 Content marketing is an indispensable tool for brands striving to engage their audience and achieve measurable success. Yet, with so many strategies and tools available, where do you start? Enter Engage and Convert: Data-Driven Content Marketing Solutions by Michael Rohde, a must-read for anyone serious about mastering the art and science of content marketing.
 The synergy between a finely tuned Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy and a well-crafted Content Marketing Strategy (CMS) creates a framework to help you effectively launch products, engage target audiences, and drive revenue growth. By harmonizing the GTM strategy's market-focused approach with the CMS's content-driven tactics, companies can amplify their brand visibility, establish thought leadership, and forge meaningful connections with customers, setting the stage for long-term business success and market dominance.
 Introducing a new product or service to the market can be exciting and daunting. As a business, it's crucial to have a well-thought-out strategy that guides potential customers through the buying cycle. The buying cycle consists of four phases: Discovery, Consideration, Conversion, and Retention. Each stage has its own challenges and opportunities for businesses to create compelling content that resonates with their target audience. In this blog post, I'll dive into each phase of the buying cycle and explore the best type of content to create for each stage. Let's get started!
Phase 1—Discovery The beginning of the story starts with potential customers finding you. At this stage, your potential customers need to become aware of your company’s products and why they should choose your products or services. A successful beginning starts with introducing the company to the potential customer. The goal is to show the customer that your company is aware of their needs and can fulfill them. You will have reached your Phase 1—Discovery goal when the customer becomes aware of your brand. The best content at this beginning stage should be educational. Viral content is also important in helping spread awareness. Types of content that work well during the discovery phase include:
Phase 2—Consideration After the customer becomes aware of your company, you will want to start the education process on how your company’s products will help the customer succeed, describe how your company excels where the competitors might fail, and answer all of the customer’s questions so that they can make an educated decision on choosing your company’s product. The goal at this point is to get the customer to consider a purchase. The best content at the consideration stage of the buying cycle is to supply potential customers with content that helps them evaluate you and your products, such as:
Phase 3—Conversion The story’s climax is when the potential customer becomes a paying customer. For this to happen, the customer’s pain points must be resolved, any lingering doubts about the competition must be removed, and the customer must feel confident they made the right decision. All of this is accomplished through a consistent message, adhering to set themes that address the customer’s concerns, and relaying confidence that the company’s product is the best product or service on the market. The best type of content for converting the customer includes:
This content will be the heart of your direct sales materials and should showcase all your best features — this is the point of the story where you want to drive home the message that your products or services are the best available. The story won’t end there of course; there should always be an epilogue. The theme of the epilogue is to keep the paying customer happy so they remain a paying customer, and would recommend your products and services. That’s where Phase 4—Retention, comes into play. Phase 4—Retention At this point in the story, you have a paying customer, and you’d like to keep them around in the hopes they might refer you, offer a great review, provide a testimonial, or, best of all, remain a paying customer. The best type of content to retain a customer is:
Now that you know what type of content you want to develop and where it fits in the buying cycle, you should create a calendar so the team knows what they need to do and when they need to do it.  A successful content marketing strategy will grow your audience and enable you to increase your potential customer base. This article will walk you through the basics of developing a content marketing strategy along with an overview of how it fits within the buying cycle. For a closer look at an introduction to content marketing, please read my earlier post here. Developing a Content Marketing Strategy One of the first things you’ll want to do when developing your content marketing is to learn the overall goals of the company. For most start ups, the overall goal of the company might be taking the product to market, or in most cases, simply to grow. Content marketing fits in great with both of these overall goals in that you can use your content to both educate consumers on your product and to increase awareness of the product through different mediums—forums, blogs, websites, webinars, infographics, etc. Determining Your Audience After you learn your company’s overall goals, you’ll want to discover who your audience is. For example, are you looking to target middle aged parents looking to buy a new car or developers who are looking for a solution to their problems? Either way, you want to learn their pain points. For my client Carjojo, their customer’s pain point is negotiating the best price when buying a new car; their comfort point is that Carjojo can either do the negotiating for them, or at least, provide data to help them do their own negotiating. One way to determine your audience is by looking at who participates in your forums, or who replies on Twitter, or who likes you on Facebook, or who comments on your blog post, and so on. Developing Themes around Your Audience Now that you have an idea of who your audience is and you know their pain and comfort points, you can develop themes. You can showcase these themes through introductory blog posts that describe upcoming features to help your customers with their pain points. Good blog post topics also describe your product’s features that make current customers happy. This is also a good time to develop an editorial calendar, which I discuss in this post. Fitting Your Content Strategy Within the Buying Cycle
Here, I provide a quick outline of how your content strategy will fit within the buying cycle. For a closer look at this topic, you can read my earlier post, Understanding the Buying Cycle.
Using Metrics to Determine Overall Impact Before you start publishing your content, you’ll want to have a good analytics program tracking your progress. For example, Google Analytics can be easily applied to most online platforms and will instantly start providing key insights as to who is on your site and what they are doing there. It’s a good idea to watch several different key indicators to get a feel for what your audience is doing, but it’s best not to focus on any one metric in particular, and don’t get hung up on why there was a spike on Tuesday and a slump on Thursday. It’s better to look at overall trends when determining how to adjust your strategy. You might get a good idea of what’s working and what’s not working after collecting about a month’s worth of data, but you’ll see the larger picture when you have six months to a year’s worth of data. By following this content marketing strategy, you should increase awareness of your company, which should help the overall goal of your company. Don’t expect this to happen overnight. It will take daily updates, revisions, and close analysis of your metrics to make it happen. |
Michael RohdeSpark Studios 
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