Everyone talks about content creation for the web. While most ad agency creatives think of videos, flash animations and cool pictures, the truth of the matter is that content that really helps drive awareness, traffic and nurture leads into customers, is much more than that.
Of course videos and pictures are a part of it, but there are posts, blogs, ebooks, white papers, webinars and many other options, all hugely important to drive traffic, which also require a constant flow of new, relevant, and impactful content.
While coming up with the content is not easy, by any means. Having a process of doing so helps tremendously. So, for what it's worth, here is a 10 step approach or breakdown on how to build an editorial calendar to attract more Hispanic customers to your website
SUMMARY
- Use behavioral and demographic information about your prospects to develop buyer personas based on their interests and needs, then target your content accordingly.
- Before you start creating new content, conduct an audit of your existing content to identify the topics and personas you should focus on and set up guidelines for new content.
- Map your content to the buying cycle of your customers to ensure that you’re creating content that works best for your readers based on which stage they are in.
- Create an editorial calendar to build a detailed schedule for creating and publishing content.
- Find new ways to come up with creative content topics that are relevant, helpful, and fun for your readers, and keep a backlog of these ideas so you always have some on hand when you’re ready to create new content.
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
1. Do persona research and develop your Ideal Custom
er Persona to understand who you are talking to and what to talk about how. Get to understad their demographincs, needs and behaviour, online or offline. Most agencies have the demographics of the target with the planners, so, an-agency wide brainstomrming to "approximate" your taget's persona could be a great place to start.
2. From this first step you should start getting an idea of what types of content and topics your target would be interested in reading. Based on your brainstorming, you should start trying to answer these types of quesitons in the content that you are about to create:
3. Do a quick brainstorming to arrive at a Buyer Profile, help you identify where your target is online, what do they consume, what kind of tools do they engage with, like online- banking sites, mortgage calculators, etc, and which of your products are more attractive to them. You want to know:
- What do they do online? Do they read blogs? Are they active on Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks? What kind of search terms do they use? Are they email newsletter subscribers?
- What kind of information do they tend to consume online? Educational pieces? Trend articles? Interactive tools like calculators or worksheets? Do they watch videos or listen to podcasts?
- Which of your products do they spend the most time researching?
- How do they use those products?
DO A CONTENT AUDIT
4. Now you should be getting closer to writing your own content with the right frame of mind for your target audience. But, before you go crazy and start writing, first do a content audit of your existing site. Identify which content is working, which is not and see if there are ways you can repurpose that content on other formats. So a research document or white paper can be churned out in little bites through out facebook posts, tweets or blog posts.
5. Put your content into a spread sheet and look for patterns that will indicate what audiences respond to which type of content, when, at what point in the buying cycle (more on this later). Orginizing your content into items which will help you generate "bucketed" ideas.
ORGANIZE YOUR CONTENT
6. Leverage your buyer's Personas, profiles and existing content-now newly organized into buckets and choose which content to use for each stage of the buying cycle. Most every consumer goes through a buying cycle which typically looks like this:
7. Once you identify which content fits with each of the stages in the buying cycle, identify which type of content to deploy, at what point and on what format:
WRITE CONTENT IN ADVANCE
8. Now, develop your Content Calendar based on what kind of content to create, what topics to cover, which personas to target and how often to publish or support customer engagement and inbound marketing strategy. Some sound advice in developing your content calendar is as follows.
- Write 3 to 6 months worth of content in advance
- Specify your objectives, KPIs (traffic volume, leads, engagments, new customers)
- Arrive at a good mix of content type, topics and personas to cover al your segments
- Note the SEO keywords, the stage of the buying cycle, the CTA for every piece of content.
- Align to seasonal or product specific usage periods. (Snow plows in the winter, boat shoes in the sumer)
- Repurpose existing content. Turn it into a video, a slide show, split it into posts
- Create separate tabs on your spreadsheet for your kind of content (Blogs, videos, posts, tweets, webinars, e-books)
POST, POST, POST.
9. Post, share, ask to share, tweet and measure. Keep track of who is seeing what, when, how often and be prepared with the content they will want to see at the stage in the buying cycle they are in.
AUTOMATE
10. Choose a program or service to automate and centralize all your marketing tools and paid, earned owned channels with software such as HubSpot, who's images and infromation are leveraged and condenced in this post. It'll help youdentify which posts drove traffic, form where, which traffic converted into a lead and will make it easier to nurture that lead.
Of course, content alone can’t generate inbound marketing success. The pieces you create have to fit into an overall strategy of SEO, social mediaengagement, lead nurturing, measurement, and optimization. But with a well-defined content strategy, a detailed editorial calendar, and a good topic backlog, you’ll be publishing content like a pro and be on well on your way to becoming a more effective marketer.
11. Bonust step. Call Lalo Wakefield and let me help you or your agency set up for Spanish Ibound Marketing that's effective, measurable and succesful.