The Content Mistake that is Consuming your Marketing Budget

It’s eating away at your budget. Wasted hours on content that doesn’t drive traffic to your website and doesn’t yield conversions. Content takes a lot of manpower to produce – product marketers, content marketers, graphic designers, etc. And if you are promoting the content via organic and/or paid efforts you are wasting those resources too.

The mistake being made is creating content without knowing who you are creating it for. That content is just another blade of grass in a big field of generic content. Sure, maybe you have a job title in mind. But what I’m referring to is knowing exactly who you are trying to get the attention of that is most likely to buy your solution.

3 things you need to do before creating more content

1. Identify your target buyer – this may require the help of product management, sales, customer success and marketing to analyze your customer base and determine ideal targets. Tip: In your analysis make sure you consider which customers have the fastest sales cycles, are easiest to implement, get the most value from your solution and that you make the most profit from. The output from this analysis should include:
   1. Which verticals/industries the business should target.
   2. Key firmagraphics such as company size, stage, technology stack, etc.
   3. Key titles of the personas involved in the buying committee.
   4. Pains & trigger events that cause a need for your solution.
2. Determine the value proposition for each persona – this may require some interviews with customers and customer success to better understand the true value that your solution brings to each persona. This will be a matrix with industry on one axis and persona on the other. Tip: Make sure you carefully consider the different needs the personas in each vertical have. For instance, a CIO in Healthcare may have very different pains/challenges than a CIO in Software.
3. Understand ALL the pains and corresponding use cases of each persona – you need to know where the pain that drives the purchase of your offering ranks relative to the other competing issues on their plate. If your relevant pain is in the top two, this is a great persona to pursue with content. If not, STOP creating content for that persona. Even if you get their attention, they won’t help drive the purchase because they have other problems to deal with. Tip: You can do a survey of your customer base to this this information and turn the results into a blog or even a white paper.

What will get a target buyer’s attention?

Once you have your targets identified, you need to determine what will get their attention among a sea of competing content. This takes some research to answer the following for each persona you are targeting:

• What are the trending topics geared toward this persona?
• Do any of the topics relate to the pains/challenges that you solve?
  • Note: If no, you may want to consider targeting a different persona as building awareness in a new topic area is costly and takes a long time.
• What can you add to the discussion on the trending topic(s) that is unique?
  • Tip: Brainstorm this with a team to come up with the best results.

Stop feeding your content marketing engine!

Until you do the above analysis, any time and money spent on content development and marketing is wasted. Slow production as much as you can and put all your resources toward a clear definition of your target personas. Once you have that, you can start developing campaigns and content that will be specific and powerful enough to get the attention of those target buyers. And that’s when content marketing will become your most valued source of revenue.

If you need a little help, Focused B2B can get you through these steps so you can stop wasting marketing budget on unfocused content. Reach out to us today to get your content focused on target buyers.