Defining relevance and understanding why it is important

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

 

Defining relevance and understanding why it is important- Content Marketing: Staying Relevant

- Before you can go out and start creating content that is relevant and personalized for your audience, you need to know what relevant content is and why it's important to your business. The buying journey today has drastically changed. Your buyers are multi-channel and they're on multi devices, and buyers expect you to know who they are, know what they like, and have personalized conversations based on the channels that they are on, and they expect you to do that at scale. There's so many new things in today's buyer journey with a lot of online channels, and your buyers are basically doing their own self-research, and because things are so individualized, they expect marketers to really know who they are based on their behaviors, their demographics, and they want marketers to serve up content that's very specific to their needs, their likes, their wants, and desires.

This is tough for a marketer and it's extremely tough to do this at scale. Relevant content is personalized content that speaks to your audience's specific needs, pains, goals, and desires. It is content that feels conversational and helps to create that relationship that you, as a marketer, need in order for buyers to eventually become customers. If your content isn't relevant, it ends up being just noise, and it ends up being simply an interruption for your audience as their doing their own research. You want to make sure that everything you put out there speaks to your individual buyers.

A great way to remember exactly the definition of relevant content is to think of it in this simple format: the ABCDs of relevant content. You need to think of relevant content for your buyers, as individuals, based on what they do, continuously over time, directed towards an outcome, and everywhere they are. So, I'm going to go through and explain what each of these things mean. So, as individuals, that's what we spoke about. You want to make sure your content speaks to your different audience as if they're individuals. Based on what they do, there's lots of different behaviors that you can take into consideration when you're creating content, and we'll go through some of these behaviors.

You want to make sure that your content speaks to your buyers continuously over time. So, throughout the buyer life cycle, you want to know what type of content is relevant to your audience when, and so it's important to map that journey so that you're creating content from when they start knowing who you are as a company, to when they become customers. Your content should be directed towards an outcome. So, you want to have a call to action. Something that you want your buyer to do. Maybe it's to attend a demo if you're a product company. Maybe it's to it's eventually buy a product if you're a consumer company.

You want to make sure that your content is everywhere your buyers are. So, that means your content should be available on all of the different channels that they typically frequent. Whether it's social media, on search, on various websites, on your own websites. Your content should be readily available. So, now that you know how to define relevant content and know why it's important for your audience, you can now make sure that every piece of content that you create is relevant for your particular buyers.

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/content-marketing-staying-relevant