In my last post “7 Things You Need to Know About Content Marketing,” I shared some fundamentals you need to understand before launching your own content marketing program. As a refresher, content marketing is an evolving, long-term process rather than a one-time campaign. You might be tempted to jump right into mapping out a strategy and creating an editorial calendar. However, you need to do some content marketing legwork beforehand to set the stage for an effective strategy.

Content marketing legwork

Before you plunge into creating a content marketing strategy, you’ll need to do a little legwork first. How? By setting goals, creating your buyer personas, and doing some keyword research.

Set content marketing goals

Do you know why you’re undertaking a content marketing effort? Do you have a clear idea of what you hope to achieve with content marketing? If not, spend time figuring this out in as much detail as possible.

This requires some self-reflection, so start with key questions. Who are you serving? What problems are you solving for your customers? What does your organization struggle with (such as brand awareness or lead conversion)? What do you want your content to accomplish—both for you and your target audience?

Every organization’s content marketing goals are different, but here are some common ones:

• increase new sales leads
• nurture existing sales leads
• build brand awareness
• increase customer conversion
• boost customer loyalty
• establish your brand as a thought leader

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Once you’ve unearthed your struggles and sharpened your goals, use this information to drive your content strategy. A good strategy will identify your core audience, what type of content you’ll deliver (in terms of both topic and format), and what the desired outcome will be for readers (i.e., once your audience consumes your content, what will they be able to do?).

Create your buyer personas

While it always helps to know your target audience’s demographics (i.e., occupation, gender, age, education level), a buyer persona goes deeper. According to Hubspot, a buyer persona is “a fictional, generalized representation of your ideal customer.” It helps you understand your prospects and customers better, relate to them in a more personal way, and understand their pain points and motivations.

Like goal-setting, creating a buyer persona takes time and starts with questions. You’ll gather this intel with some market research as well as insights from your employees (think customer service and sales reps) and actual customers (via surveys and interviews). By the way, you’ll be creating a separate buyer persona for each core segment of your target audience. Start with your primary target audience and add additional ones later.

Key questions to ask:

• Who is this person?
• What traits characterize her?
• What does her typical day look like?
• What are her challenges?
• What does she need?
• Where is she in the sales funnel?
• What unique value can you offer her?

Once you fine-tune your buyer persona, you can tailor your content marketing to the unique needs of each distinct segment you need to target. Need help creating a buyer persona? Check out this how-to article and free template from Hubspot that walks you through the process.

Do keyword research

Before you develop your content strategy, you’ll need to determine what topics you want to rank for in Google. You’ll also need to figure out what specific words and phrases people are searching for regarding these topics. You have to be a bit of a mind-reader here, but you’ve also got plenty of tools and resources to help you out. (See links below.)

Why conduct keyword research for content marketing? So you can develop a list of specific words and phrases you want to rank for in a search engine results page (SERP). When you incorporate these keywords into your content, you’ll boost the chance of your prospects and customers finding your content. This will drive them to your website.

For some wonderful guides (along with some suggested free/paid tools), check out these keyword research articles from Yoast, ShoutMeLoud, and Moz. Hubspot also comes to the rescue again with a great how-to article and a downloadable free guide called “20 SEO Myths that You Should Leave Behind in 2018.”

Once you’ve done the content marketing legwork of setting goals, creating buyer personas, and doing keyword research, you’ve built a solid foundation. Your next step? Developing a content strategy.

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