3 Steps To Advance Content Marketing in Search & Social Platform

You've poured hours of sweat, tears, and blood into producing your last content piece.

You wrote, edited, and rewrote it until your exact message conveyed what you wanted to say. You strategically placed your video, images, and text to make it visually appealing as possible.

You waited for the audience to start tweeting, liking, sharing, commenting on, and linking to your latest masterpiece./p>

Logged into your social media, watching out obsessively for people to start talking about it. And, intensely monitoring analytics for any sign of traffic?

But nothing happened.

No likes. No shares. No one talked about it. No increase in your traffic.

Sound familiar?

The good news is you are not the only one!

More good news is that fixing the problem is well within our grasp.

We understand the importance of producing quality content, but what most people don't understand is what and how to produce which will truly perform well with the audience.

Performing well in both social and search requires you to generate content that is more than a bunch of words on a page. It requires one to produce content which your audience actually cares about. While this task is easier said than done, it can be achieved if you follow a specific plan.

1. Identify Your Audience

Imagine how can a conversation between your blind date and you might differ from the one between you and your wife.

Even if you are completely being authentic, your conversation in each of these cases would focus on different conversation topics and could carry different substantial tone.

It's the same with marketing.

Identifying your audiences is a critical foremost step because your content needs to clearly and directly communicate to them.

This means your content may perform effectively only with chosen audiences and poorly with other audiences.

You may at this point be tempted to try appealing to everyone.

Don't.

This is a matter of ratios. In simpler words, the better your content performs with one set of audience, the worse it will perform with others.

The problem arises when you try to appeal to everyone is that it doesn't give anyone a reason to be passionate about the content being produced.

The key to defining your audience is being specific. You need to define exactly who are you creating the particular content piece for.

The more specific, the better.

For example, a landlord clearly needs to reach out to his potential audience, but that's not even anywhere near specific.

So what criteria are necessary?

For starters, most tenants want to reach out landlords within a specific geographic region. What appeals to a tenant in South Kolkata will differ greatly from what appeals to one in North Kolkata, so your content needs to reflect that.

Let's now go bit deeper - price is another factor. Tenants who want to rent home around ₹10,000 are significantly different from those who want around ₹20,000.

Time is another factor. A landlord will generally appeal to those rent-seekers who are looking to move in quickly, or to those who are looking to move in after a few months time.

So hypothetically, a landlord might be creating a content piece only for his potential tenant who:

• Wants to live in South Kolkata.
• Has a budget of ₹10,000.
• Is looking to move in immediately.

Knowing all of these factors enables the landlord to craft the content in such a way that it will definitely appeal to potential audiences. And, here's the beauty of this approach - not every content needs to target the exact same audience.

So, the more specific you can tailor content, the better it will perform.

2. Find out Exactly What Audience Need/Want

Now that we know what exactly our audiences are and who are we trying to reach out, it's time that we figure out what exactly they want or need.

Continuing with our previous example, we know that our audience needs a new home, also we know where they want to live, how much they are comfortable in spending, and how soon they want to move in.

Now let's use a few more additional criteria for our previous section, and let's say that we are targeting an audience that consists of young to middle-aged families who have children and enjoys outdoor activities.

But what else does this audience want or need beyond just the home, that is directly related to rental of the home?

It's almost a certainty that they would possibly want good schools for their children. They would also probably want a quiet and safe neighbourhood with plenty of children-friendly environment, which may include beaches, parks, and theme parks.

So now we know what exactly our audience is looking for, and we know they are looking for a home that is:

• School zoned are
• In a quiet and safe neighbourhood
• Is or located near children-friendly entertainments.

3. Identify Their Hot Buttons

The last and the final step is to determine what motivates your audience. This is what we call as a ‘Hot Buttons' - something that can leverage a certain behaviour or response. In this situation, it's to get them engaged with the content.

Since we already know who are our audiences are and what they need, identifying their buttons should be simple now.

The most appealing and powerful hot button is most likely to be their kids. Anything related to their safety, happiness, and education should produce effective results. It will be easy to create content about how certain activities can positively contribute to their brain or physical development, and tie some of your local activities available, like meditation, martial arts, or youth sports.

Some of the other hot buttons include:

• Privacy
• Being near family
• Exclusivity
• Proximity to medical facilities
• Local amenities

This list could be endless virtually, but the whole idea is to identify the factors that would motivate people to rent it.

Paint a Picture

Have you ever had a conversation with someone, who when sharing a story, do a great job at storytelling that you almost felt you've experienced it with them?

Their facial expressions and hand gestures dances along with their words, immersing one to float into their own imaginary world that expertly had been crafted by them.

Paint the whole scenario not just with facts, but also with emotions, conversations by asking questions. Produce content that people would want to like and share and connect with your audiences emotionally.

Now It's Time to Produce the Content…

Following these 3 simple steps, it's time that you put pen to paper, or more relatable, fingers to keyboard.

If you play your cards right, armed with information about who and what exactly your audiences want, what are their hot buttons, you can connect and gain traffic to your site.

Remember, you are not just producing content about the landlord and their homes - but you also have to focus on the factors that drive the tenant's decisions.