-a-kind unified platform specifically built to maximize earnings for digital content creators. We provide complete solutions for Ad Optimization, Subscriptions, Crowdfunding, QuickShop, and AdBlock Recovery.

The post Growing Your Paid Readership: A Guide to Content Creation first appeared on Publir.

Content personalization in marketing has many benefits, and there are some effective strategies you can use. You can tailor your own strategy to boost customer engagement, drive conversion rates and increase revenue. Content personalization can help companies drive the right message to the correct target audience. The content may be adapted to fit newsletters, blogs, or other forms, and may include different headlines, images, CTAs, body copy, etc. Doing this could help improve conversion rates and drive campaign performance, boosting engagement. Called ‘dynamic content’ due to its constantly updating nature, it is all about customer-oriented personalized user experiences. 

How Do Brands Create Such Specific Content? 

How do you know your best friend is feeling sad? It’s because you have observed them, their facial expressions, and can pinpoint either one or more of those expressions as representing sadness. Similarly, brands ‘know their audiences’. They segment user data into 3 buckets. 

Behavioural Data 

When a user visits your website, they leave behind some information. Behavioral analysis can give you the time they spent, the number of visitors, sign-ups, and other metrics. Sources for this data are mobile applications, websites, CRM systems, call centers, helpdesks, billing centers, and marketing automation systems. 

Contextual Data

Providing context to user actions, items, and persons can help marketers gain insights into user intent and patterns. Data comes from social media activity, milestones, location, preferences, and old buying behavior. 

Demographic Data 

This method divides the market into smaller blocks based on demographic factors ranging from age, income, and marital status, to gender, sexual orientation, education level, geography, etc. You can get such data from population censuses, 3rd party databases, and survey records. It is quite useful, knowing how your audience behaves on the internet. 

What Are The Advantages of Content Personalization?

Curate An Interested Audience

Consistently tracking user behavior, information, preferences and more, can help you offer your audience relevant content and consequently products and services that keep their interest buoyed, and their engagement with you for a long time. A bored audience won’t stick around. They’ll leave to engage with similar brands that offer something unique. You can attract new customers, but to have a loyal fan base, requires dedication. Content personalization can help with that. 

Better Lead Nurturing 

There are higher chances of leads being converted into MQLs, or marketing qualified leads, and SQLs, or sales qualified leads if a publisher takes care to curate personalized content. When individual audience members are catered to, established relationships grow stronger, getting you more leads and conversions over time. 

Higher Lead Conversion Chances 

If you manage to reach the right audience at the right time with the right message, your conversion likelihood increases. This is better than when you send customers random irrelevant messages. A personalized curated experience may entice a customer to convert way more than a generic approach. 

Better Revenue 

Different strokes for different folks. Some people prefer Facebook, others Instagram. Staying abreast of everyone’s preferences is important, so you can target your efforts towards those channels to boost purchases. If you have a customer frequently visiting your brand site and social media handles, you could lure them through those channels by personalizing their experience, providing product recommendations whenever they express interests. If your customer sees what you are offering them in terms of user experience and the product is interesting, they may be more likely to return to your site and buy from you. 

An Emotional Touch 

Emotions have always driven purchasing decisions, which is why content personalization is a great differentiation strategy for customer engagement and retention. If you manage to strike an emotional chord with your audience via your content, the impact may be boosted by data-driven personalization. Marketers have managed to break down their audiences on parameters like age, location, and gender, allowing them to customize their marketing message on a deeper level. 

Effective content personalization encompasses a variety of tools, customer data, and new technology, helping marketers study customer journeys to garner more data, giving the customer a bespoke experience, boosting emotional bonds. 

How Do You Build A Content Personalisation Strategy 

User First

Before curating your content, map out your target audience’s needs. Your content, product, or service needs to solve some problem. Your personalization strategy doesn’t need to blow your own trumpet. It should be more about how your product is tailored to audience needs. As a manufacturer, it should be your goal to create something of value for end-users, irrespective of whether you get their business or not. 

Speak To Individuals 

Personalized content is all about the individual. When addressing a potential customer, try to make them feel as if they are your only priority. A human-centric and empathetic approach might help. Interact with your customers as a person, not a company. Lend things a personal touch, and genuine relationships may foster.

Customer Journey Mapping 

A customer journey map helps you curate content that is relevant for each step of the customer’s journey. Such a map should speak to different audiences, aligning your content to each stage of their user journey. This can help you deliver relevant content to a customer during a certain part of their journey, ensuring they move forward to the next step. 

What Can Help You Personalize Content

There are many content personalization tools specifically made for this purpose. 

Customer Data Platforms 

This software clubs customer data across touchpoints, building individual customer profiles after scanning data in real-time. Data from first, second and third-party sources like social media, web forms, site behavior and action, CRM, mail interactions, and other customer transactions, all come together to build quite an accurate customer profile. 

Google Tag Manager 

Working with a data layer variable that triggers personalization, this tool gives marketers data helping them display custom content to different audience members. Google Tag Manager can help publishers provide a seamless personalized experience, boost on-site user experience and conversion rate. 

Data Management Platforms 

Such platforms collect, collate, and activate data from different sources. The data can be a first, second, or third party, and the sources vary from online to mobile, offline, and beyond. 

The above tools have become indispensable for personalized content marketing, helping businesses find new insights about their valued customers. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, content personalization is absolutely essential if you want to feel the pulse of the customer, and relate to them on a deeper level. With a little effort, personalization of content can go a long way in getting you fresh leads, while boosting engagement with your present users. Read our blog about asking customers for reviews, a great starting point for curating a customized content, product, or service experience. 

The post Content Personalization – Why This Can Help You Retain Customers and Win New Ones first appeared on Publir.