How to Reach to Customers in Content-Centered Marketing

We apply our knowledge in content-centered marketing and provide you with insights that will help you reach your customers with the content you create. Our article includes practical advice with the guiding tips that will help you avoid the common mistakes and finally deliver your content right to your target audience.

Table of contents:

1. Define the Mission of Your Content Marketing

    1.1. Who Is the Potential Audience?

    1.2. What Are Your Topics and Niche?

    1.3. What Is the Value That You Bring with Your Content?

    1.4. What Type of Content May Resonate the Most?

2. Locate the Channels That Your Target Audience Uses

3. Use Audience Insights to Drive Your Content Marketing Strategy

4. Map Your Content to Your Customers’ Buyer Journey

5. Develop and Implement an Effective Content Distribution Plan

    5.1. Optimize Your Content for Search Engines

    5.2. Distribute Your Content on Social Media

    5.3. Consider Paid Distribution Channels

    5.4. Send Out an Email Newsletters

    5.5. Cooperate with Industry Influencers

    5.6. Analyze Results and Make Necessary Adjustments

    5.7. Value Drives the Traffic and Helps You Reach Your Audience

We’re all tired of the ‘content is the king’ mantra, right? But that doesn’t mean that it is not true. More and more companies tend to use branded content marketing while pushing their brand awareness. 

Answering your question – yes, it still works. But it’s all about the way you do it and whether you produce top-quality content that brings value to your target audience.  

We want to make it clear that reaching out to your customers is proportionally dependent on the value you bring to the customer. Too many brands have fallen into the trap of useless content creation and distribution without even doing initial research of the niche. Of course, this ended up as a disaster. That’s why it is essential to have enough knowledge about content marketing blogs and the benefits of content marketing.

1. Define the Mission of Your Content Marketing

So this is the reason why we compiled this comprehensive article. Let’s kick off our list of tips with the fundamental groundwork that you’ve got to do before you even start producing content. There is a slight chance that you’re reading this article because you’re already a content creator, and you’re simply not heard by the audience. Basically, if you follow these tips from A to Z, you will see where you’ve made a mistake and how you can fix it.

There are three questions that you’ve got to ask yourself at this stage. You can call them the grand three pillars that may hold your content marketing afloat. 

Who Is the Potential Audience?

When we talk about content-centered marketing, we mean that our idea is to start the content production based on specific niche research. And we are producing content on a particular topic, the audience will follow. 

The opposite of that is the audience-centered content. This may work for you if you have an extensive user base in the company that never worked with the digital content marketing. Then you can make a research on the existing audience and start the content production. Then it’s easier to reach to the customers, cause your whole content strategy is based on the research of your existing audience.

Since we’re building the content-centered marketing strategy, we’ve got to make the research of the potential audience, not the existing one. You can do your research in several ways: analyze your potential competitors, run questionnaires of the target groups, etc.

When you know who your potential audience is, it will be easier to predict what kind of content they will find valuable. 

What Are Your Topics and Niche?

Define a specific niche you work in and the topics that you cover. You won’t be able to deliver substantial results when you try to work with everything. Only long-term work with the correctly selected topics will help you provide a genuinely qualitative content with reputable expertise. 

Plus, since content-marketing is tied with search engine optimization, it’s simply easier to grow the website or blog authority when you specialize in a specific topic. 

What Is the Value That You Bring with Your Content?

This is by far the most complicated question that most of the content creators may not be able to answer. And that is bad; cause content will only resonate with your audience when they find it valuable. 

What kind of expertise do you have? Are you ready to share the ins and outs of the problems that you’re trying to put in a spotlight on your blog? When your answer is ‘Yes,’ and you know how your end-user will be able to benefit from your content, you are a few steps ahead of the competitors. 

What Type of Content May Resonate the Most?

That’s where you can experiment if your research is not consistent enough. You can produce different types of content and analyze the results. After you’re able to cross-out the content that your users are not interacting with, you will be able to boost the engagement on your website or blog.

2. Locate the Channels That Your Target Audience Uses 

Digital content marketing is not just about the content production for your blog. You’ve got to know what marketing channels this content to distribute to. Otherwise, you will be left one on one with the SEO, and that’s not enough for the significant boost of your marketing results. 

Once you’ve done the required research of your potential audience, you need to highlight the social platforms and communication channels that your audience uses the most. This way, you will be able to avoid knocking on the wrong doors. One of the most popular mistakes that content marketers do is not utilizing the social platforms which their customers use the most. 

Unfortunately, many marketers tend to underestimate the results that can be achieved through these marketing channels and simply cut out the hand that can feed them.

3. Use Audience Insights to Drive Your Content Marketing Strategy

The results of your potential audience research and the engagement that you see from your active users that interact with your content should become a core in your digital content marketing strategy.

We genuinely believe that you’ve got to develop a strategy with specific guidelines that you will follow in your content production. When you apply the audience-related insights to your content-centered marketing strategy, you will be able to improve the reach of your content.

These insights are essential for the further growth of your website or blog.

4. Map Your Content to Your Customers’ Buyer Journey

The question that we all ask ourselves is how to reach the right customers at the right time. Cause, after all, most of the companies that utilize content in their marketing activities want to sell products or services. That’s the core reason for us to reach to the end-user and explain how valuable our brand is. It’s obvious. 

So let’s say you already have enough valuable content on your blog, but your core audience of the website doesn’t notice you reaching out to them. What’s next? Another excellent idea for your content to be heard is to map your content to the customers’ buyer journey. You can provide your customers with insights in the form of articles when he may not be sure about his decision or struggle with one. This way, your content will serve as the final hit of the hammer that pushes the nail all the way through.  

5. Develop and Implement an Effective Content Distribution Plan

Your content should not only be produced with care and attention details. You also need to work with the plan of content distribution. Do you already have a distribution routine that you perform every time you have a new article out? Are you sure that you utilize every opportunity of content distribution?

There are several directions that you may take to distribute your content successfully. We have already discussed some of the above, but let’s finalize this list to make sure we have this cheat sheet. 

Optimize Your Content for Search Engines

Content marketing is dead with proper search engine optimization. Companies that only rely on one channel of distribution and believe that valuable content will find its way through the search engine jungles are terribly wrong. The only thing that can boost this is the viral effect of your content on social media platforms. However, it happens to 1 out of 10 articles/videos/pictures or whatsoever. Make sure you make the most out of the content optimization for search engines to get the best results with your digital content marketing efforts.

Distribute Your Content on Social Media

Now, when we understand that there is a big picture with more than one channel of content distribution, we want to highlight the importance of social platforms as the element of the ecosystem. 

None of the listed channels of distributions will deliver proper enough results on its own. You’ve got to apply for a complex approach and work in every direction. 

When we talk about the social platform, we have to keep in mind the research that we’ve mentioned above. Don’t waste your time on the platforms that your potential target audience won’t use. This is a harmful waste of your valuable time.

Consider Paid Distribution Channels

This might work for those who have an impressive budget and can buy paid advertising and marketing of the produced content. Basically, it’s a great way to give an additional boost to your content, but you’ve got to be sure that this paid channel of distribution has a proven track record and will work for your business. 

Send Out an Email Newsletters

Newsletters are so underestimated. When you work with content-marketing on a regular basis and build it from scratch, you will get to the point where the whole system works like a swiss clock. 

This means that once you release your article, blog post, or literally anything, you will post it to your social media platforms, send out a newsletter in a timely manner, consider the opportunity to cooperate with the influencers, etc. The big picture that we’re talking about is the machine that you can build, which will send out your fresh content to the customers through every available distribution channel. That’s the best way to grow your audience, reach it, and engage. 

Newsletters can take a lot of your time, they can seem boring, and you can see very slow progress. However, when you look at giants like ‘Hustle.co,’ you know for sure that newsletters still rock, it’s just about your approach and motivation.

Cooperate with Industry Influencers

This can also be considered a paid advertising of your content, but some of the industry influencers can be interested in working with you on a quid pro quo basis. The mutual benefit can drive your cooperation to success and help you increase the audience your content can reach.

Analyze Results and Make Necessary Adjustments

It’s essential to evaluate what’s been done and apply changes based on the results you see. We’re not saying that you’ve got to change your content plan every two days, we’re talking about small step-by-step changes that may improve your inbound marketing vs. content marketing results. 

Make sure you perform the evaluation with the team to make sure that everyone could apply his/her expertise by looking at the results you’re getting. This way, you will have a conclusion from a niche expert on SEO, social media performance, etc.

Value Drives the Traffic and Helps You Reach Your Audience

After all, it’s about the quality of content you produce and the value that you bring to your potential audience. There are numerous examples on the market when companies decide to dive into content marketing and start producing useless content being sure that quantity and quality are the same words. 

Unfortunately, it’s not. And if you’re in a situation where you’re not reaching your audience, the engagement numbers are low and depressing, you’ve got to review your content marketing plan. 

Just as we’ve described in the section above, the content strategy can help you layout the core values of your content and help you hit the right spots when interacting with your audience. 

Make sure you review your current content marketing results and make sure that you’re actually content-centered, not lost in the woods of content marketing instead.