2ND NOVEMBRE 2022
Strategic Content Marketing

Doing Content Marketing effectively means working in a strategic and integrated way on the marketing funnel in terms of targeting, content and messages.

According to a recent research by McKinsey* such an approach can trigger a virtuous circle and lead up to 15-20% greater effectiveness in the implementation of your online (and offline) marketing and communication campaigns, as well as better organizational synergy and in the orchestration of lower-, mid- and upper-funnel investments.

In our experience, the starting point of a Content Strategy that works is a detailed mapping of the brand personas combined with an accurate analysis of the existing and missing contents and the key messages relevant to each of them in the different phases of the funnel.

But let’s start from the beginning.

WHO ARE THE BRAND PERSONAS?

We can define them as identikits of ideal customers, which represent the needs, behaviors, motivations, interests and aspirations of real users.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO IDENTIFY THEM?

Defining our personas accurately helps us to:

• Focus on brand, marketing, communication, content activities, avoiding addressing “everyone and nobody”
• Avoid wasting budget and energy in low-profitable user segments
• Provide a user-experience as personalized as possible for its users to increase the propensity to purchase and loyalty

In practice: media planning, the development of content and editorial plans, the creation of new features, the creation of value-added services guided by the analysis of the brand personas help us to optimize our efforts and maximize the return on investment.

HOW CAN I IDENTIFY THEM?

In defining the personas, any information that may be useful for the reconstruction of one’s ideal client is taken into account, in particular:

• Demographic information: such as age, gender, geographic location, income
• Psychographic information: behaviors, interests, reasons for purchasing, needs, barriers, role in decision making, without neglecting the level of digitization and attention to sustainability issues

WHAT DATA CAN I USE?

Personas are defined on the basis of information collected from various sources:

• user navigation and interaction with the brand
• analytical data of your website and social channels
• CRM data
• questionnaires, interviews
• hands-on experience

The more specific the information you get, the more you can delineate the personas in detail.

What best practices do we suggest for identifying brand personas?

Our experience tells us that there are at least 3 best practices to follow to create an accurate mapping of brand personas:

• Always give a business priority to brand personas to decide which ones to focus on; except in the case of high budgets, it is not advisable to work on all personas at the same time with the same effort
• Select a maximum of 3-4 people on which to direct investments: a quality audience will be more proactive in conversions and in retaining the brand
• Translating what mapped into practice: communication channels, contents and messages must be consistent with the motivations & needs of the identified key brand personas

Why use brand personas mapping in planning your advertising campaigns

Accurately identifying your brand personas is the first step in creating an effective full funnel marketing strategy as it allows you to define audiences for your campaigns more effectively.

BUT HOW DOES IT WORK IN PRACTICE? WHAT IS THE PROCESS TO FOLLOW?

Here is our 7 step guide:

• Identify your Brand Personas, using the data at your disposal and not forgetting to collect qualitative data from customer care or direct interactions with your prospects and customers
  
• Remember to prioritize the most relevant Brand Personas for your business
  
• Map content and messages relevant to each Brand Person in the different phases of the Customer Journey; select the key messages in the different stages of the funnel
  
• Define strategy and media planning on different channels and formats based on brand personas (actual and emerging) and competition analysis
• Identify Media Audiences based on your Brand Personas; use wider audiences and then test different variations of the same ad to identify the best performing advertisements and fine-tune your target audience
  
• Create creative assets in different formats and variations; don’t forget to create multiple creative variations of the same ad to test the best performing audiences
  
• Fine-tune your Brand Personas using insights from the creative content testing phase
  

According to our experience in the field, proven by a recent research by Meta *, using wider advertising audiences, starting from a strategic mapping of the brand personas, allows to achieve an average improvement of 44% in brand recall and a 31% more of users who declare their intention to purchase with the same budget.

Want to know more?

Contact us to learn more about this topic or to share your feedback 😊

* source: McKinsey, “Why every business needs a full-funnel marketing strategy”

** source: Meta, “Why broader audiences matter in an auction-based system”