Trading Phantom Content for High-Quality Content That Sticks

3 minute read

Upland Admin

You want to craft an effective content strategy, but you’re overwhelmed by the chaos of content marketing. You know your plan lacks the focus it needs to really make an impact.

This muffled strategy often results in “phantom content”—content that is published only to disappear without generating or nurturing leads. With 88% of marketers looking to address creating high-quality, engaging content in the upcoming year, cracking the code of workhorse content is top of mind.

So, what does this type of content marketing look like in practice? How do you create engaging, high-quality content? Don’t get overwhelmed with tech or producing a certain amount of content—just look to your customer.

When you refocus your content under the lens of customer experience, you create content that innately provides your end user with exactly what they need. It’s a little bit of content marketing magic.

The Simple Approach to Customer-Centric Content Marketing

Research the Space

Find your competitors. How are they talking to customers? What types and themes of content are generating discussion on LinkedIn? Who are the thought leaders?

Researching in this way can highlight common customer pain points and generate fresh content ideas. Most importantly, perhaps, it can shed light on value you can offer that your competitors lack.

Evaluate Your Content

Armed with an understanding of competitors, it’s time to assess which pieces of your own content are converting. Take a focused look at your content and its performance—from robust marketing automation data measures daily performance to organic website traffic.

Assessing the success and failures of your current content with a critical eye is essential to understanding what your customers think is high-quality content.

Know Your Customer

With 94% of all B2B buyers viewing multiple pieces of content from the vendor they ultimately select, you want to make sure you’re speaking to your consumer directly. Build on the research you’ve collected by talking directly with your sales team and exploring available market research.

From there, move to understand how your customer consumes the content: for example, if your customers crave interactive content and you keep publishing eBooks, you should adjust accordingly.

Use all these insights to craft in-depth personas:

  •        Who they are
  •        Common pain points
  •        Preferred content type (infographic, blog, social media, etc.)
  •        Role in buying process

These personas will operate as the framework and voice for all your published content.

Write It Down

Brainstorming is great. Documentation is better.

The Content Marketing Institute cited that 60% of marketers with a well-documented strategy rate themselves highly in terms of content marketing effectiveness, compared with 32% of marketers with a verbal strategy. This means that drafting a plan in writing can be the deciding factor in executing high-quality content.

Not only does documentation aid in the process of mapping out your strategy, but it also provides visibility into what you’re doing for internal teams (*cough* sales alignment).

Phantom content isn’t inevitable. When you take the time to focus on the customer, high-quality content will follow.

Reliable products. Real results.

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