What’s Really Holding Back The Power of Content Marketing?

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What’s Really Holding Back The Power of Content Marketing?

Bryan Karas

September 21, 2018

There was a very interesting article I came across that talked about “What’s Really Holding Content Marketing Back.”

The author, Danny Blackburn, goes on to say that “As more brands continue to move their focus to digital, we now have more teams – branding, PR, social media, customer service, SEO, sales – producing more content for a wider range of objectives.”

So what’s the problem? Too many teams are creating content. Their content is not focused around the business as a whole but around the short term needs of that team – which forces C-Level folks to focus on the ROI of every piece of content the company puts out…

Makes sense..but I think there’s another problem – companies create “cool” content instead of specifically tailored content that targets the customer or a specific customer persona.

Dick and Jane

The title of one of the most popular children’s books in the 20th Century is called We Play and Pretend – and that’s what most of us do when we create customer personas. Yes, personas are fictional representations of our customer segments but they need to be based on real data that reflects their real behaviors.

Here are some questions you need to ask: What does my customer want to accomplish and what drives their behavior? Why would they hesitate to purchase? What are their expectations and preconceived notions? Is this an emotional purchase or a practical one?

It’s less important about putting a name and face to a persona and more important to understand the psychology that leads to behavior.

From magical fairytales to boring data

Instead of sitting down and creating fake personas off assumptions and past knowledge you probably should go out there and collect real data.

Conduct a survey – online or offline – it doesn’t really matter. What matters is asking open ended questions that will lead to understanding how your customers frame their motivations and needs.

You can use Qualaroo to trigger exit surveys on your website. Your question should revolve around your current goal and should be swapped out to test different questions and gather more insights.

And sometimes you just might have to call a customer. Now I know we live in this digital age where picking up a phone and calling someone up is almost as rare as a bigfoot sighting. But you’d be surprised at how much useful data you can gather by speaking directly with customers (over phone or in person). Just listening to the way they talk, what words they use, could lead to awesome new marketing copy…

Now that you have the data, here’s a great blog post to help you analyze and take action.

4 Case Studies That Will Help Crush It With “Out-of-the-Box” Content Marketing

Just because you’re going to be using data to build your customer personas doesn’t mean the content you create has to be boring. Check out how these four companies used data to create awesome content to generate thousands of visitors to their sites.