For your business to be successful, you need to manage the relationships that you have with your prospects, customers and stakeholders. While managing these relationships at different levels right from a suspect stage till the contract closure stage, you will need different forms of ‘effective marketing content’. What is this ‘Effective’ marketing content then?
Content comes in different forms and takes the shape of different marketing artifacts (e.g. Flyers, Brochures, Articles, White papers, Blogs, Website content, email newsletters, Press releases, Case studies, and Customer testimonials) at different points in time. For it to be effective, it should meet the objectives and the purpose at different levels in the buying cycle.
Here are some characteristics of great & effective marketing content
- Compelling & Engaging
With the initial few pares/words/subject headers/abstract, it should feel compelling to go through the details included. It should engage the attention of the reader and arouse enough curiosity.
- Relevant & Fulfilling
Having generated the curiosity, the promised value should be delivered (fulfilled) by the content. This avoids the negative effect of disappointing the reader and also increases the chance of the content being further distributed / recommended amongst peer communities.
- Convenient and user friendly
Content should be simple, convenient and in an appropriate format. Content should be designed, specifically for print or for electronic views.
How do you go about generating such kind of content then?
It takes a lot of efforts and planning, but here are some things you can do:
1) Research
- Research your target audience, who is going to consume the content
- Understand the objectives that you need to achieve with the content
- Research your competitors to understand what they are talking about
- Research your target industry to look for any signs of any trends/implications developing and how these are going to be affecting your target audience.
2) Generate content repositories and filter
- Gather all reference content that you feel can be re-used in some way to meet the above objectives.
- Do Intelligent Tagging and maintain your content repository well, so that you can get to the content that you want, when you need to.
3) Write, Refine, Package & Publish
- Define your content headers and start populating content. If you keep looking at your repos, you may never be able to start. Focus on your objectives
- Refine content in line with the objectives
- Package, as appropriate for the format in which it is going to be used. Use Design effectively
- Publish content
Let me know your thoughts!
Atul
https://www.xenia-consulting.com/
Linked IN – http://www.linkedin.com/companies/1015090
Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=129562663721686
Twitter – https://twitter.com/xeniaconsulting
Atul is Founder & CEO at Xenia Consulting. He has over 22 years of experience in marketing, across corporates as well as SME,start-ups. Over the last 5 years, he has gained significant expertise and has helped several companies drive growth leveraging digital marketing
Aniket
Hi Atul,
Nice article, but u r focussed more on the back end and not even mentioning the use of 'appropriate imagesdiagrams', that is so important specially if you are targetting the 'tech' janta. Apart from that I think the communication that gets flowing between u and the client is more important and the collaterals only give you an 'excuse' to talk further and move on. The credibility and performance on the provider's side is the most important. Also I think it is important to test whether the communication is 'implantinginducing' the right action on the receiver's end before finalizing on the content. There are broadly two such categories…FYI and FYA…You should be able to test which way the receiver would go after you publish the content
-Aniket