The Secret Behind a Great Content Plan
So much depends on how you bucket information.
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Join For FreeMarketing requirements and content strategy may vary for different businesses, but the success of your content relies entirely on how you plan for the information to reach the right audience and how you present it to that audience. In this article, we'll use these two vital aspects in content planning for bucketing information.
The Right Information for the Right Audience
In content marketing, it all begins with understanding how to bucket information — how to present it for various audiences. There are plenty of valuable resources out there that explain the ''a-z'' of content marketing. But here, we'll see how to bucket information, or how to manage information in such a way that it provides different perspectives for different audiences.
" Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action." - Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute
The crux of content marketing is to nurture audiences with meaningful engagement and to facilitate the buying process by gently nudging them towards the product/service. The content should reach a broad spectrum of people who interact with the product. In B2B scenarios, the decision-makers might be the managerial category and above, whereas the target user groups could be juniors. In this case, content should be created to engage with both these groups. So the best bet is to start by profiling your audience. Here is a sample audience profile for a software development company.
Level 1, CxO/ Vice Presidents: they are the influencers and visionaries of their organizations. There is a general belief that unless the C-suite is convinced, it is an uphill task to bring in any change or introduce new ideas/products/service.
Level 2, Directors/Managers: they recommend best practices and work closely with the technical teams. They may be the ones who take care of budgeting and overall accountability of their division/department.
Level 3, Team Leads: the ones who have experience in solving problems by using similar products or other methods.
Level 4, Programmers: the hands-on folks who are going to use the product on a daily basis.
Each of these audiences can relate to different aspects of a software product or service. You could say that information needs to be bucketed into different layers to reach these audiences. For this reason, it is a good practice to conceptualize content as a structured layer, from which information can be drilled down.
These audiences look for business, techno-commercial, and technical content. For example, the CxO/VP level mainly looks for information related to business drivers, and programmers might be looking for tech stack-related information. For each level of audience, it’s best to come up with a set of keywords that resonates with their needs.
Depending on your business strategy, market positioning, and available budget, request your SEO specialists to come up with high-volume keywords and their low-volume counterparts. High-volume keywords are hard to compete with. But generally, low-volume keywords are long-tailed with a high focus on specific searches. The long-tailed ones are easy to weave organically into your content, without forcefully fitting them in. They are also optimized for natural language search.
Here are a couple of long-tailed counterparts to high-volume keywords:
High-volume keywords |
Low-volume keywords (long-tailed) |
Digitalization |
Digitalization in insurance industry |
Business applications |
Benefits of intelligence applications in hospitality industry |
Once you know the keywords, coming up with the right content is relatively easy. Here is a sample set of keywords often used by our geeky market researcher to map various sets of audiences for our popular low-code app development platform.
CxO/VP |
Manager |
Leads |
Programmers |
enterprise application platform, digitalization, business applications |
modernizing, replatforming, app modernization, RAD platforms |
integrated development environments (IDEs) low-code platform container-driven app delivery, DevOps teams, delivery automation platform |
open-standards platform, Docker, Kubernetes |
Presenting It Right
Our content team uses these keyword groups to come up with a content plan. Once the right content is planned for each target audience, the next step is to ensure it is presented right. Businesses are evolving faster than even a couple of years ago, which directly impacts content marketing — as many organizations are hard-pressed for time to reach out to audiences in a regular and timely manner. A sure-footed content distribution strategy acts as a shield against this.
Use the analogy of rocks, pebbles, and sand to come up with your content calendar. Let me explain. Plan for one or two short blog posts on a weekly basis (pebbles), and promote them with short tweetable content on social media and other direct and indirect channels with higher frequency (sand). Once you have several blog posts in the same subject/vertical or any other criteria, plan for a whitepaper or e-book on a monthly basis (rocks).
Today, reuse is the natural progression from building and distribution in content marketing. What the audience wanted yesterday is forgotten by today. With this in mind, think about how to reuse existing content and keep the buzz alive. Promote existing relevant content with current keywords and re-reach the audience differently, so that your content stays usable at the pace of your customer needs. A tweak here and a tweak there, a keyword addition here and a new tease there go a long way toward freshening up your existing content — and using it optimally.
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