When planning content, the most crucial step is identifying your target audience. Often referred to as persona design, aiming to "drive actions that connect to the company's business" inevitably requires setting targets more precisely than for advertising alone. This means planning distinct content tailored to each specific audience.
For example, with membership sites, if you only deliver similar content to both highly loyal, actively participating members and those who only occasionally enter gift campaigns, you risk failing to satisfy either group. Or, for products with long consideration periods like cars or insurance, the information people seek differs based on their stage of consideration or life stage – are they just gathering information, ready to buy now, do they have a family? Ideally, content should be tailored as much as possible to these individual needs.
Furthermore, in content marketing, you must consider not only the content itself but also its distribution. Where exactly are the people who want this information? How do you reach your target audience? While advertising methods like PR or leveraging influencers for social media reach exist, to make it easier for them to take actions that lead to business, you'll need to segment your targets using ad networks, SEM, and content recommendation services.
To make content truly effective, planning must encompass not only creating "appropriate content" but also delivering it at the "right time" through the "right channel."
Achieving this naturally requires an enormous volume of content to provide. Managing this content and optimizing its delivery becomes impossible to handle solely with human labor, necessitating some form of tooling. Furthermore, data and analysis become insufficient when delving deeper into questions like: What potential audiences exist outside your owned media? What behaviors do these people exhibit digitally? Relying solely on your own website analytics becomes inadequate.
This direction actually aligns with what key terms frequently mentioned in the recent trend of marketing digitalization—DMP, CRM, marketing automation—aim to achieve.
This makes perfect sense, as content marketing has two aspects: while it involves information dissemination and publishing through owned media, it also connects to the funnel-based marketing process of building brand awareness, converting prospects, nurturing them, and ultimately turning them into customers. In other words, when we return to the definition of content marketing—"providing valuable and persuasive information (content) to prompt existing and potential customers to take actions that benefit the company's business"—it becomes clear that content marketing also encompasses the task of leveraging content within the broader marketing process.
So, how does content evolve when it reaches this level?
It requires elements of "trend-setting," a strength of advertising creatives. It also demands "societal" elements, akin to what media editors consider. Content like technical information, which only experts can create, becomes necessary.
While addressing marketing challenges and scheming to generate buzz, we must also plan to capture the attention of our target audience. Furthermore, we must incorporate diverse improvements identified through the PDCA cycle. Ultimately, the content must possess the persuasive power to make the recipient think, "This is interesting!", "Huh, I didn't know that!", or "I see!". I believe content marketing now demands ideas with a much higher bar than ever before.
Who gets what content, when, and through which channels? No matter how much data we can collect or how sophisticated marketing tools become, content strategy and communication planning remain tasks that require human thought. This necessitates not only a content strategy/planning direction team and a web analytics team, but also a data analytics team to measure and analyze data both within and beyond owned media, plus a team focused on marketing PDCA. What kinds of trials are actually underway in the broader field of content marketing? I'll cover that in future installments.
From the Front Lines of Content Marketing [15]
