We’ve been closely monitoring the exciting developments in AI that can boost productivity and transform content creation. At WriterAccess, we’re ready to take the next big leap and tap into the tremendous potential of AI to make your content even more relevant and impactful.  

Streamlining content research and gap analysis seamlessly, we’ve cut down the time to find the best content creation opportunities from hours or days to just a few minutes.

This game-changing feature will ultimately link your content strategy with top organic traffic opportunities. Let’s dive into how it works and how it can help you create better content.

Enhance your content strategy

Identify gaps in your current strategy and explore new opportunities to grow your audience. 

Based on your inputs, data, and AI, we will research the best keyword opportunities for you and compare your keywords with your competitors to identify gaps and opportunities. 

You will be able to discover untapped potential and bridge existing gaps to expand your audience effortlessly. 

Find the best content opportunities faster

What takes this to the next level, is how AI Content Wizard can speed up your work by helping you overcome writer’s block, and finding effective solutions more quickly.

During our early customer interviews, we identified that content research is not only crucial but can also be time-consuming when developing a robust content strategy. 

Content strategists dedicate hours and weeks to understanding the business and audience, and researching keywords and topics that have the potential to become relevant clusters within a content editorial plan that is effective in attracting qualified readers.

What if you could perform extensive content research based on reliable data in minutes instead of hours? That’s what we aim to deliver with the new AI Content Wizard. 

Say goodbye to the days or even hours spent researching content ideas and generate valuable insights in a fraction of the time. 

Leverage reliable real-time data

Today, it’s not enough to simply create content. 

Marketers face increased pressure to showcase its tangible impact regarding business outcomes and revenue. 

Stakeholders expect content that will go way beyond being well-written and relevant or complying with Google E-E-A-T guidelines. 

Content teams must effectively captivate the right audience for every funnel stage. 

Organic traffic volumes are the minimum expectation for top-of-the-funnel content. However, the specialized bottom-of-the-funnel content is increasing in importance and is expected to convert even more into leads, MQLs, deals, and revenue. 

Achieving this kind of result requires a well-crafted content strategy, where efficiency is critical in achieving success. And to be efficient, you need to rely on accurate data.

AI Content Wizard will allow content teams to find the best content opportunities based on real-time metrics such as the difficulty index of keywords and search volume. 

You can rely on accurate data from our proprietary Web Crawler and SEMRush API to quickly identify the most promising opportunities for success.

WriterAccess also integrates with many other tools. Click here to know more about them!

Increase organic traffic that resonates with your audience

Create persuasive, compelling copy that speaks to the needs of your target audience while exploring the best organic ranking opportunities. The AI Content Wizard will craft theme and article suggestions considering the best organic opportunities according to your persona and industry information. 

Our algorithms not only assist in generating clever ideas to expand your audience reach but also provide comprehensive content briefings.

Our briefings provide accurate keyword data and a comprehensive outline that can be used to develop content drafts or place article orders through our extensive talent network. 

With more than 15,000 freelancers, our vetted talent network contains only the most talented professionals. We hand-review portfolios, host screening tests, and assign star ratings for pricing based on performance and customer reviews.

Want to get to know who our experts are? Check out our top talent here.

Rest assured that professionals with real-life industry expertise will craft your content. With over 75 talent pools covering various industries, we ensure relevant and engaging content tailored to your audience. Experience the difference that real human expertise makes in creating compelling content for your readers.

With WriterAccess and our new AI Content Wizard, you can build high-quality content and drive more organic traffic to your website with ease.

Count me in! How does it work?

AI Content Wizard makes it a breeze. 

Just input your domain, pick your competitors and keywords, and write a brief description of your audience. Sit back and watch as the tool generates a comprehensive list of opportunities. 

Leverage this valuable resource to create content order drafts or even place article orders directly through our vast talent network. Try out WriterAccess and our new AI Content Wizard absolutely free with a 14-day trial. Unleash the power of effortless, captivating, and results-driven content creation. Sign up today.

The post Supercharge Your Content Strategy with the AI Content Wizard at WriterAccess appeared first on Rock Content.

In January 2020, InfoStream made the decision to start working with WriterAccess, completely transforming their content creation processes and boosting their own credibility in the content creation space. And they haven’t looked back—relying on WriterAccess for up to 25 new orders per month.

We recently had the pleasure of speaking with InfoStream’s own Chief Operating Officer (COO), Andrea Simmons. In our interview, we discussed the unique challenges that led InfoStream to WriterAccess, what set WriterAccess apart from other platforms, and the results InfoStream has achieved as a result.

The Challenge of Creating Quality Content Across Industries

Prior to working with Rock Content’s WriterAccess, Simmons explains the challenges that InfoStream faced in delivering quality, specialized content to clients across a diverse range of industries. Content is a key element in their work—whether they are building a website, developing digital marketing plans for social media, or tackling SEO.

Before WriterAccess, InfoStream had a team of extremely talented in-house writers. However, as Simmons discusses, “No matter how skilled our [in-house] content writers are, it wasn’t possible for them to have experience in all industries. It wasn’t possible for them to know our clients or our client’s industries.”

As a result, InfoStream’s in-house writers were spending large amounts of time conducting research for specific industry content, resulting in delayed project timelines and frustration. Meanwhile, Simmons explains “We would lose credibility with our clients because, yes, we had a writer—but we didn’t know their business well enough.”

Enter WriterAccess: Managed Services, Specialized Writers, and Built-In Quality Control

Encountering these challenges, the team at InfoStream began looking into other options for content creation. They needed writers who would be able to create quality content for any industry as a means of boosting credibility and confidence with their clients while keeping projects on track.

They tried different freelancer platforms like Freelancer and Fiverr, but they quickly found that finding writers through these platforms was equally time-consuming because they needed to screen and select specialized writers for each client (and sometimes for each project).

Ultimately, InfoStream stumbled across WriterAccess and found that the platform had everything they were looking for to create quality content for their clients across every imaginable industry. The key differentiator, as Simmons explains, is WriterAccess’ Managed Services, a membership option that offers a dedicated point of contact, workflow management, and hand-picked talent for a company’s unique needs.

“We were very much drawn to that to save time and energy, and also have confidence in [the] product. Michelle has been our Managed Service provider since we started and it’s been fantastic. […] I’ve personally worked with her in the beginning and now she works with all the project managers, but she and I still have been touching base as we develop the relationship and the volume of the work we’re doing.”

Working with WriterAccess has not only simplified the process of finding specialized writers for InfoStream’s diverse client base but has freed up valuable time and improved quality control. With WriterAccess, InfoStream and its clients are able to get content that is unique and reliable with a quick turnaround time.

The Results: Reliable Writing and SEO Services

Since starting with WriterAccess in January 2020, InfoStream has placed more than 2,200 orders and is now able to provide reliable writing and SEO services in a credible and stable way for all of its clients. Having Managed Services alleviates quality control concerns and offers a consistency that improves their relationship and reputation with their clients. 

Meanwhile, InfoStream’s team members no longer need to spend their valuable time writing job descriptions and placing ads for individual freelancer writers to meet their content requirements. Instead, they can simply pass along what they’re looking for to their Managed Services provider and have access to qualified, hand-picked talent quickly.

Likewise, since using WriterAccess, every one of Infostream’s clients uses the company’s writing services—and the team is able to provide credible SEO services to clients as well. This has diversified their offerings and further solidified InfoStream’s reputation in the digital marketing realm.

And despite the current trend to turn to AI platforms like ChatGPT for content creation, Simmons maintains that the actual value of marketing content lies in its authenticity and its ability to speak to a customer’s pain points. As she explains, “We believe that there’s going to come a time when authentic content is going to be higher-ranked than something that’s AI-generated. […] We do believe in authenticity because, in the past, we’ve seen that win.”

With WriterAccess, companies like InfoStream get authentic, well-researched, quality content that they can feel proud delivering to their clients. And that’s what will set it apart from anything generated by a chatbot.

The Bottom Line

When InfoStream needed a diverse pool of writers to meet its clients’ wide range of content needs, WriterAccess was able to deliver. Meanwhile, the WriterAccess platform and the Managed Service offering continue to deliver, with approximately 25 new content assets created for Infostream each month. Now, what can we do for you? Get in touch to learn more or get started with a free demo today.

The post How to Create High-Quality Content for Clients From Different Industries? InfoStream’s Secret is WriterAccess appeared first on Rock Content.

In fact, businesses have recognized the power of blogging and its potential for generating consistent revenue. However, blogging goes beyond merely writing a piece and adding a couple of photos to it.

With blogging now being more mainstream, it’s imperative for companies to invest in the right kind of blog to reach their target audience.

So, let’s break down the four types of blogs that thrive across different industries and discover how you can start building one today.

Exploring the Diversity of Blogging

There was a time when blogs were solely the medium of individuals, but today, more businesses than ever have their own blogs. In fact, a majority (77 percent) of Fortune 500 businesses have a dedicated blog.

Similarly, over half (55 percent) of B2B brands believe blogging is the best way to move a client through a sales funnel. Overall, blogging is a fantastic way for companies to reach their audiences and convert leads into sales.

However, it’s crucial to find the right type of blog, as important as creating the content itself. Although there are no strict rules for blogging, there are clear benefits to this approach:

• It is easier to come up with blog content.
• You can build your audience faster and engage them more efficiently.
• You’ll have better conversion rates by connecting with your reader.

So, with that in mind, here are the five types of blogs and how they can work for your business.

1. Informative Blogs: Educating and Inspiring

More than anything else, the internet is a vast repository of information. Whether a customer wants to find out more about a product or a historical fact, the details are just a click away.

Informative blogs exist to provide insight into specific topics related to your industry. The more informative and engaging, the faster the blog will grow its audience.

For example, let’s say you sell kitchen appliances to average consumers. One of the best ways to provide valuable information related to those appliances is to share recipes with your audience. These recipes can be simple and easy to make, especially if the reader has a particular appliance or tool.

Overall, the primary purpose of an informative blog is to add value to the reader. Then, once they have their information, you can sell them a product or service related to the post. The best way to leverage an informative blog is to position these products or services as essential components in solving a problem.

Using our recipe example, if the product is a food chopper, the blog can remark on how fast and easy it is to use the chopper to dice vegetables and how much prep time can be saved. If readers are looking for time-saving products and tips, they’ll be more likely to buy the chopper.

Best for: Retailers and e-commerce sites

2. Personal Blogs: Sharing Experiences and Stories

A personal blog, as the name implies, is usually not associated with a business, at least not directly. However, businesses can leverage personal blogs for influencer marketing purposes. Additionally, personal blogs provide an excellent opportunity to establish an affiliate marketing network within a specific niche, such as parenting or travel.

Personal blogs are all about the individual running the account, even if they outsource the writing. The purpose of this blog is to share one’s experiences and insights, typically centered around a specific topic.

One example of a personal blog could be someone who is living as a digital nomad. They could write about what it’s like to be a nomad, how they find work, how they manage different aspects of daily life, and more.

In this case, the blog will be highly valuable to other nomads who want to learn how to get started (or just want to converse with other like-minded individuals).

As far as the business side of things, companies that sell products or services that help nomads (i.e., RV equipment, travel accessories) can sponsor posts. Similarly, the company can write a guest post that leads readers to their website to purchase products.

Best for: individuals who want to build an audience, businesses that want to tap into influencer marketing

3. Niche Expert Blogs: Establishing Authority

An expert blog is kind of the reference section of a library ‒ the point is to become a trusted resource within your industry. In this case, instead of writing fun and casual blog posts, each post should be informative and professional enough to be a reference source for someone else.

Building a niche expert blog can be hugely advantageous for businesses for a couple of reasons:

• More Backlinks ‒ Google and other search engines rank sites partially based on how many people link to them. When you’re a trusted resource, smaller companies and blogs will link to your content.
• More Traffic ‒ As you become established within the industry, fellow professionals and insiders will start to visit your blog more often. Also, when customers are looking for a high-quality business, they’re more likely to visit your posts as well.
• Better Brand Recognition ‒ Growing your brand is much easier when people come to your blog to find out more information about a specific topic. Sites like HubSpot and Rock Content are good examples, as authorities within the digital marketing niche, they have excellent brand recognition within their industry.

For niche expert blogs, it’s also imperative to develop both evergreen and topical content. For example, if a news segment relates to your industry, you can write a post from your brand’s perspective to provide added value to the reader.

Best for: B2B Brands and authoritative businesses (i.e., lawyers and doctors)

4. Visual Blogs: Engaging Through Images and Videos

Although all blogs incorporate visual elements, a visual blog puts these pieces front and center, typically with text as a secondary option. A perfect example of this is a video blog, which uses video segments instead of written articles and posts.

Since video marketing is such a valuable tool for businesses, it makes sense to host a vlog. However, video content is also a lot more expensive to produce, so it’s imperative to have a lean production and publication process that can turn ideas into full-fledged videos as efficiently as possible.

In many cases, a business may develop a visual blog in tandem with a traditional blog. For example, a company that sells lawn care equipment could have a visual blog that shows how to use the machinery and make minor repairs as necessary. In this case, the vlog is a niche authority that can help drive more traffic to the website and individual product pages.

Other types of visual blogs can include food and travel blogs, in which images of exotic locales and delicious dishes are just as vital as the information about them.

Best for: Design-Heavy businesses, product tutorials, entertainment-based businesses

Bottom Line: Blogging is a Must for Your Business

Discovering the value of a compelling blog is one thing, but building it from the ground up is an entirely different challenge. Thankfully, you don’t need to be a wordsmith pro to leverage this powerful marketing tool.

Content creation platforms like WriterAccess can connect you with talented writers from all corners of the globe.

With WriterAccess, you can effortlessly obtain top-notch blog content that’s tailor-made for your needs, ensuring you can meet the demands of your audience.

Scale production as required and keep the flow of engaging content going. The best part? You can seize a fantastic opportunity with WriterAccess’s free two-week trial. See for yourself what a great blog can do for your business!

The post 4 Types of Blogs That Thrive Across Industries appeared first on Rock Content.

How can you use it in a way that amazes your audience and makes sense to your brand — all of that while fitting into your budget?

The best way to find that answer is to look at successful cases and understand why they did.

To help you with that part, we listed 6 great Digital Marketing examples to get inspiration and learn from.

Let’s take a look!

1. American Express: Building Authority

Creating great content aimed at a specific target (your buyer persona) is the best strategy when you want to build authority. But what does that word really mean in a Digital Marketing context?

When a brand is recognized as an authority, it means a good amount of people go after it for reliable and trustworthy information on a determined topic.

That was the image AMEX wanted to build when they kick started a big Content Marketing campaign with a site called Open Forum — now Trends and Insights.

The idea was to give relevant information and help the public with all matters related to their corporate solutions: financial news, trends for businesses, tips for marketing, sales, productivity, and cash flow.

The results were as successful as they planned. With the constant flow of articles and posts, the website became a reference for entrepreneurs starting their businesses and growing bigger.

But the real secret behind AMEX’s case is in borrowing the authority from those who already have it.

A Content Marketing strategy can be done solely in-house, but the company chose to go after industry leaders and well-known names to contribute with their insights and lessons.

So, why not do it too? Inviting professionals with a name in your area is a great idea to attract more leads and create an important relationship with influencers.

2. Airbnb: Focusing on User-Generated Content

Specialized articles are great for creating authority, but there’s another strategy that is perfect for brand awareness, engagement with the public and generating leads organically. We are talking, of course, about user-made content.

Airbnb is a company that fully embraced this Digital Marketing channel by allowing all users to share their travel experiences on all platforms and social media.

But they went even further. What is the perfect content for a hotel business? Tourism, obviously. So Airbnb started to promote and encourage videos, photos and travel guides created by owners and clients.

The visual part of it is essential. Instagram is an important channel for the company because it resonates with what its audience wants. This is one of the best digital marketing examples from this list.

And nothing stops you from doing the same. Give incentives and promote the content your leads and clients are creating that makes sense to your business. Let them be part of your brand image.

3. Lyft: Creating Promoters

A great accomplishment in Digital Marketing is turning clients into promoters. It’s making your user base find more leads for you.

This is usually achievable by creating loyalty programs or giving special conditions in exchange. It is a way to encourage and spread word-of-mouth advertising.

It is exactly what Lyft did and it worked. Even competing with a greater player on the market, the ride-share app found its space offerings incentives like free rides for the users who were referring the service to their friends and family.

When this strategy is tied to a brand focused on delivering excellence, it becomes a lead generation powerhouse.

There’s nothing more convincing to us than being recommended service by someone we trust and then having our expectations met. How about trying that too?

4. Domino’s: Embracing New Technologies

Among these Digital Marketing examples, Domino’s is a good case to understand how knowing new technologies and acting fast can pay out.

Domino’s Anyware is a tool focused not on the product itself, but how you order it. The software (available on multiple platforms) is voice-activated, tied with an AI capable of interpreting and understanding what you want.

It improved sales, for sure, but the biggest return from this strategy is in brand image.

Being known as a company that embraces and pushes technology is a big advantage, especially among younger crowds.

5. Sephora: Taking The Omnichannel Path

Sephora is seen in the market today as one of the big players in the Digital Marketing field. That’s not because of any specific strategy, but how they managed to have a huge online presence overall.

The company’s focus is on being wherever its audience is. Social media, of course, has a big role, as the products have a great visual appeal.

The result is what is called shoppable experiences — rich content like a tutorial in a video that ties valuable information to direct advertising or an interactive quiz that shows the best product for you.

And there’s more. Sephora goes all-in on omnichannel. They sell on Instagram, they have a great user experience on their website and they even explore geolocated ads for their shops.

It is a great example of knowing your persona, being available, and creating customer loyalty. One of the outstanding digital marketing examples to never forget.

6. Slack: Focusing On Solutions

Slack shows that Digital Marketing efforts don’t end when the lead is converted.

It is a team collaboration tool for enterprises, no matter their size or configuration. It is a complete and flexible platform focused on productivity and decision-making.

If your business delivers a service as they do, you need to understand that you are not selling a product, but a solution.

This is the insight that built Slack’s support around user experience. They have a specialized team that responds to thousands of tickets every day, helping their base not only to use the technology but to do more with it.

The proximity to active clients results in loyalty. And loyalty is key to the market’s future.

7. Red Bull: Understanding The Impact of Viral Content

Source: Red Bull YouTube channel

It takes genius content strategy and luck to go viral, and this is one of those digital marketing examples we simply had to share. However, Red Bull has managed to capture viral moments consistently and turn them into content, relying on users’ hunger for the thrill.

Satisfying this thrill is critical to how widespread a piece of content can be. This is where Red Bull excels — understanding that satisfying humans’ curiosity can be piqued with standout content.

You can see this in full display with the Red Bull Stratos video, where Felix Baumgartner was broadcast live, jumping from the edge of space.

This video depicted Red Bull’s slogan, “Red Bull gives you wings,” without outrightly selling throughout the video. It became an instant success with over 6.8 million views on the energy drink’s official YouTube channel.

Sometimes people are tired of being sold to; they just want a story interesting enough to share with their loved ones. So why not tell your story differently?

8. Volkswagen: Stirring Nostalgia

Source: Ads of Brands YouTube channel

Volkswagen’s The Last Mile campaign was a farewell to the Beetle lineup, reinstating the shift to electric automobiles.

The entire video is centered around nostalgia. A boy grows up falling in love with his father’s Beetle and shares key milestones in his life with the iconic vehicle.

As the story continues, you can hear a children’s choir rendition of The Beatles’ classic tune “Let It Be.” The ad establishes an emotional connection with the audience and shows the diehard fans of the Beetle that it is just as painful to discontinue the vehicle lineup.

Don’t be afraid of change. Utilize nostalgia to keep the old fans interested in where you are going with your new audience.

9. Apple: Leveraging Customer Engagement

Source: TechCrunch

Aside from mastering the art of selling status and luxury to its users, Apple has taken customer engagement to a new level with organic social media campaigns like “Shot on iPhone.”

The campaign was intended to show off the clarity of the iPhone 6’s camera. Seventy-five iPhone users submitted a total of 77 images.

The result of the campaign was revolutionary and is the perfect digital marketing example that shows how customer participation can be leveraged for marketing purposes.

Engaging with users and valuing their participation stimulates brand loyalty and can make your brand a talking point in gatherings of enthusiasts and critics alike.

10. L’Oréal: Adopting Augmented Reality (AR)

Source: Future Stores

The thought of trying out multiple wears at the clothing store to find your perfect fit can be discouraging. Trying out cosmetics is a bit more delicate, especially when boasting a makeup lineup as extensive as L’Oréal’s.

Makeup lovers care more about the final look wearing makeup gives them. Using the Makeup Genius app and Magic Mirrors, L’Oréal users can now try out and compare hundreds of looks within seconds using their phones.

This shortens the time it takes to satisfy a customer and make sales.

Pushing the boundaries of innovation with your brand allows you to reach the point where only you can provide the value needed to make your customers happy.

11. Protein Works: Decentralizing Sales

Source: The Protein Works

Accepting that not everyone will know about your product regardless of how much you invest in ads is one of the first steps to crushing your sales goals.

Through its affiliate marketing program, Protein Works is reaching new audiences and making more sales. They bank on the trust prospects have in their affiliate marketers to generate the required buzz and traffic for their products.

Affiliate marketers are rewarded every time a sale is made using their coupon codes or referral links. The company opens its program to influencers and non-influencers because the degree of trust is not based on popularity alone.

Operate a more decentralized lead and sales channel. Interpersonal interactions are essential to establishing trust and creating a more lasting connection with your brand.

12. GoPro: Allowing Their Users To Tell the Story

Source: GoPro YouTube channel

Inspiring emotion in prospects in a way that they choose to become users of your products is one marketing strategy we all can learn from GoPro.

GoPro encourages users to share videos from their adventures and journeys. They are uploaded on the brand’s official YouTube channel. User-generated content shows other users and non-users that they don’t have to be professionals to produce stunning-looking visuals.

Because of this simple act of letting users tell their stories, YouTube is the brand’s social media with the most traffic.

Showcase everyday stories because the majority of your users are ordinary people. This will create more of a personal connection with your brand.

13. JetBlue: Delivering Impeccable Customer Service

Source: JetBlue

Focusing on customers’ needs as you grow can be challenging. Twitter is often utilized as a promotional space for brands’ services, and JetBlue found a way to incorporate customer service into it.

Only a few social media can be used to cater to the needs and complaints of your followers, especially when it is a large community. And JetBlue strikes a balance between promoting its products and services and attending to users.

Good customer service can never go out of style. As more companies make their complaints and self-service channels less human, you should find a way to make users welcome by taking a contrary approach.

14. Uniqlo: Curating Hybrid Shopping Experiences

Source: Fashion Journal

Ever asked yourself what you want your brand to be recognized for? You do not have to align with the traditional industry for the products you sell; the experience you drive determines the industry you represent.

Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo has always seen itself as a technology and not a fashion brand. Uniqlo launched the world’s first fast-moving image campaign. Taking a photo of the billboard delivers a unique promo code with which users can purchase products on their website.

Thinking outside your industry by implementing non-traditional ad campaigns exposes you to a larger audience that will remain loyal to your brand after the initial fascination phase.

15. Dollar Shave Club (DSC): Focusing On The Essentials

Source: Dollar Shave Club YouTube Channel

This is solid evidence that companies selling everyday products like razors can offer excellent digital marketing examples.

But we can all agree that the type of product you sell influences your ad. Yeah, that’s why you sometimes find commercials for shaving sticks and blades boring.

DSC changed all that with its launch video. They made fun of the soaring market prices of newer shaving technologies by making funny references to what users need and what they don’t.

The result? They amassed a loyal fanbase that appreciated them selling cheaper than the competition and for their fun content.

Wrap Up

We hope you enjoyed these crazy-good digital marketing examples — let them be your inspiration!

In the cases we’ve presented, you saw strategies to attract, build a brand image, turn clients into promoters, and improve retention.

The bottom line then is clear: embracing the internet with great ideas and great content can help your visibility in multiple ways.

Not sure where to start? No problem! WriterAccess is the ideal platform to help you streamline your content production, combining the efficiency of AI-powered tools with the creativity of human writers.

Enjoy 14 days of free access to our network of expert writers and discover what great content can do for your business!

The post 15 Digital Marketing Examples to Inspire Your Strategy appeared first on Rock Content.

Incredible content that resonates with your audience and attracts the trust of search engines is the heartbeat of any digital marketing strategy.

But you can’t simply guess what will work and produce content at random if you’re serious about getting results. You need a solid plan based on research, data, and experience. 

A content production strategy helps provide that structured plan. Here’s what you need to know to put together a good one.

What Are the 3 Components of Content Strategy?

A content strategy plan covers everything involved in not only creating web content but delivering, planning, and managing it, as well. And content doesn’t start and stop at written words, either. Videos, audio content, multimedia graphics, and various other types of content are relevant, too.

Start your journey toward a truly fantastic content strategy plan by learning what digital marketing experts call the three components of content strategy, and keep them in mind as you move forward with your plans.

1. Brand Focus

Brands have more in common with individual people than you might think. They have personalities, unique points of view, and voices. 

Modern consumers often make purchase decisions based on how well they relate to a brand on an interpersonal level, and a good content strategy plan takes this into consideration.

A well-planned content strategy involves choosing topics and approaches that are fully in line with a company’s established brand identity. Those themes also need to be relevant to both the company’s business goals and its customers’ needs.

2. Customer Experience

User experience is all the rage these days, and this is only becoming a bigger focal point as time goes by. 

Search engines like Google are looking for genuinely helpful content that does the best job of answering searchers’ questions and addressing their needs.

Content that delivers a positive user experience is content that really sings on multiple levels. It’s content that taps into what matters to your visitors and holds their attention. 

It’s formatted with readability, reader comprehension, and user-friendliness in mind, as well.

3. Content Distribution

A great content strategy plan is about more than just the content itself. You could have the most incredibly made, relevant content on the entire internet, and it still won’t succeed if you don’t have a practical approach to content distribution.

That said, your content strategy needs to follow up with a solid plan that dictates where you’ll publish it and when. Choose channels, times, and posting circumstances that are the most likely to positively impact your audience’s level of engagement with your brand.

What Are the 5 Steps to Developing a Content Strategy?

No two brands or companies are exactly alike, so it only stands to reason that no two content strategies will be, either. 

But there are certain key steps every digital marketer needs to take in order to ensure all their bases are covered.

The following are known as the 5 steps to content strategy development. Carefully consider how they apply to your brand and should be implemented for you to reach your unique goals.

1. Set clearly defined goals

Content that helps your brand connect with readers and boosts your bottom line is content that was created with a clear purpose in mind. 

That said, the first step toward creating a content strategy plan that truly delivers is defining both your long-term and short-term goals for what you’re putting out there.

• Are you looking to build your audience, establish your unique brand identity, or something else entirely?
• Is the objective to sell a particular product, gain newsletter subscribers, or build your social media following?

You need to know where you’re going before you can start your journey.

2. Understand your target audience

Yes, part of the point of putting together a winning content strategy in the first place is to impress Google and rocket your site to the top of the SERPs. 

But it’s crucial to keep in mind that Google’s algorithm is designed to deliver search results that real people are looking for.

That said, content that resonates with Google is always going to be content that also registers with living, breathing people looking for information and answers to their burning questions. So get to know your audience inside-out.

• What demographics do they belong to?
• Where do they live, and what unique concerns might customers from those areas have?
• Do they have families or own homes? What are their approaches to those things?
• Which types of jobs do they work, and how much do they make?
• What are they afraid of, what inspires them, and what are they hoping for in the future?
• Where do your company and product fit in with these concerns?

A solid set of buyer personas can help you answer questions like these and tap into what your existing (or desired) audience would like to see from you.

3. Audit your existing content

At this point, you don’t just know what type of content you’re looking to produce. You also know which audiences you’re writing it for and why. But you’re still not done crafting your content strategy plan yet.  

First, you need a better understanding of where your current content catalog is and what purpose it’s serving.

• What’s the underlying message or point of view? Is it in line with your current brand identity?
• What pieces resonated well with your audience? What do those pieces have in common?
• Are there any content gaps that need to be filled moving forward?

A content audit can help you answer questions like those in preparation for putting a new content strategy into action. 

An audit may also involve updating staple content, removing posts that no longer serve your purpose, optimizing your on-page SEO, and making some adjustments to technical SEO.

This is also a great opportunity to get a read on how your competitors are approaching content production – especially if they’re outranking you on the SERPs. What are they doing that you’re not? How can you learn from what you see and improve upon it?

4. Brainstorm themes for your content

This is the point where you start applying what you know and have learned about your target audience to the creation of new content. Start by identifying the key strengths, priorities, and themes attached to your brand identity.

Collectively, these will become the foundation for your new, emerging content strategy plan. Ideally, the goal is to do more than simply drive traffic and sell products. 

Great content is a brand’s opportunity to bring something unique to the table.

At this point, there really isn’t anything such as a new content idea. The uniqueness of a great piece of content comes from the one-of-a-kind point of view behind it. 

So decide what you’d like to say, as well as what media forms and platforms are the best fit for it.

5. Integrate your content strategy into your marketing funnel

Naturally, members of your audience won’t all be at the same point in their buyer’s journey, and they’ll occupy various positions within your digital marketing funnel as a result.

Some will be just starting out and still in the process of exploring the possible solutions that are open to them. Others will be primed and ready to buy. Then there are those in between or who may be looking to get more out of a purchase they’ve already made.

Each of these consumer types has a different set of needs, so your content strategy plan should consider all of them. 

There are also 3 broad content types to make sure to include in your strategy.

1. Hero content is content designed to speak to huge chunks of your target audience at once – the backbone of your catalog.
2. Hub content consists of pieces that support your hero content by continuing narratives and fleshing out your larger message in meaningful ways.
3. Hygiene content is a form of supporting content designed to help by answering frequently asked questions, addressing common concerns, etc.

What Is the Core of Content Strategy?

Once you’ve got a winning strategy in place, it’s time to start creating pieces that entertain, inform, and resonate with exactly the people you’re looking to reach. That’s where the 3 Cs of your content strategy core come in.

The 3 Cs of content strategy

Content

Naturally, the content itself is going to be a huge part of the core of any strategy, so this C covers all the considerations that go into making a piece of content incredible, including:

• Themes and broad considerations, like whether a piece of content is more focused on your audience’s interests or something specific about your products
• Format choices, including classic written articles, infographics, videos, ebooks, etc.
• Target length of your content, as quick 250-word blurbs work very differently from long-form articles, that are several thousand words long
• Volume concerns, including how often you’re publishing on each of your platform choices

Channels

Your approach to content channels can make or break whether your content even gets seen in the first place, so it’s crucial to choose wisely. This is especially important for companies just getting started at building an audience. Essentials include:

• Social channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, as well as potential alternatives like Quora, TikTok, or Pinterest
• Sponsored content and other forms of paid distribution
• Email, as this is still one of the most effective ways to distribute content and reach an audience

Contributors

This factor covers who will be helping you bring your content strategy plan to life because it’s unlikely you’ll be doing everything alone, especially as your brand grows. Positions you may want to hire for or outsource potentially include:

• Content writers to help you produce blogs, articles, and more
• Videographers and photographers
• Graphic designers
• Social media managers
• Research analysts
• Webmasters

What Is a Content Strategy Framework?

A content strategy framework is a blueprint you come up with once you’ve hammered out all the basics as to what you’re looking to accomplish with your content and why. Think of it as the skeleton that will lend support to your larger content catalog, especially as it grows.

A good content strategy framework explicitly details what types of content you’ll be producing, who it’s for, what form it will take, where you’ll publish it, and how often. It’s essential for keeping your content production team on track over the long haul, as consistency is a key component in your long-term success.

Key steps to take when building your content strategy framework include:

• Going over your primary goals and reflecting on how they fit into your content plan
• Researching and building new customer personas if needed, as well as refreshing old ones
• Auditing your existing content catalog to better assess what’s working for you and what’s not
• Selecting a content management system that’s in line with your goals, your needs, and your audience’s expectations
• Definitively deciding what types of content you want to focus on moving forward (and how often)
• Brainstorming the actual ideas for your content

As far as the brainstorming bit goes, there are lots of great places to find inspiration for great posts your audience will love. You can weigh in on industry developments or emerging social trends. Also, address common concerns your customers have or answer direct questions you’ve been asked.

Besides, keep a close eye on what your competitors are putting out there and look for gaps your unique brand voice can fill especially well. And, of course, keep careful records of your efforts, so you can get a feel for what works and what doesn’t so your next content strategy plan can be even better.

Wrap Up

At this point, you know a bit about what a content strategy plan is all about, as well as how you can go about creating one that will help you meet your ongoing goals for your business.

You know why it’s so important to have a clear, targeted plan in the first place. Now it’s time to start producing stellar content as one of your tactics.

A great content catalog starts with a terrific team filled with pros – like experienced copywriters, bloggers, social media experts, and more.

WriterAccess is the content creation platform to beat when it comes to hiring incredible freelance writers who can deliver for you.

It combines the efficiency of AI-powered tools with the creativity of human writers to help you streamline your content production.

Why not give WriterAccess a try today? Enjoy 14 days of free access to our network of expert writers. Discover the transformative power of great content for your business!

The post Plan Your Content Strategy In 5 Steps appeared first on Rock Content.

To stand out from your competitors and capture the attention of your target audience, you need superior content.  It is arguably one of the most important parts of advertising on the internet.

Here’s what you should know about content marketing, its history, why it’s critical, and how to start developing a content strategy that generates results.

What Is Content Marketing?

Simply put, content marketing involves using content or copy to achieve specific goals. Businesses utilize it to inform, connect with potential customers, nurture client relationships, and sell products. However, content marketing can take various forms.

Many businesses already partake in content marketing by publishing consumable content on public platforms to boost brand awareness—think social media.

However, strategically leveraging content can be a game-changer. When companies purposefully design campaigns to educate, inform, and engage consumers, profit margins naturally increase over time.

Where Did It Come From?

Although the term “content marketing” itself wouldn’t come until much later, the first recognized efforts to use content in advertising occurred in 1895. American tractor and farm equipment manufacturer John Deere launched “The Furrow,” a printed magazine that was published every quarter.

What made “The Furrow” stand out from its competing publications is that it didn’t try to sell anything. It wasn’t a catalog and it didn’t contain overt advertisements. It simply sought to educate the consumer and build a relationship between the company and its target audience. 

Over the years, its readership grew. By 1912, “The Furrow” boasted a staggering 4 million readers, paving the way for other brands to follow a similar marketing model.

Meanwhile, in France in 1900, brothers Édouard and Ándre Michelin of Michelin Tires created the famed Michelin Guide. It began as a guide for automobile owners and included basic maps, tire care instructions, and mechanic, hotel, and other travel recommendations.

In 1929, the Michelin Guide began to include restaurant listings in its publications. It became most notably known for the awarding of “stars” to fine dining establishments that were considered worth traveling to.

Their marketing strategy was brilliant and one of the most noticeable in the history of content marketing. There were fewer than 3,000 cars on France’s roadways. The Michelin Guide was designed to generate interest in automobile travel and, subsequently, the need for tire services.

Later, the advent of radio stations would provide an opportunity for companies to create radio shows and commercials. Sears created Sears Radio Theater in 1979, which provided useful advice and comedic relief to listeners. This in turn created a higher demand for radios. Consumers then purchased those radios from Sears, driving revenue.

Television subsequently brought the opportunity for visually engaging advertisements. By the early 1990s, content marketing was being used in some way by nearly every brand.

The Birth of Digital Content Creation

In 1993, O’Reilly Media (formerly O’Reilly & Associates) launched the world’s first company website. As technology began to advance at a breakneck pace, computers found their way into the home of nearly every American—just like televisions once did. 

At one time, computers, and by extension the internet, were considered a luxury. All that changed rather quickly, with the World Wide Web becoming an integral way of communicating and doing business.

Just two years later, in 1996, newspaper journalist John F. Oppedahl unwittingly coined the term “content marketing,” not knowing just how important the term would become in the coming decades. Copy creation soon became a free-for-all. If you had an internet connection, you could publish content people would see.

The Emergence of Search Engine Optimization

Most businesses that were present on the web in the mid-’90s to early 2000s enjoyed consistently rising traffic as consumers discovered how to use the internet.  But as hundreds and even thousands of websites were published daily, competition for views grew.

Performance metrics like traffic volume didn’t necessarily indicate the quality of the content users were arriving at. They were largely reflective of a copywriter’s ability to appeal to search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) became inextricably tied to content marketing, but content marketing grew well beyond just SEO.

Early versions of search engine algorithms were much simpler and ranked web pages for a search term or keyword based on the number of times that term appeared on the page. Algorithms assumed that the more times a keyword was present, the better the content was for people searching for the topic.

It wasn’t long before search engine algorithms evolved. Early versions of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning began to track user behavior and how they interacted with webpages once they arrived. If users “bounced” or didn’t engage with the content, algorithms would start to rank the page lower than others on the same topic. And the algorithms continue to grow and evolve. 

The Rise of Social Media Marketing

Although MySpace wasn’t the first social media platform to exist, it’s arguably the one that people remember most. The basic social sharing forum of Six Degrees was actually the first online social platform, followed by a litany of others.

• 1997: Six Degrees
• 2003: MySpace and LinkedIn 
• 2004: Facebook 
• 2006: Twitter 
• 2010: Pinterest and Instagram
• 2016: Tik Tok

As consumers joined social media platforms in droves, companies began to investigate how to advertise to users in unique and memorable ways. Social media marketing began to take shape, and it now plays a critical role in a company’s overall content marketing strategy. 

Posting on social media is a great way to share blog posts, articles, photos, videos, and user-generated content (UGC) like testimonials or reviews.

The Arrival of Authority Marketing

Content publishing, search engine optimization, and social media marketing weren’t enough for search engines to separate good copy from great copy with so many competitors creating content.

Search engines began to evaluate the credibility and reputation of a website page’s author, and then used this information to rank pages by established content creators and industry authorities higher than similar content by less known sources.

Authority marketing is an important component of advanced content marketing. Industry leaders are generally given more internet real estate, so to speak, than others competing for the same space.

Published authors, large corporations, international brands, and other well-known entities will usually have a higher domain authority or website authority. This is one of the many factors used by algorithms to determine where a web page should rank in relation to billions of others.

The Introduction of Natural Language Processing (NLP)

In October 2019, search engine giant Google announced the introduction of natural language processing (NLP) into its algorithms. NLP doesn’t replace any currently existing algorithm technology. It instead adds another layer to it.

NLP technology allows Google to use advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to analyze human language and better match search terms to web page results. Essentially, this enables Google to read website pages like a human would. 

The need to understand the page at such a level is largely driven by the rise in voice search, which has changed how people try to find things on the web. Instead of using keywords like “content marketing,” consumers are using key phrases, like “What is the best content marketing tool?”

Why Do You Need a Good Content Marketing Strategy?

Simply put, without a good content marketing strategy, you’ll have a difficult time maintaining the visibility of your business online. Potential customers will have a harder time finding your company, and those that do make it to your website are more likely to bounce than stick around and consume content.

At the very least, basic content marketing is necessary to make sure your business registers on the digital map for potential customers. This might look like a couple of blog posts a month fed to your social media channels just to keep them alive. 

Good content, on the other hand, provides exponential value for your business over time.

Benefits of Consistent, High-Quality Content

There are numerous benefits to regularly publishing high-quality content in various forms on your company’s website and social media channels. A solid web marketing strategy:

• Establishes credibility and authority in your field
• Continues to generate value for your business over time
• Cultivates an engaged target audience
• Builds trust between your brand and consumers
• Provides answers to the most common user questions
• Improves your brand’s reputation
• Generates more qualified leads and click-throughs
• Compels users to take action, such as calling your business or filling out your contact form
• Informs consumers and allows them to make educated decisions about products and services they purchase
• Creates more online visibility for your business and encourages word-of-mouth advertising
• Helps your website pages rank highly in search engines for target keywords and key phrases in your industry
• Builds brand loyalty and creates advocates for your products and services

What Does Good Content Look Like?

If you’re not a writer by trade, you may not know what Google and web users consider to be “good content.” Many business owners don’t know how to effectively use keywords, what topics to include to create an authoritative page, or how to publish better content than their competitors. 

Professional writers have a better understanding of what users and search engines expect from copy.

Good content should be:

• Easy and straightforward for the user to read
• Scan and skim friendly
• Search engine and conversion rate optimized
• Rich with headings and subheadings
• Completely unique on every page
• On-brand and able to clearly communicate your company’s core values
• Aligned with the challenges and needs of your target audience
• Optimized for human readers
• Positioned to help the reader more than sell to them (sales tend to organically increase when users feel understood and supported)
• Peppered with relevant statistics and/or facts from reputable sources and other industry professionals
• Evergreen or newsworthy; evergreen content continues to provide ongoing value to your business, while newsworthy blogs help drive fast, targeted traffic to your website
• Shared regularly on your social media channels

It should also provide:

• Acknowledgment of the user’s problems
• Actionable advice for the reader
• Valuable information not published online by competitors
• Visual engagement with ALT tag-optimized images and videos
• A clear call to action to contact the business via form or telephone
• Links to additional resources on your website and other credible, high-ranking websites
• Insight into your company’s unique vision and personality

It’s also important to pay attention to the user experience and ensure that visitors experience your content in the manner you intend. Your pages should:

• Load quickly; ideally in less than three seconds
• Be free of broken links or links to low-quality, spammy websites
• Contain no critical content errors 
• Include links to other pages on your site to:
  • Help users easily navigate from one place to another 
  • Keep them interested and engaged in what you have to say

No Time to Write? Hire an Expert Writer

Quality content creation takes time, something many business owners find themselves short on as they work to drive sales and keep the company organized.

If you don’t have time to write, or you just don’t feel confident in your ability to write for the web, outsourcing your copy could be a viable solution for your company.

WriterAccess is one of the world’s top content creation platforms that provides businesses of all sizes access to the talent and tools needed to create compelling content marketing campaigns.

We offer affordable per-word and flat-rate pricing, and each of our content strategists, editors, and writers is screened to ensure their ability to consistently provide our customers with error-free, engaging copy.

Sign up now for a 14-day free trial to connect with our network of over 15,000 writers, editors, and other freelancers. We can help you cultivate top-tier content that generates quality leads and positions your brand as an authority in your niche!

The post A Brief History of Content Marketing (And Why It’s Taking Over) appeared first on Rock Content.

To accomplish this, it is necessary to create and execute a marketing strategy, which includes content production and other actions, as a way to prospect consumers.

It works like a conversation, allowing you and your audience to build a relationship.

However, will your strategy ever work if you try to talk to everyone?

No, because if you decide to speak to everyone, nobody will hear you. The reason for that is simple: people have different needs, opinions, pain points, and challenges. So, if you want their attention, they should see that you understand their particularities and want to help them.

To achieve this objective, and accurately reach your audience, you should start by building a buyer persona, also known as a persona. Creating it is the basis of a Digital Marketing strategy.

This content will cover the following topics:

What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional character that represents your ideal customer. 

Creating it requires careful work that includes market research, customer data that you already have, and even some assumptions.

Check out this animated infographic to get a clear picture of what we are going to discuss in this article:

Once you build your persona’s profile and describe its characteristics in detail, you will be able to address your Marketing efforts to the right people.

After all, if you know your ideal customer “in person”, it is easier to talk to them about things they are interested in.

The concept of buyer persona was created by Alan Cooper, a software designer, and programmer. It became popular with Inbound Marketing.

Nowadays, it is helping businesses and marketers all over the world to reach customers, establish a relationship with them, and make more sales.

Now that you know the theory, how about understanding the concept of persona in practice?

First of all, imagine a company that offers CRM software. How would its persona look? Let’s see the following topic.

Buyer Persona Examples

First, we would like to recommend you take advantage of the Buyer Persona Generator from Rock Content. Use your creativity and try to connect the personas to your business.

William, 35 years old, married, has a bachelor’s degree in Marketing and a busy professional routine, although he tries to find a balance between work and family.

He works as a Marketing Manager for a company that supplies kitchen equipment to restaurants.

Pain points

Since the company’s early days, he has been working with spreadsheets to keep track of its customer base, which is growing fast.

Thus, he realizes that an old method is no longer an efficient tool, and the members of his team are complaining about their difficulties in using spreadsheets.

For this reason, he has been talking to the CEO about the possibility of acquiring a CRM system.

However, his boss thinks that spreadsheets are still an effective method of tracking sales and keeping a good relationship with customers.

Communication

William frequently searches CRM-related terms on Google, aiming to find the ideal solution for their problem.

He even asks for more information when he finds a system that he likes, and also wants to complete his benchmark by email.

He is on LinkedIn, where he regularly consumes content to keep up with his area, as well as on Facebook, which he uses for personal purposes. Also, Willian likes to watch the news on YouTube.

Solution

Because their business involves a lot of transactions and communications with customers, as well as orders with special requests, they need a CRM system with some specific characteristics.

For example, it must be easy to use and intuitive. Besides, it should be scalable, since the company will keep on growing.

Also, the software has to integrate with their email solution so that they can automate communication with leads and customers.

Finally, it must offer segmentation features, which will facilitate the Marketing and Sales departments’ work.

Below, you can find another three examples of buyer personas. They’re more concise than the one presented above and suggest a slightly different structure, also valuable.

1. Martin Mann

Target Product Line: Household Appliances and Equipment

• Martin’s Details ‒ Martin is a working dad with two children, ages 8 and 3. He is 36 and lives with his wife Paula in Georgia. They have a combined household income of $100,000. The family rents a home in the suburbs.
• Martin’s Pain Point ‒ As a busy dad, Martin is looking for products to help him squeeze as much time out of his day as possible. He wants to spend more time interacting with his kids, but he also has a household to keep up with.
• Martin’s Objections ‒ Even with a decent household income, money is always tight because of high bills. He wants affordable products that won’t put him into debt.
• Martin’s Goals ‒ He wants to be able to take care of household chores as easily as possible and spend more time with his kids.
• Potential Sales Pitch ‒ Cooking products that allow Martin to prepare meals faster and more efficiently. Also, cleaning tools to help with children’s toys and household items.

2. Samantha Grey

Target Product Line: Outdoor Equipment

• Samantha’s Details ‒ Samantha is a working professional who is single but actively dating. She is 28 and lives in an apartment in Los Angeles. She makes $85,000 a year.
• Samantha’s Pain Point ‒ She loves to go hiking and exploring, but it’s tough to plan a trip to the mountains. She wants to have convenient outdoor gear, so she can go whenever the opportunity arises.
• Samantha’s Objections ‒ She doesn’t want gear that is too heavy or takes up too much room in her bag. She also doesn’t want to waste money on cheap products that won’t last.
• Samantha’s Goals ‒ To spend more time outdoors hiking, biking, and exploring more of the natural wilderness. She has a few dream hikes she’s planning for the future.
• Potential Sales Pitch ‒ Hiking boots and clothes that are low-maintenance and built to last. Also, outdoor equipment can come in handy for her long-distance dream hikes (i.e., backpack, mini camp stove, etc.).

3. Jennifer Jewel

Target Product Line: Fashion and Accessories

• Jennifer’s Details ‒ Jennifer is a manager at a tech firm, and she’s actively dating and looking for the right guy. She is 31 and rents an apartment in a swanky part of New York. She makes $180,000 per year.
• Jennifer’s Pain Points ‒ She likes looking her best when she goes out on the town, but she can’t afford luxury prices at the moment. She doesn’t want cheap-looking products, either.
• Jennifer’s Objections ‒ If a piece looks too chintzy or cheap, she won’t want it. She also wants items that she can resell on consignment to fund her next batch of clothes.
• Jennifer’s Goals ‒ She wants to make enough money to have the wardrobe of her dreams, and she wants to travel more with a special person.
• Potential Sales Pitch ‒ Trendy accessories that can accentuate haute couture outfits. Clothing that is both functional and chic, and will last long enough for Jennifer to resell it at a decent price. Travel accessories and clothing may also be a good fit.

What Are The Types of Buyer Personas?

This could be a tricky question. If you look for off-the-shelf persona models to implement in your strategy, you may miss most of the benefits we have covered in this text.

This is because, as you know, each business has its particularities that must be considered when defining the objectives. Therefore, they must also be taken into account when developing the buyer persona. 

In other words, do not look for ready-to-use personas. Instead, build your own based on the specifics of your audience and of your business. 

Having said that, there is a way to categorize buyer personas. First, you should know that there is a big difference between B2B and B2C customers, so personas for these two business modalities have some details that differentiate them. 

B2C personas

If you are in the B2C market, you are dealing with the final buyer of a product or service. In other words, your consumer wants to satisfy their own needs and desires.

B2B personas

B2B transactions involve buyers who not only have individual characteristics but also carry the needs and conditions of the companies that employ them. 

In this way, B2B personas might be considered a bit more complex. They blend the particularities of the types of businesses that might be interested in your solutions with the individual traits of the people responsible for closing deals.

What Is a “Negative” Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is designed to be a depiction of what you believe your ideal customer looks like. A negative buyer persona, on the other hand, is a representation of what you do not want your ideal customer to be.

For instance, a negative buyer persona may include people who are within a lower income bracket and are unlikely to afford your product. It may also include prospective customers who are simply too expensive to acquire.

More often than not, the information needed to create these negative personas will be found within your customer service and sales departments. You want to hone in on the traits of customers who had high acquisition costs, took a long to close, were just simply challenging, etc.

By creating negative buyer personas along with your regular buyer personas, you can better understand and identify those who are and are not a good fit for your service or product. You can fine-tune your marketing messaging and strategies to bring in a higher number of qualified leads.

Now, when it comes to the negative buyer persona, make sure to create it last. You want to focus on your ideal customers first, and then you can turn your focus to creating a profile for potentially problematic customers.

In the end, negative buyer personas will save you both time and money by not focusing on prospects who aren’t a good fit.

Target Audience vs Buyer Persona: What’s the Difference

I know we’ve already mentioned it here, but are you truly familiar with the concept of a target audience? It is important to know the differences between it and the idea of a persona.

Firstly, a target audience includes more general data, that is, demographic information of people that are more likely to become your customers.

A target audience profile can also include socioeconomic and behavioral aspects, although not as detailed as the persona’s characteristics. It has been widely used in offline marketing campaigns.

Some target audience examples to help you understand the concept:

• Marketing managers, 35 to 45 years old, working in companies in the state of New York;
• Men and women, 30 to 40 years old, middle class, owning dogs;
• Women, 25 to 35 years old, middle class, interested in DIY (do it yourself).

As you can see, a persona’s profile gathers much more information about the people you want to reach. But why is it so important?

9 Benefits of Creating Buyer Personas

Because they have such an impact on the Marketing department, it is natural that buyer personas benefit the business as a whole.

Of course, more efficient Marketing strategies expand the company’s reach and enable it to attract more customers, which consequently results in profits. But the introduction of a persona in your strategies brings advantages that go beyond the fulfillment of commercial goals.

1. Higher ROI

The idea behind creating a buyer persona is to facilitate the segmentation of the public so that the brand directs its Marketing and communication efforts to people who have a real possibility of becoming customers.

This means not only an increase in profits from sales but also an even greater growth in your ROI.

This effect is a result of the increased efficiency of the actions directed toward your audience. The persona serves as a guide to make these efforts in the most accurate way possible, avoiding spending time and resources unnecessarily.

If your ideal client is not a Facebook user, for example, there is no reason to allocate employees to produce content for this particular network. That way, you can find more effective means of investment.

You can also fit the persona into a paid ads strategy. As you know, tools like Google Ads and Facebook Ads allow you to target your campaigns to specific audiences, which you can customize according to interests and demographic factors.

Thus, if your business takes the buyer persona’s characteristics as the basis, you will ensure campaigns with much higher ROI levels.

2. Greater market authority

A company that can impact the right audience tends to grow quickly, gaining market share.

The persona helps you communicate more effectively with your potential consumers, conveying your brand’s values and visions through a solid, consistent approach.

The natural consequence is that people will start talking about your business, generating what we know as Word of Mouth Marketing.

In the age of consumer 4.0, this generates immeasurable benefits for the company. If your message impacted your persona, they will mention your brand positively in forums, social media, and other communication channels.

Today’s audience places a lot of importance on recommendations from other people, and they tend to share these recommendations with others. This creates a cascade effect that helps consolidate your company as an authority in the market.

3. Generation of brand advocates

Brand advocates are customers who grow so loyal to a brand that they become its staunchest advocates.

Not only do they fill social media with positive comments and share your content, but they also form a loyal buyer base. No matter what happens: they will continue to consume your products.

Great, isn’t it? But creating these advocates is a huge challenge for any company.

The Buyer Persona works as a facilitating tool in this process. By relying on the semi-fictional character to create content, develop products, and position itself with contemporary issues, the company can address its main pain points, needs, desires, etc.

In this way, you create a bond that goes beyond the customer-brand relationship, paving the way for high loyalty levels.

4. Improved communication with the public

The persona serves not only to guide the communication efforts made by the marketing team but by the entire company.

This involves, for example, customer service. This is one of the most critical points of interaction with the public, since it is usually the channel where customers go to make complaints and solve doubts.

Therefore, it is necessary to intelligently define the approach that will be used in this medium, including issues such as tone of voice and recommended expressions.

For this reason, we recommend creating a style guide that covers all areas of the company and clearly defines how employees should behave while interacting with people.

This guide should be based on the persona’s main characteristics, just like in a Content Marketing strategy. With positive interactions, you pave the way for a more long-lasting relationship.

5. Enablement of Smarketing strategy

The processes that involve the attraction, qualification, and conversion of leads become much more effective if they involve the Marketing and Sales departments working together.

The alignment of these two sectors is what we call a Smarketing strategy.

This approach aims to exchange insights between salespeople and marketers, facilitating the creation of experiences and triggers capable of moving the lead along the sales funnel and enabling its conversion into a client. 

The structuring of a persona is fundamental in this process since it allows members of all teams, both in Marketing and Sales, to have the same ideal customer as their primary reference.

This way, in addition to maintaining constant communication and pursuing the same goals, both departments can create more accurate strategies to achieve their objectives.

6. A better understanding of your customer

Imagine you’ve just met a person and you want to establish a pleasant conversation. Maybe you agree that you will be more likely to accomplish that if both of you share common interests, right?

So, as the person talks about their interests, goals, and challenges, you can tell them your opinion and even offer suggestions.

In the relationship between your business and your customer, the same occurs. Once you have a complete profile of your ideal client, you will be more likely to be empathetic, and your prospect will feel you understand and want to help.

7. Higher efficiency

Directing your Marketing efforts toward a persona will help to save time and money. You will have a higher chance of reaching people who have the exact problems your product or service is meant to solve.

Thus, with less time and money spent, the cost of attracting each customer is lower.

8. Accurate segmentation

If you have a buyer persona, you can segment your communication according to people’s preferences. Think, for example, about the language you should use.

Do your prospects like to talk formally or informally? What vocabulary do they use? Do they prefer reading a text with technical terms? Would they like it if you use emojis?

Segmentation also includes appropriate content, according to the customer journey stage that your lead is in.

For example, if the person is at the awareness stage, he needs more educative and general content, which is present in blog posts and infographics. At the decision stage, interactive calculators and case studies would be welcome.

When you have a buyer persona, you can answer all these questions. Thereby, you will help your customers to move through the customer journey, which will increase the number of sales and, of course, revenue.

9. More persuasive approach

Because objections are a natural element of a negotiation, you must be prepared to clear up your prospects’ doubts.

However, if you have a persona in mind, it is also possible to predict issues that may come up and cover them, for example, in blog posts, ebooks, and case studies.

Besides that, you will be able to clear up possible questions in the content of your emails, so your approach will be more persuasive. If you do so, your email marketing strategy will be more effective.

Localization and International Buyer Personas

If you’re running a business with customers around the world, you must take an even more careful approach to creating buyer personas. While the broad details may be similar across borders and continents, there are a few other factors to consider when developing international customer profiles.

Search trending keywords

People may search for products and services with different keywords in their home country. What you can do is use Google with an anonymous browser window and the country’s extension code. For example, in the UK, the code is .uk, and in Chile, the code is .cl.

Searching for trending keywords in each country will help you identify how people search in the region, which can give you insight into their thought processes. Also, you may discover that some topics or products are trending much higher in one country than another.

Look at competitors

The top brands in a country can tell you a lot about how people shop and browse products in that country. So, doing some competitor research can tell you what’s working and what isn’t. While you don’t want to copy any of your competitors directly, you can pay attention to elements like:

• Color Schemes ‒ What colors are used for logos and ads within your industry? Colors can have different local connotations, sometimes by association with a particular brand or product.
• Copy ‒ What kind of slogans and copywriting do local competitors use? Are there turns of phrase that locals understand that would be lost on a different audience? Does the copy change from one region to another (i.e., North India vs. South India)? Also, keep in mind that direct translations are often incorrect. Instead, it’s better to have a native speaker translate ads to catch any nuances or context clues.
• Imagery ‒ What images or graphics are used in advertisements and content pieces in your target region? Do companies rely on photos or illustrations more? What about the typography?

Conduct audience research

Finally, the best way to develop a buyer persona is to speak with individuals from the region. You can do this via surveys or questionnaires, but make sure to incentivize respondents so you can get as much feedback as possible.

In addition to surveys, A/B testing can help you refine your messaging and landing page layouts to see what elements attract the most attention.

The 2 Most Common Questions When Creating a Persona

Let’s get to it:

1. Do small businesses need a buyer persona?

It is easy to understand how this tool can help giant companies with large numbers of employees and customers. But is it suitable for smaller clients? The emphatic answer is yes. 

Even a self-employed dog walker needs to better understand their audience if the goal is to extend their customer base and increase their revenue. 

2. How many personas should be created?

Should I create only one? Can I create as many as I want?

At this point, it is necessary to act according to your reality. If you sell products/services to audiences or markets with different characteristics, it makes a lot of sense to create more than one persona, so you don’t need to limit it to one. 

However, it is essential not to exaggerate. Working with too many different personas can lead to confusion in your communication strategy and weaken your messages.

With this in mind, you can work out the ideal number for your company. 

What Are The 5 Main Errors When Creating A Buyer Persona?

You already know the main steps to creating effective buyer personas. Now, it’s time to understand some of the worst mistakes companies make in this process. This way, you can prevent them and ensure better results for your strategies.

1. Using too many assumptions

Buyer personas are semi-fictional characters. This means that you should not develop them based on assumptions but rather through serious behavioral research and data analysis. 

To get relevant information for creating your persona, it is essential to conduct interviews with real people. We will talk more about this later. 

2. Overusing demographic information

Using demographic information is undeniably vital for building a buyer persona. However, you should not pay too much attention to this factor.

Your persona should get as close as possible to your potential customers’ real conditions, highlighting their pains, desires, needs, dreams, hobbies, and many other elements that cannot be captured purely by demographic research. 

3. Interviewing the wrong people

When setting up interviews to collect data for your persona, it is essential to properly define the people that will participate in the process.

You know that the goal is to find your ideal customer, but who exactly is that? You need to think about this question and define, first of all, to whom your company wants to sell its products and services. 

When defining the interview list, many companies stick to the customers they already have. Although they are important in the process, limiting yourself to interviewing current clients result in inferior buyer personas.

4. Having Too Many Personas

There is no one-size-fits-all number when it comes to the number of buyer personas you should create. There are several factors that contribute to the number of personas you need. These may include the different industries you serve and the number of offerings you have available.

However, creating too many personas, especially in the beginning, can overwhelm you and be incredibly distracting. Further, a high number of buyer personas will divide your marketing efforts, keeping you from focusing on the necessary actions to drive optimal results.

This is especially true if there is any overlapping between the profiles. After all, each buyer persona should be unique to ensure your message is vastly different and tailored to that specific persona. You need to be able to create content that will resonate with potential customers and not confuse them.

Ideally, you should start with no more than three different buyer personas. These should focus on the ideal customer segment that provides the greatest opportunities and value for your business moving forward.

New buyer personas can be added at a later date if you want to expand into a new market or target a new audience when your product offerings grow.

5. Making Profiles Based Just on Stereotypes

When profiling your target audience, it can be easy to rely on various forms of stereotypes. If you allow bias to enter your buyer persona profiles, you will not be creating a realistic image of who your ideal customer is.

Instead, when stereotypes and personal bias enter the process, your personas will be reflecting the desires and wishes of the company. The use of real data can help reduce the risk of bias being injected into your buyer personas.

How Does a Persona Affect Your Content Production?

When you have a persona and know your prospects and customers, you can understand the purchasing process.

This knowledge will affect your content production because people need different types of content as they go through the stages of the customer journey.

Awareness stage

Think about a person who has just found your blog. To solve a problem, they probably searched a keyword on Google and found you.

Because he is at the awareness stage, he will need educative and more general content, which he will find in blog posts, infographics, and videos.

Evaluation stage

As the prospect goes to the evaluation stage, you should offer, for example, ebooks, webinars, whitepapers, and newsletters, among others.

Decision stage

Finally, the person gets to the decision stage, where they need to make a decision: to buy or not.

To help them make the best decision, there are some appropriate types of content, such as case studies, free trials, discount coupons, and even a chat with a consultant.

You can see that the type of content depends on the customer journey stage the person is at. If you build your persona properly, your content strategy will be more effective, and you will be more empathetic and engaging.

What is The Relationship Between The Buyer Persona And The Buyer’s Journey?

Just like the persona, the buyer’s journey is a very widespread and relevant concept in the Digital Marketing field.

Both ideas are interrelated within any mature strategy since they have to do with the efforts to approach leads in the best possible way.

Thus, the buyer persona establishes who to approach, while the buyer’s journey indicates when to approach them. 

It is vital to understand how the two tools are intertwined. If you have a strong buyer persona, you can map out effective ways to influence their buyer’s journey.

In turn, this journey needs to be closely monitored to ensure that the lead has access to the right content at the right time.

If a lead is still in the awareness phase and receives content from the bottom of the funnel, for example, the whole strategy may lose its effectiveness.

How To Create Great Content For Your Persona?

Once you have established your persona(s), it’s time to create impactful content that resonates with them.

The first step is to define the channels where such materials will be available. The ideal is to be present on all networks where your persona has the habit of browsing, as well as establish a blog to centralize your content and increase your digital authority. 

Although every channel is essential, in some cases, it is necessary to focus on just a few.

If your persona is a young adult, for example, she’s probably not a Facebook heavy-user. In this case, producing content for Instagram and YouTube would make a lot more sense. 

In addition, you need to define the content format. Some people are more attracted to videos than text. Others prefer reading an article while commuting to watching a webinar. It is essential to understand these particularities to improve your approach constantly. 

In the bigger picture, we can say that creating great content depends on identifying trends that appeal to your persona and offering unique experiences.

You can accomplish this through Interactive Content, which generates about 88% more engagement than static content. This is a trend in the content sector and will help you capture and retain your ideal customer’s attention. 

You can also count on content creation platforms like WriterAccess and connect to thousands of freelance writers, editors, strategists and proofreaders that can craft the ideal content for your persona.

How To Create a Buyer Persona In 4 Steps!

As we already said, to create a buyer persona, we can’t rely on assumptions alone. Some inferences may indeed be necessary, but most of the work depends on surveys, which can be done using interviews or forms.

If you ask the right questions, you will be able to gather all the information you need to build an accurate buyer persona. Let’s take a look at some steps that you need to take.

1. Collect data

What would be the best source of information to create a profile of your ideal customer?

Your customer base, of course.

In fact, you can interview not only people that have already purchased your solution but also your prospects. So let’s discover some methods for collecting data.

Researches

You can analyze your customer base to discover trends regarding how they consume content.

Besides that, landing page forms can be used to collect useful information. Interactive quizzes are a great way to do that because they are attractive, engaging, and even fun.

Talking to experts can be helpful too because they have a better understanding of your audience.

So, ask the sales team, trainers, tech support, and writers who write copy for your audience, among others, for information about the people you want to reach.

Besides that, Google Analytics and competitive analysis can offer you useful information about people who could become your customers.

Surveys and interviews

It is essential to have in mind that customers have different levels of engagement. Depending on the size of the form, some of them may not be so interested in helping you.

On the other hand, a small form or interview will not supply you with the necessary information.

Create smart questions, which may be arranged into four categories: demographics, personal data, content consumption, and challenges. Take a look at the following examples.

Demographics:

• What are your gender, age, and education?
• Where do you live?
• What do you do at work? What is your job position?
• What is your company’s industry?
• What is the size of your company?

Personal data:

• What are your goals?
• How is your routine?
• What are your responsibilities?
• What challenges do you have at work?
• What does success in work mean to you?

Content consumption:

• What social networks do you use?
• What subjects are you interested in?
• What content formats do you like?
• Where do you find information that is useful to your work?
• How do you learn and acquire new skills?

Challenges:

• What challenges did you have before finding us?
• How are we helping you solve problems?
• What characteristics of ours do you like the most?
  

Who to interview?

You may be wondering about who exactly to interview. Well, you may get tempted to talk only with “good” customers, that is, people who love your business and its solutions.

However, “bad” customers, who are not so satisfied with your service or product, can offer valuable information. Indeed, interviewing them could even help you to improve your solution.

You can also interview people who have not yet purchased your solution, especially if your business has just started, and you still don’t have a customer base.

How many people to interview?

There is no definitive answer to that.

However, as you do interviews, at some point, you will start to predict the responses of interviewees. You will notice patterns, so if you start to precisely predict what the person will say, you may stop and go to the next step.

2. Analyze the collected data

Now that the interviews are done, you have a lot of information to analyze and arrange.

How exactly could you do that? Search for common characteristics among interviewees, and what problems and challenges were mentioned the most. Thus, you will understand what type of content could be more relevant to them.

After, you need to decide how many personas your business will have. Is it possible to gather the information for only one persona? Or would it take the creation of more profiles, maybe two, three, or more?

Regardless of the number of personas, remember that your Marketing strategy should include all of them. So, there must be blog posts, ebooks, and nurturing flows, among others, for each persona, ok?

3. Build the persona

Now, turn all the selected information into a person. Open your text editor and build a profile with name, age, and occupation.

Besides writing about their day-to-day life, you can even create a quote, relying on the interviews of course, as if the persona itself was telling you about their challenges and goals.

Next, arrange the information according to topics such as personal and professional goals, as well as pain points and challenges.

After that, as the grand finale, choose a name and include a photo of a person, because it will help you to see your persona as a real person.

4. Share it with your team

Once the profile is ready, save and share it with your team.

All of them should know the persona and give suggestions, which could even lead to some changes if it is necessary.

If you create yours, you will get to know your customer much better, and the Marketing team will be able to produce relevant and useful content.

Besides, the sales team will develop a more efficient approach, which will increase its efficiency.

Check out our buyer persona generator to make this whole process easier.

How To Find People To Interview For Your Buyer Persona Research?

The primary source for your interviews during the buyer persona creation process is, without a doubt, your customer base.

After all, it is formed by people who already have a proven interest in your products and can indicate important characteristics to shape your strategies.

However, as already mentioned, you should not restrict yourself to these people. 

Besides already active customers, interview your prospects. If they are included in your nurturing flow or follow your social media profiles, you can be sure that they already know a lot about your business, even if they have not yet made a purchase.

To better define which leads can serve as good interviewees, use the data collected from the various channels in your strategy. 

Another way to find people to include in interviews is to resort to referrals or third-party networks.

The latter is differentiated by the fact that it involves people entirely outside your company’s environment, which requires greater care in selecting interviewees.

Examples are Craigslist, which allows you to post ads for interested parties, and UserTesting.com, which enables you to receive real-time feedback remotely. 

AI-Powered Persona Creation

Learning about your audience is a time-consuming process, particularly because there is so much data to analyze and sift through before you can create a compelling buyer persona.

Fortunately, AI tools can help expedite this process and deliver targeted results much faster than a team of people could. There are a few AI tools that can curate data from tons of different sources and develop buyer personas for you.

However, you still want to conduct your own research to understand how people will interact with your business.

Here are some ways that artificial intelligence can help you build better buyer personas:

Analyze online habits across platforms

Modern consumers don’t just use one website or platform to search for products and services. In some cases, they may use multiple sites like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and more. Individuals may also look at different shopping sites to read reviews and compare prices before making a final decision.

AI tools can help keep track of how a customer moves from one site to the next and the actions they take on each site. For example, someone may start their search on Google, but then transfer between different e-commerce sites, looking for the best deal. The person may also look on review sites to see what other people are saying about the product or service.

Getting a comprehensive view of your target customer can help you pinpoint how you want to present your brand on the buyer’s journey. Since the goal is to get them to purchase from your brand, you need to know what factors will get the customer to buy right now instead of searching elsewhere. AI can give you better insight into those factors.

User context based on keyword searches

During a customer’s research phase, they may search for different keywords related to the product or service. Some of these keywords may have stiff competition, but others may not. AI can help you discover related keywords that people use to make purchase decisions. Knowing these keywords can give you valuable insight into the thought process of your target audience.

For example, maybe customers are most concerned with the durability of a product, so you can leverage that within your advertising. Alternatively, some people might focus more on the price, so you can target them with sales and discounts. In each case, AI can give you far more context beyond surface-level search keywords.

Bonus: 3 ways to use buyer personas for better campaigns

Finally, let’s briefly discuss how to use your personas to improve your campaigns. The most important thing is to establish the use of personas as something intrinsic to the corporate culture, involving this concept in all internal processes.

1. Identify your leads by persona

From the first interaction with a new lead, categorize them according to the buyer persona that best fits their characteristics, assuming you have more than one. From this action, you will be able to direct all subsequent efforts to better meet the lead’s specific needs, directing them toward conversion. 

2. Use a CRM to track leads

The use of Customer Relationship Management tools is a must to keep the necessary monitoring of your leads. The success of a strategy based on personas also depends on the understanding of the phase in which she is in the buying journey. The use of a quality CRM facilitates this type of analysis and allows the involvement of all team members.

3. Use different marketing funnels

If you can identify your leads by persona and closely follow their journey, it is valid to make use of different marketing funnels. This way, each of your personas will aggregate leads with similar characteristics, which can be included in the same funnel.

Therefore, you create a very effective segmentation system, which enables the production of really relevant content and campaigns. 

Wrap Up

Including a buyer persona in your marketing strategy is a key step toward achieving your goals.

These semi-fictional characters serve as the foundation for your audience’s communication efforts, granting your company greater reach and authority.

Use this step-by-step guide approach to create your buyer personas and enjoy all the benefits of this method. 

With the proper creation of a persona for your business, your strategy will reach higher levels. To increase these results, even more, download our free ebook with everything you need to know about buyer personas!

The post Buyer Persona: A Step By Step Guide To Build The Perfect Persona For Your Business appeared first on Rock Content.

Threads arrive amidst a moment of crisis in Twitter’s relationship with its users, as the company has been limiting some features, especially for those who are using the free version. The company justifies these actions in an attempt to stop massive data collection by referencing AI companies. In early July Elon Musk himself tweeted some of these “temporary” limitations. 

The fact is user frustrations can lead them to look for alternatives, opening doors for Mastodon, Bluesky, and now, for the “Meta” version of this format, named Threads.

Twitter x Threads: similarities and differences

To begin with, when testing Threads, I can say that I felt quite familiar. That’s because its layout and main features are basically identical to those of its competitor, Twitter. 

Of course, with different feature buttons “texts”. For example: “New thread” instead of “Tweet”, to include a new post, as well as “Repost” in place of “Retweet”. But, in general, it’s pretty much the same.

It’s also easy to share your “Thread” in Instagram Stories, due to the integration of the two networks, which is not big news, since Twitter users were already able to share their Tweets on Instagram.

Related to features, to be honest, I don’t think there are many differences between them. But one thing that Instagram highlighted as an important difference is that Threads is a decentralized social media. 

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, explained in this NYT podcast that Thread as well as Mastodon, is built on ActivityPub, an open protocol. That means eventually, in the future, it will be possible for different social networks built on ActivityPub to work with each other, and could also allow users to export their contacts to another platform, giving more autonomy to content creators. 

This is a great philosophy change, but we’ll need to wait to see how it’ll work.

How does Threads work?

Your Threads profile is created from your Instagram credentials. Starting the procedure, there is an option to import your Instagram profile information and also automatically follow your entire network. This means as soon as the user chooses this option, a connection invitation is automatically sent to all their contacts, which I believe is a strong benefit to content creators that won’t need to start their positioning from zero.

On the other hand, as a mere user, this could be inconvenient. Considering that you may have a different purpose for Threads and want to make different connections there, maybe you feel a certain discomfort in ignoring the invitations and could even feel obliged to follow them back.

And what if I want to delete my Threads profile? Well, that’s something that has irritated some users. As it is integrated with Instagram, the account becomes combined, so to delete Threads, you’ll need to delete both. (OMG!) But don’t worry! You can still deactivate your Threads profile and hide it, keeping your profile active on Instagram.

What are the opportunities for brands on Threads?

Zuck’s new social network has already hit 100 million users according to his Thread. In only the first 16 hours, Instagram’s new app was downloaded more than 30 million times.

Scrolling through the timeline for the first time, most of the threads available to me were from influencers and brands that I used to follow on Instagram. Maybe because I’ve chosen not to automatically follow my Instagram contacts, having a very small network in the beginning, there is a strong possibility they used Instagram data to understand what could be relevant to me. 

But, after five days of accepting invitations, and having some of mine accepted, I can see threads from these people all the time.

I suppose that you want to know about Ads and when it will be available in the new app. In the same NYT podcast that I mentioned before, Adam Mosseri said “I don’t want to mislead anyone. We believe in ads. We think they are a way to offer free service worldwide. We think it’s a good thing. But right now, it’s just not the focus at all for the app. I think that would be the definition of a champagne problem.” He also explains that the focus is to make something that people love and want to keep using over time.

Until then, as we can see on Twitter, I believe brands will stick to the same strategy with quick posts that attract comments and shares, making reach grow quickly and easily. On Twitter, it is common to see brands also talking in a fun way, attracting even more interaction from followers. I don’t see this working any differently on Threads.

The post Instagram Threads: Here are our first impressions related to the new Twitter competitor appeared first on Rock Content.

The reason is simple: digital transformation turned the internet into a powerful ally for anyone looking to attract customers and build strong relationships with them.

If we type “IT store + CITY” or “Pizza near me” in Google Search, we don’t want to read articles or news — we want a list with options, opening hours, location, customers’ feedback, etc.

With this tool in hand, even big companies realized they could attract a few more prospects based on their location and search queries.

But what about people who are searching for my products and services? How can I find them? Or rather, how can they find me? Google My Business is the answer.

If you want to literally put your company on the map, read this guide carefully. Below, you will find detailed information on the following topics:

What Is Google My Business?

Google My Business is a free platform that allows you to manage how your company appears on Google results. It means you can control your business listing. That is, the information shown by the search engine.

A good way to start is by searching for yourself. See what the results look like:

If prospective customers search for “sports store Los Angeles,” they will see a map and what is called the Local 3 Pack. That is, the 3 local listings are ranked by distance and relevance.

Basically, Google Search knows how to differentiate when you have a doubt or when you are looking for suggestions.

The information shown in the Local 3 Pack, in turn, comes from Google My Business profiles.

That’s the point where your strategy begins. By performing a simple search, you see all the information users can attain about your business. In this case, you are sharing space with two other companies.

At the bottom of the list, users find a button to see more options. In the best-case scenario, of course, we would find your brand in the top 3 results.

If you’re not there yet, let’s start from the beginning and build a solid profile!

Inside Google My Business

Your profile gathers all the information your prospective customers need: the business name, description, address, category, opening hours, website, contact info, products, and services, reviews, and even photos and videos.

You can also show specific details to potential partners, such as restaurants and hotels.

Notice that all this information will be available in your Knowledge Panel — the user just needs to tap/click on your business listing.

The more data you offer about your company in your profile, the more your customer will know about it.

Now let’s talk about what is the real impact of giving your brand good exposure.

What Are The Benefits of Google My Business?

One of the current goals for marketers is to position their company’s brand at the top of the search result lists.

Notice that Google’s design is now making it so easy to find information that half of the searches lead to zero-click. This means that people quickly find what they need, so they don’t need to explore websites.

That makes it crucial to be on top of Google’s pages and Google Maps lists. 

As soon as users find the information they want, they move on to the next activity, often multitasking with two or three things at the same time.

After all, approximately 90% of searchers click on results located on the first page shown by Google. No wonder business lists are being highlighted. 

This is how customers want to interact with the market most of the time. 

Good exposure

If you wanted to open an excellent restaurant by the side of the road 30 years ago, you would need to spread some outdoor ads to attract people. That way, your business would be visible to those passing by or living in the neighborhood.

Now, our eyes are on the mobile screen. A well-filled profile offers a chance to be seen every time a person needs your service. Google My Business puts you on the map, an opportunity you don’t want to miss.

Regardless of the size or niche of your company, Google Search results are the place worth being.

Get reviews

One thing that searchers have in common is the willingness to find social proof of quality. What Google My Business can do for you is to collect online reviews and put this information to work in your favor.

When it comes to digital influence methods, this is a valuable trend. Whether you have a Content Marketing strategy or provide attractive customer service at your store to encourage them to rate your service, a 5-star review stands out.

Notice that reviews are critical for local pack results, which means your daily efforts may become a competitive advantage in the most visible of places.  

Find good insights

Listening to customers is essential to any business strategy. Based on what they say, you can deeply change your team works or the products you offer.

Reviews must guide decisions like that. However, not everyone feels like talking about it openly. An online review is more pleasant, though. 

Besides that, it gives people time to think more carefully to highlight their best attributes.

But if you want richer insights, Google My Business provides detailed statistics about other relevant points, including:

• the search queries used by customers to find your business;
• the number of views you have;
• the actions your customers take on your listing;
• metrics about the profile of your audience (gender, locality, and age groups);
• the number of clicks on your website;
• the number of direction queries.

That’s one of the reasons it is so important to optimize your profile.

It is free

The fact that there is no cost at all to create your profile on Google My Business explains why the platform is the protagonist of any Digital Marketing strategy. There are plenty of features available, and you can access all of them for free.

Unlike other platforms that offer a limited free version and different functionalities according to the user’s level, Google My Business gives you exactly the same resources as your competitors or global companies can have.

No premium version. No expiration date. The features include a free website that is automatically created for your business as soon as you fill in your profile.

How To Create an Account

Now you are ready to start. Check out the steps you need to take to create your profile.

1. Log in

Go to Google My Business and click on Manage Now. Log in with your Google account or create a new one. 

Once you do that, Google will ask you to locate your business on the map.

2. Find your business listing

Your customers may have already created a profile for your business. Don’t worry! That’s pretty common, especially if you own or manage a restaurant. 

Type the name and location to check if the listing already exists.

Click on it and move on, but remember not to do that on Google Maps. 

If your business is already there, the Suggest an edit option will only offer you the opportunity to update information — not taking control of the account to add images or answer comments and questions.

You must do that on the listing page. The alternative is to put your business name and click the Add your business to Google link. 

3. Say your name

Set your business name and click Next to continue. Pay extra attention if your company is part of a chain store or restaurant. 

In this case, remember to add your specific location (street, district, or city) to the name.

4. Choose a category

People (and Google) want to know exactly what kind of business this is. 

Notice that it is crucial to be as specific as possible, since customers usually don’t search for stores’ names, but categories.

You can type the first letters to select the option that best suits your business in the drop-down menu.

5. Add your location

“Do you want to add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?”. 

That is the question you have to ask. Notice that it may not be a good idea to provide your address if you do a home office.

Is that not your case? 

So select YES and click on Next, then type your business address. Once again, click Next to check if your option is included in a list of potential businesses. 

One more click on Next, and you can confirm your position on the map. Click Next to conclude this step. 

Notice that Google will show you an extra (but optional) step to select your service area.

That’s especially useful for restaurants and other stores that offer delivery services.

6. Set your contact information and preferences

On this page, you can fill in some fields with your phone number and website URL (optional). 

Click Next and then toggle email notifications if you want to receive recommendations for your business profile.

After a final click on Next, you will see the final screen to save all the information and click to Finish the process. 

Well done! Now you have your own Google My Business account.

How to Optimize Your Google My Business Page

Before you start, familiarize yourself with the platform. Check out what it looks like:

Verify your profile

You have your account, but Google and your customers need to know that you are the real owner of the business. 

Log in to your dashboard and click Verify now, as you can see below:

Then choose a way to verify your account. Notice that a postcard will probably be your only option. 

In some cases, Google allows you to do that by email or phone — it depends on the business size and category.

Upload images

Identify who exactly your target audience is and choose some pictures that are attractive to your ideal customer. 

Marketers often outline a Buyer Persona to be more accurate in strategic decisions like that.

Focus on relevant information

Highlight the most important information in your business listing. Good restaurants, for example, show their menu with prices and even a reservation button. 

Those options can be easily set up on the dashboard menu.

Be active 

Whether your business listing is widely accessed or not, it is fundamental that you actively respond to your reviews and update your information. 

That shows interest in what your customers think about your business and provides valuable insights to constantly improve your service.

Use this space to build a healthy relationship with your public.

Strengthen your marketing strategy

Last but not least, take an extra step and develop a solid strategy to captivate your public. You can use your business listing to keep your customers up to date on events and promotions.

This may be the chance to improve or even start your Content Marketing strategy, taking advantage of your business visibility to strengthen ties with customers and get more eyes on you.

As you can see, Google My Business is a powerful tool for companies, regardless of their size. In a few clicks, you manage to put your brand on the map and be digitally easier to find. 

A business listing also increases your marketing ROI and helps you to identify your customers’ profiles. 

So what are you waiting for? With Google My Business working in your favor, you can achieve greater results!

What about a complete strategy for your business? Check out this article about Local Online Marketing!

The post Google My Business: A Beginner’s Guide To Optimize Your Page For Local Sales appeared first on Rock Content.