Chapter 2
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding the differences in delivering content
Painting portraits of your best customers
Getting smart about telling stories
Making it personal and taking it online
As consumers, Google has taught us that we can quickly find almost any type of information we want when conducting online searches. And, we can expect that the content showing in the search engine results page (SERP) will closely match what we asked for in our search query. As online marketers and online businesses, Google has made it clear that if we want our websites to rank well in search, it’s up to us to provide high-quality content. Not only should the content match the searcher’s intent (what she specifically wanted to know), but also it should anticipate what questions our buyers are asking.
For an online business, that doesn’t mean Google expects you to be a mind reader. But search engines do require that you know your customers extremely well. You must also understand what content buyers find most helpful and anticipate how those content needs change during different stages of the buyer’s journey. Sounds simple, right? Trust us, it really is not that difficult. In this chapter, we show you how content marketing and personalization can work wonders for your website and help meet the needs of search engines and customers.
As an online business, you use content to help drive quality visitors to your website. And search engines, not just Google, then deliver search traffic based on the content that best matches the information request of the customer. This is the goal of content marketing.
Creating useful, interesting content for your website pays. Consider that content marketing leaders get eight times more website traffic than those who don’t use content well, according to technology pioneer, Neil Patel. What kind of content works best? Well, the short answer is that you need a mix of content types, styles, and lengths, which we discuss later in this chapter. But one interesting fact is that while consumers’ attention spans are fading, it’s still the longer form content that captures more site visitors. Top ranking content in Google is between 1,140 and 1,285 words, according to Searchmetrics (www.searchmetrics.com
). And visitors are actually reading the content, spending nearly 40 seconds on long articles (which is a really long time in the online world!). Plus, readers then end up staying longer on the website that hosts the content.
If that’s not enough to prove the value of good content, think about this: Quality content generates three times as many leads compared to that of traditional outbound marketing tactics; and content marketing costs 67 percent less, according to Demand Metric (www.demandmetric.com
). Of course, long-form articles aren’t the only requirement for creating an effective content marketing strategy. Personalized content is an increasingly important component for online success. And when delivered through your website, personalization is specifically referred to as web personalization. Let’s define these three concepts more clearly, because you’ll want to incorporate all of them:
Creating truly useful content starts with understanding as much as possible about the person who is consuming that content. You may have a website that sells to parents, but that’s a very broad category of buyer. You might have a mom of twin toddlers looking for parenting information on your website. She has very different needs than the father of a 14-year-old teenager who is also searching for parenting advice. But both of these buyers are your target customers. You likely have products that appeal to each of them. However, if all your content is based generally about being a parent, it’s going to be tough to convince these two different buyers to remain interested and shop with you. Your job is to provide both of them specific information that most closely matches their needs or interests.
If you have any type of store (online or off), you already understand the necessity of this customer analysis when stocking up on inventory. If you don’t know who is coming to your store and what they are buying, or why they are buying it, then you’re essentially guessing as to what products you should keep in stock. The same approach is needed when developing buyer personas for the purpose of creating content. If you’re not familiar with the term “buyer personas,” it’s simply a profile of your different types of customers that describes as much as possible about who they are and what they want. You might have only two to three different types of customers, but you may also a dozen different customers.
Before you get started writing a profile of each of your best customers, you must have a substantial amount of information about those customers:
Speaking of getting your customers to hand over the keys to their personas, you might wonder what type of information you need to know. This can vary a bit depending on whether you sell B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer), but generally you want to segment them into some common types. For example, in B2B, it may be important to know what their job titles are; that’s because IT roles (or technical job roles) might show an interest in your product or service for very different reasons than business owners or executives. In B2C, you may want to know it’s a parent who works full-time outside the home, or a stay-at-home mom or dad. While both of these parents are your customers, they are motivated to buy from you for different reasons. While this is not an extensive list, following are some of the most common data points you might want to know to start creating a buyer persona:
Once you have sufficient information, it’s time to create a buyer persona. Start by sorting through all the data and interviews and look for common points of interest or common data points. You should be able to quickly begin grouping buyers into categories based on the similarities you uncovered. A buyer persona is actually a fictional customer who is made up of all the real data you collected from those different customer types you uncovered. So, for each buyer persona, you get to create a character.
Start by giving him or her a name and then identify this customer’s buying category, such as “Serina, working mom of teenagers,” or “Bob, stay-at-home dad of preschoolers.” Another key persona for your online business may be “Geraldine, grandmother.” Then, for each of these named personas, continue adding information that details who they are, describes their lives, and shows details about when or why they might buy from you. You’ll also want to include information about where they go (online and off) to get news, parenting tips, and advice about their households. The objective is to figure out who influences them or what other online communities (forums, social media) or websites they depend on for information.
When trying to decide what or how much information to include in a buyer persona, imagine you are at a party with potential investors for your business. You’ve invited several of your top customers to meet the investors so they have a better idea of who is buying from you.
Consider how you might introduce each buyer to the investors so that they feel confident you know about your target market and your buyers. For example, you might say: “Joe, this is one of our top customers, Mary Steady. She has her hands full working full-time and raising two teenage daughters. Although she considers herself to be very cost conscious, she doesn’t mind spending a little extra to shop with us. In fact, Mary buys from us frequently not only because of the quality of our products, which is super important to her, but also because it’s convenient. She doesn’t have to add another trip to the store to her already busy day. Instead, she orders online and knows everything will be on her doorstep with 2 to 3 days. She first discovered our site after a popular parent blogger mentioned it in an article.”
As you see, a buyer persona contains not only basic facts about the shopper, but also it tells a story about your customer’s life and how your product or service fits into her world. Once you get to know your different types of customers, you can give them content that will be interesting and helpful specific to that buyer persona.
There’s a reason content has the reputation of being King in the world of online marketing. Content, in all forms, has the ability to evoke specific actions, or reactions, from readers. And the content creator has the opportunity to shape what those actions or responses should be based on the desired intent. In other words, every piece of your content should serve a specific purpose. If done well, the content should net the desired outcome. When it comes to content marketing, your job is to align the right piece of content (purpose) with the right person (buyer) at the right time (buyer stage) so that you successfully tell your brand’s story and lead that reader (or online shopper) down the path to become a buyer.
In order to understand how best to use content, it helps to categorize it, or determine what type of content goes into which bucket. At the highest level of categorization is the framework. The information you create falls into one of these specific frameworks:
Now that you understand what makes up the content framework, let’s look at another way to organize content based on who creates it.
Today’s online buyers are savvy shoppers. But they are also heavily influenced by others, including peers, trusted advisors (from analysts to bloggers), celebrities, family and friends, and strangers (people leaving product reviews, for example). When researching products and services, there is one information source that online shoppers tend to rank toward the bottom on the trust meter — the brand! This is especially true for paid advertisements, but it applies to content as well. Whom do shoppers trust? Research indicates that friends and family top the list as most trusted, followed by online reviews, and then third-party experts.
Yes, that means your company or brand can crank out a lot of content that tells how great your product is, but at the end of the day the buyer may be skeptical about its value, simply because it came from you. Notice the emphasis we put on the phrase “how great your product is” — that’s because blatant, in-your-face promotional content usually isn’t taken at face value, but other types of content produced by your brand can still be highly trusted. Buyers expect you to say only good things about your product, and that means they have to go other places to figure out potential problems or downsides to your solution. Customer reviews usually help fill in that gap, by providing a more balanced user perspective the looks at both the pros and cons of a product.
On the other hand, if your brand writes articles about industry trends or common problems and how to solve them (without directly naming your product as the solution), buyers are more receptive to hearing from you. Similarly, if you share information from your existing customers (case studies and testimonials, for example), buyers are also more trusting, especially if they can identify with your customer and see similarities to themselves.
While it’s understandable that a direct sales pitch isn’t always seen as the most accurate, you still have to talk about yourself and your products at least some of the time. The bottom line is that you need to produce content pieces that fall into all three of these content segments:
The last category addresses the specific format of the content, or the way in which it’s packaged for consumption. You want to have a wide variety of content types, but here are some of the most common types to add into your content marketing strategy:
As you can see, there are all types of content that serves a wide variety of purposes. For content to be effective in helping convert browsers to online buyers, you need to next match each piece of content to the appropriate stage in the buyer’s journey.
The buyer’s journey represents the path a prospective buyer takes on her way to becoming your customer. That journey is segmented into four stages: awareness (not yet aware of having a need or desire for a product, just exploring); consideration (aware of a need, researching options); decision (choosing a solution, comparing options); and advocacy (loyal customer, sharing experience with others and open to repeat purchases for self). We discuss the buyer’s journey in detail in the previous chapter if you want to learn the nitty-gritty details, or need a refresher.
When you’re ready to map out, or align, your content, start by considering your prospective customer’s intent at each stage of the buyer’s journey. What is it that they want or need to accomplish? What are their goals? How does your product or service meet that goal, or help in achieving the goal? Then, look at the best type of content that can not only address the buyer’s intent at that particular stage in the shopping process, but also convince or entice the reader to move to the next stage. For example, let’s say a buyer is shopping for a floor rug and trying to decide what kind. She has already found a vintage rug your online store has for sale, but is hesitant because she’s unfamiliar with how to care for it, or if it will hold up to wear and tear from her kids and pets. This shopper is in the “decision” stage and if she has access to content that is instructional and promotional, it could help her finalize the decision to buy. In this case, you could provide a quick one-minute video from your company that shows how to care for vintage floor rugs. You might also show a review from other customers who speak to the sturdiness of the rug and its ability to hold up in high-traffic rooms, despite it being an antique. We like to use an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets to identify what content is needed at each stage of the buyer’s journey. You can also tag which personas might need the content most at each stage. When your existing content is mapped out in this way, it’s also a good way to reveal gaps in your content, or what type of content you need more of to ensure there’s something available for everyone at every stage. In Table 2-1, we show you an example of how to map out your content framework, segments, and types to the buyer stage.
TABLE 2-1 Align Your Content to Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey
Stage |
Awareness |
Consideration |
Decision |
Advocacy |
Goal |
Exploration, entertainment (Not yet aware of need) |
Researching, looking for a solution (Recognize a need) |
Comparing solutions/products (Addressing need) |
Sharing results (Committed to brand) |
Content Framework |
Entertaining Educational |
Educational Persuasive Instructional |
Instructional Persuasive Promotional |
Persuasive Instructional |
Content Segment |
User generated Brand generated (unbranded) |
Brand generated (branded) Third-party |
Brand generated (branded) Third-party User generated |
User generated Brand generated (both) |
Content Type(s)* |
Infographics Videos (fun) Trend articles E-books |
White paper E-newsletter Webinars Online reviews |
Free trial Demo Video (how-to) Testimonials, case studies |
Video (testimonials) Video (product tips) Online reviews Social sharing |
Persona |
Decide which of your personas are most likely interested in each stage of content. |
|||
Vertical |
Identify a specific vertical market that matches content you have to offer. |
|||
Name of content |
This is where you identify the exact content you will use. |
*These are examples of the type of content that could fit with each buyer's stage. You could have more or less for each stage.
Having content available for each stage of the buyer’s journey is a critical step in any content marketing strategy. But why stop there? If you want to really increase your chance of influencing the buyer with content, then the information should be personalized as much as possible to that buyer. By “personalized” we mean that the content addresses challenges, needs, or desires that are specific to a particular buyer. If your customer is the office manager for a doctor’s office tasked with shopping for an online appointment service, you want to provide her with content that talks specifically about her industry, healthcare. Your content should discuss patient needs, for example, when talking about how easy it is to use the service. Compare that scenario to another customer type. You might also do a lot of business with hair salons. For that buyer, you want content that addresses the hairdresser’s customer, or perhaps how an online appointment service can help a salon have fewer cancellations. As you see, personalized content is just that — it is written with a particular buyer’s needs in mind and speaks the language of that buyer, or her industry.
For online businesses, content personalization primarily occurs via your website, also known as web personalization. As with any online system, you need to make sure that all your online systems communicate in order to pass the right information (or, in this case, the right content) to the right website visitors, at the right time. Let’s take a look at some of the backend system considerations, as well as some online tools that can make personalization easier for you to accomplish on your site.
Just as you may have a backend inventory management system that needs to relay information to your shopping cart, there are other systems you may use to talk with customers. And in content personalization, it’s important that these systems or tools integrate, or communicate, with one another to pass along pieces of information that lets you personalize your content. Here are some of the systems and tools that are likely to be involved in the web personalization process and need the ability to communicate with one another:
www.salesforce.com
) or SugarCRM (www.sugarcrm.com
) for this functionality. Whichever solution you choose, you want to make sure it has the capability to integrate with the other tools we mention in this section.www.marketo.com
) or Eloqua (from Oracle). Even if you are a smaller online business, you probably use e-mail software such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, or Pardot (from Salesforce). Like a CRM, your marketing automation software also keeps a lot of information about customers and prospective buyers that is helpful in personalizing content.As you begin to implement a personalization strategy in your content and on the web, you first need to decide how to segment your audience or visitors. If a visitor has never volunteered information about herself to you (by filling out a form or creating a customer profile), then getting information starts with cookies. When it comes to the web, you’re able to use cookies, or a tracking code, to identify some things about your visitors and follow them around your site. If they leave and return, you are still able to use the cookie (unless the user clears his web browser cache which would remove any cookie tracking).
Even if you’re not familiar with implementing this process on your website, you’ve very likely been “cookie’d” yourself. Have you ever visited an e-commerce shop and looked at a specific product? After leaving the site without purchasing, you’ve probably noticed an ad for that exact product or website show up in your Facebook feed and in ads on other websites. Or, if you return to the site, you may see content or offers that are based on your previous browsing behaviors. Similarly, with the use of cookies, you can now decide some of the ways you want to segment or group your website visitors. First, there are two general types of visitors to consider:
Depending on whether you are targeting known or unknown visitors, here are some examples of other ways you can segment visitors to offer more personalized content:
As you see, the more information you have access to about your visitor, the more specific you can get with segmenting.
One of our favorite things about having an Internet business is that there is almost always no shortage of online tools to help manage and grow your business. This is certainly the case with content personalization for the web. Here are some of our favorite solutions that make it easy to use personalization on your site in an effort to increase conversions — and revenue!
www.triblio.com
): Considered an Account Based Marketing (ABM) tool, Triblio allows you to show personalized content and offers on your website to prospective buyers. You can provide your content to known and unknown website visitors, as well as show personalized content to targeted buyers (specific leads or accounts you are trying to influence and sell to). Triblio also works with e-mail or marketing automation platforms and Google AdWords.www.folloze.com
): Account-based marketing is also a core capability for this personalization tool. But one of the things we really like about Folloze is the unique method for delivering personalized content to buyers. Folloze lets you create content boards that contain many different pieces of content all designed for a specific buyer. Think of it in terms of a Pinterest-style layout of a board (or online page) that groups your content in one easy to access place. Figure 2-1 shows an example of a personalized board from the Folloze website. Another benefit of this tool is that it not only tracks who engages with or visits the board, but which pieces of content they interact with; and it lets you see who the prospective buyer is that is viewing the board. You can put a link to a Folloze board in an e-mail, on a page of your site, or just about anywhere.www.evergage.com
): This content personalization tool monitors your site visitors’ intent in order to know which content to show them. In addition to tracking what places of offers get clicked, Evergage also tracks how much time is spent on each page, where the visitors’ computer mouse hovers, and how they scroll through a page. Looking at a host of data points as they occur on your site in real-time, or why a visitor is actually on the site, the tool uses machine-based learning to make recommendations and decisions on which content to deliver to the visitor. Evergage is designed for large e-tailers and other sites with heavy traffic, and can identify the users and what purchases or interests they’ve had on other sites and then recommend similar products or content to be shown on your site.FIGURE 2-1: Create a custom board to deliver highly personalized content to buyers using Folloze.
There are plenty more web personalization and account based marketing tools available. And, you don’t have to start out using the tools, which can range from several hundred dollars per month to several thousand dollars monthly. These tools are a significant investment. But to compete online today, offering a one-to-one personalized approach to marketing with content and product offers is quickly becoming a necessity in order for you to remain competitive.
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