By Zach Watson
The way most marketers create content is all wrong—I know because I used to do it for years.
Earlier in my career, I worked at a B2B company intent on building a large supply of inbound traffic. The site was optimized for conversions, so the more sessions we brought in, the higher our ROI on the channel. Marketing had a team of three to four writers who each churned out four to five articles a week. After several years, we were attracting over 150,000 unique visitors to the site each month.
So what’s wrong with this story? Well, no one knew anything about our audience. We chose topics through keyword research only, and then did our best to write something intelligent about each subject. Sure, people came to the site. But that’s only because we blanketed the front page with content, not because our content answered their most pressing questions. Our strategy was volume over value.
Small businesses can’t afford this approach, and neither can smart marketers. The internet is too saturated with content. Over 4 million blog posts are published every day. This is why you hear experts say there’s not much point in creating good content anymore. If you’re not producing something outstanding, it’s too hard to stand out. And you won’t see a return.
But don’t lose all hope just yet. In the years since I left that job, I’ve continued to work in content (I’m a director now), and I’ve found the secret to generating great media has two parts:
1. Really get to know your audience
These days I work at an agency with a bunch of designers. Like me, they need to get to know their audiences. But instead of just relying on data, they prefer to interview them. This is known as generative research, because it “generates” ideas for the designers. That way, they don’t assume what people think about a design, they learn directly from the source.
Good marketers are using this same approach in their content research and coming up with ideas that directly relate to what their audience wants to read.
A real life example: This is how Timi Olotu builds the content strategy at PatSnap. By having in-depth conversations with customers, he’s able to identify topics that matter to his audience and develop content tailored to those interests.
“We start by really understanding what our audience is trying to achieve in their job, and the surrounding context. Then we ask them about obstacles to achieving those goals,” Oluto explains. “The key is to standardize the kind of questions you want to ask, so you can collect similar kinds of data and find trends. It’s critical to organize information so the content team can ask, ‘Where’s the intersection between all the things that matter to our audience, and all the things that matter to us?’”
And the results of that research? PatSnap’s audience values the company’s content so much people email Olotu when they’re changing jobs (i.e., changing emails) to make sure they stay on the newsletter list.