Developing a content strategy framework

To develop a successful content strategy framework you need to clearly define your content's target audience – your ideal customer profile and the buyer personas involved in decisions to work with you.

Buyer personas are in-depth representations of critical people who work at your ideal customer companies. They go beyond demographics and represent their challenges, fears and aspirations. What are they looking to achieve, and which other people in their world help or frustrate their decisions?

Your buyer personas should cover five key questions:

• Change Drivers: What causes buyers to invest in solutions like yours, and what is different about buyers who are satisfied with the status quo?
• Success Factors: What operational or personal results does your buyer persona expect to achieve by purchasing this solution?
• Perceived Barriers: What concerns cause your buyer to believe that your solution or company is not their best option?
• Decision Criteria: Which aspects of the competing services, solutions, or companies do your buyers perceive most critical, and what are their expectations for each?
• Buyer's Ecosystem: Who and what impact your buyers as they evaluate their options?

Developing buyer personas

In the world of manufacturing, understanding the companies who represent the biggest growth opportunity for you can be hard. Likewise, isolating the wants and needs of key influencers and technical decision-makers buried deep inside OEM organisations can be a challenge.  

Sales, marketing and account management all need to work together to build your Ideal Customer Profile and define the buyer personas who you will need to reach within those organisations.

Your Marketing team should have data on where your current online visitors are located and how they found your website, plus details about their demographics and the role types. They may also have data from market research such as customer satisfaction surveys.

Meanwhile, your Sales team will have strong awareness of your buyer personas' questions (a rich vein of content ideas), what they want to achieve by investing in a solution like yours, and their common objections to purchasing.

You may have ideal customer nuances, which means you'll need to consider any possible adjustment for associated buyer personas. On average, contract manufacturers create four different audiences according to the Content Marketing Institute.

Having comprehensive buyer personas will enable you to produce more relevant and valuable content that they'll want to consume.

The importance of the buyer’s journey

The buyer's journey is a customer's path to purchasing a product or service. It can be split broadly into three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision.

The information your buyers are searching for will vary according to where they are in the buyer's journey. Content intended to generate awareness, for instance, is different from content for the consideration and decision stages.

Awareness (What do I need?): A buyer becomes aware of a need and has expressed a potential problem or opportunity symptoms. They start gathering information to help them understand this problem or opportunity and decide whether it should be a priority. They are not ready to be sold .

Consideration (What are my options?): A buyer has defined and given a name to their problem or opportunity and starts reviewing their options, assessing which may best meet their needs and eliminating those that don't.

Decision (Why should I buy now – from you?): Having narrowed the field in the decision stage, a buyer has defined their solution, strategy, method, or approach and is ready to make a decision.

Understanding the buyer's journey lets you create content that will resonate with your buyer personas and nurture them as they move through each stage.

Determine which content types to create

You know your audience and have created well-defined buyer personas and an ideal customer profile. You understand the buyer's journey and their needs at each stage. Now you can start thinking about what content to create across that matrix.

Blog posts

Making your site a valuable resource for your customers starts with regular blogging. Blogging helps build your reputation and authority in your field. It can help grow your audience by driving traffic to your website, building rapport, enhancing engagement, telling your story and creating sales opportunities.

A good manufacturing blog calendar presents a vibrant mix of original stories, topical analysis, and educational content that targets the needs of your buyer personas at each stage of the buyer's journey.

Long-form content

Long-form content like eBooks, white papers and guides remains a valuable asset. They provide conversion opportunities and the chance to start new conversations. And they can be repurposed for different channels, including as pillar pages for your website to help you get found.

Case studies

Case studies allow you to tell customer stories and build credibility simultaneously. You can demonstrate how your services have helped companies succeed. Case studies are highly versatile as they can take many forms.

Pillar page and topic clusters

One of the ways to deliver search engine optimisation (SEO) success is to develop strategic content 'clusters' around a central topic. The heart of this topic is a comprehensive resource page, called a 'pillar page', that covers a topic in-depth and links to high-quality content (blogs) on supporting subtopics. This will help improve your SEO and position you as a thought leader in your industry.

Infographics

Infographics can represent data more compellingly than words alone. They are great for when you need to share a lot of data in a way that is clear and easy to understand. Plus, they are highly shareable.

Videos

Videos are a highly engaging content medium and can be shared on your website and social media. They involve more investment in time and resources than written content but can track back to ROI. Examples include demos, expert interviews, education and explainer videos, case studies, and event promos.

Podcasts

Podcasting provides a huge opportunity. There's a surging interest in B2B audio content as workers seek to top up their knowledge via more digestible formats. Podcasts are also an excellent fit for audiences who don't have the interest or the time to invest in reading content every day. Your expertise could be repurposed as a series of expert interviews, round table chats or industry roundups.

Research

Research-based content is highly engaging and can help enhance your authority in your field. Like case studies, research can be packaged in many ways to create multiple pieces of content, from blog posts to infographics, webinars and podcasts.

Webinars and virtual events

Webinars offer a unique chance to share your ideas and expertise online. They keep participants engaged through their interactive nature and provide an opportunity to create a memorable ‘sense of occasion’ around the shared ideas. By creating an experience of thoughtfulness and professionalism, webinars have become the channel of choice for many people communicating in the digital space.

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Producing content in various consumable formats matters because you continue to engage with a growing audience in ways they value. Think about what will best serve your buyer personas. It may be tempting to launch a podcast, but if your audience isn't consuming content this way, it won't reach them or capture their attention. It pays to think carefully here.

Shaping your brand narrative

Humans love stories. They make us feel connected, give us something to believe in, and make us feel better.

Business storytelling is similar. It helps align your business with your target audience. But your brand's story is more than what you write on your website. It's also your mission and how you communicate it consistently to your audience, wherever they are.

Positioning your customer as the hero

Telling your brand story means recognising that the customer is the hero. A common mistake many companies make is focusing their messaging on themselves, not the customer. But it's not about you; it's about them. Your customers are not seeking another story or a hero; they are looking for a guide.

Your buyer persona profiles tell you much of what you need to know about your customers, including what they are trying to achieve, their pain points, and what they hope to gain from a solution. Using this insight and drawing on your core proposition – how your company can help relieve your customers' pain and help them achieve their goals – you can create a brand story that will resonate with your customers.

Your brand story should:

• Identify the principal problem your customers face, how they feel about it, and why it matters to them
• Empathise with them and establish your authority as a solution provider
• Identify how you can help them and what they will gain
• Evoke jeopardy (the stakes) and qualify the merits of implementing a solution.

All content or messaging you create should flow from the customer's perspective.

The content creation process

With well-defined buyer personas, a clear picture of the buyer's journey, and a library of content formats to play with, now it's time to start thinking about the topics your content needs to cover.

Using your buyer personas

Your buyer personas illustrate your ideal customers' needs, interests, fears and aspirations. The profiles you create for each persona will be bursting with opportunities for content that will respond to those aspects. Your goal is to create content that answers buyers' questions at every stage of their journeys.

Sales and marketing: better together than the sum of their parts

Be sure to involve your sales team, too. They are speaking to OEMs day in and day out. The information your salespeople gather is a treasure trove of relevant insight and material that can help produce more specific and targeted content ideas. And likewise, the marketing team must remain alert to opportunities to develop bespoke content for the sales team.

The following are tools to help you generate new content ideas:

• Buzzsumo: Do you want to discover popular content around a particular topic? This resource uses various tools like social media shares to help you see which content ideas would do well if you created content about them.
• CoSchedule Headline Analyzer: Do you have a general topic in mind, but are you stuck on what to write about? The content idea generator will do the work for you. Or, if you have an idea in mind, the Headline Analyzer tool will help you strengthen it.
• Feedly: Do you want to track popular topics in your industry and discover new content ideas in one place? Feedly pulls together a curated list of content around topics you're interested in, compiled from news sites, newsletters and social media, so you don't have to scour the internet yourself.

Distributing your content

It's not enough to create great content. Develop a plan for distributing and promoting your content to reach your ideal customers.

Just as you can create content in different formats, you'll also have various channels to publish your content, including your website and social media.

Ideally, you should select a mix of distribution channels. Your blog is an excellent place to start. By regularly publishing content through your blog, you will boost traffic to your website.

Social media is another essential distribution channel. Contract manufacturers should prioritise LinkedIn. You may also want to consider posting on Twitter, Instagram or other social media platforms depending on buyer personas habits.

Be sure to select distribution channels based on where your customers are. You'll also need a plan for promoting your social media content. Will you share your new post on LinkedIn rather than your website? When will you share your latest eBook with your email mailing list?

By planning your social media posts and email campaigns around your content, you can ensure your target audience finds it.

Analysing and measuring content performance