Tips on marketing with content:
Plan, use personas and recycle

by Gordon Graham, Editor, SoftwareCEO.com
 

Design guru and best selling author Roger C. Parker has lots of suggestions about marketing with content.

Here are three great tips that emerged during a recent lively discussion.

♦ Content tip #1: Plan in advance

"Planning should be one of the essential goals of marketing with content," he declares.

How many companies have started a newsletter and run out of ideas after two issues?

It's far better to plan the whole year in advance, instead of running out of steam partway through.

"I encourage my clients... with a sharp stick," chuckles Parker. "Don't write the first issue until you have an editorial calendar for your first 12 issues." It sounds difficult, but it pays off when each article is easier to write. "If I know in September I'm doing an article on something, between now and August I'm going to be thinking about that subconsciously.

"Even while I'm driving, I'll come up with ideas. On August 31, I sit down to write that September newsletter and it just happens—my fingers are on automatic."

Time management experts say that every minute spent planning saves five to 10 minutes in doing.

So taking an hour or two to plan out several months' worth of content is actually very productive.

♦ Content tip #2: Create a set of personas

Parker recommends creating two or three key personas to help plan your content marketing.

The term means "mask" or "character"—or essentially a market segment summed up as an individual.

But if you've never used personas, how do you do it? "These are single-page documents that begin with a hypothetical name like Roger, and what his needs are, his characteristics, where he goes for help," says Parker.

"So you write a little story, a couple paragraphs about Roger and you stick a photo of a typical Roger on it... and then you analyze Roger's pain points and what kind of specific content Roger needs.

"You're personalizing a lot of data, making it accessible and engaging."

Go on to cover each of your main customer segments. This exercise will help you target content to each type of prospect.

Of course, we could say much more about personas.

In fact, here's a whole page of articles and presentations about personas.

Scroll down to the bottom for some sample personas and templates you can use.

But here's the bottom line: Developing a persona can help you picture a typical prospect or customer and figure out what they need.

♦ Content tip #3: Recycle

Everyone likes to recycle, right?

In terms of content, recycling means more bang for your buck and putting out a more consistent message.

"I think content management is based on recycling," says Parker. "You're not marketing to people standing still, but to a parade walking by. "So you have to reuse your content to be consistently visible."

It's not hard to recycle a white paper as a presentation, or boil it down into a shorter article.

If the basic ideas are central to your company's purpose, there's really no limit on how many times you can reuse them.

"After you run that first article, reuse it as a newsletter, as a series of blog posts, Twitter about it, then create reports, then have a teleseminar," he says.

"The point is that every piece you write can be subdivided and repurposed many other ways."

Recycling your content in other formats help you stretch your marketing budget and get the maximum return from every idea you develop.

Copyright © Computing Technology Industry Association, Inc. Reprinted with permission.