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Hi, everybody. I'm Devon Asaro. I'm a content strategist here at iAcquire. Welcome to Cliff
Notes Tuesday. Today, we're going to be talking about chapters 11, 12, and 13 in Joe Pulizzi's
book "Epic Content Marketing." Now, today's chapters are all about definition. We're talking
about defining your brand in three distinct ways. So, the chapters cover three different
ways to define your brand. One: define your engagement cycle. Two: define your content
niche. Three: define your content marketing mission statement. So, let's jump into defining
the engagement cycle.
The first question you want to ask is: does anybody care about your sales process? The
customer certainly doesn't. So, if your content creators, your content managers, your content
strategists aren't thinking about your sales process, nobody is. You want to be able to
create content that will actually move customers along through the sales process, through the
funnel. I mean, this is the reason that marketers have always worked off the funnel. It's not
a perfect system, but it's a point of reference for thinking about different types of consumer
needs and different types of personas that you want to target content to. But first,
you have to figure out what is your engagement cycle. How do customers discover your product?
How do they make decisions about your product? How do they compare? What kind of content
do you need to give them to help them with those decisions?
Now, one of the ways that you can really begin to create targeted content is by actually
mapping your personas to different phases of the engagement cycle and actually creating
content to sort of bridge that gap. Now, Joe talked about creating personas in previous
chapters. Here at iAcquire, we really put a lot of emphasis on mapping everything we
do to personas because being able to visualize your customer and base that visualization
on real data, anything that you can gather from your customers can help you make informed
decisions about how to serve content, when to serve content, and what sort of content
to serve. Now, the way to keep track of this is through a content segmentation grid. This
lists the type of content, the needs date, and the target persona for the various pieces
of content so that you can make sure that everything you're creating has a purpose and
has a target audience.
Now, once you begin organizing that information and creating an infrastructure for content
and beginning to define your goals, you need to think about what your content niche is,
because there may be 10 other companies out there like you. How are you going to make
yourself stand out? How are you going to occupy a space that either isn't already taken or
somebody's not already doing it well? Now, a lot of people might think that they would
want to just start with smaller goals and think about small areas where they can get
a little bit of traction. Joe advises the opposite. He advises you to get uncomfortable
in your niche, to never feel like the space that you occupy is good enough, that being
second best to another brand, no matter how big the brand is, is not good enough. He suggests
that you ask yourself, "What if my content was gone? Would anybody care? Would there
be any needs that would be left unfulfilled for the user?" If not, then there's a problem.
If your content isn't supplying something that your users would miss, you're already
working in the wrong direction.
To remedy this, he says you have to think big and go small. So, you have to say, "I
want to be the authoritative brand in this space." But, you don't have to choose a giant
space , because there's already going to be bigger brands out there that are doing it
better than you. So, yes. You want to be the authoritative brand, but doing it in a smaller,
more focused area that's very unique to your brand. That's the way that you're going to
create an authoritative brand voice and create effective content.
Through some of the processes that we were talking about earlier, the content segmentation
grid and defining your personas and your engagement cycle, you can begin to practice what's described
as fractal marketing. That's taking your general content and beginning to narrow it down to
very specific personas and very specific need states, so that your content always has a
very specific purpose and is speaking to a particular audience member. Now, a lot of
times, it can seem like you're getting too specific if you're aiming at niche personas,
but creating that sort of specific content is a way to actually appeal to more of a general
audience, to actually give them a reason to come to you because you're the expert. You're
talking about something that not every other brand is talking about.
Now, all this comes together in defining your content marketing mission statement. Any mission
statement for a brand defines what you are and what you're all about, but it also defines
the type of content that you're going to create and the type of content that you're not going
to create. Content that's based on a mission statement is purposeful content that's driven
by goals and all of the work that we've talked about, the segmentation grid, defining your
personas will all feed into a short pithy definition of who you are and what you want
to say. Your mission statement should express who you are, but it should also define your
authority in this space. It has to be something strong that suggests to the user that your
brand really is the brand to come to for whatever subject you're talking about.
Ultimately, your mission statement is really an internal asset. It's something that can
be used as a litmus test, so that when you're creating content, you can hold it up to one
statement and say, "Does this piece of content help communicate this larger message?" So,
that's why it's so important to put all that work into defining something that really represents
your brand's and your business objectives. Thanks for joining us. Hope you've enjoyed
this summary. That obviously is just a summary. To learn more, I recommend that you pick up
the book, "Epic Content Marketing". A lot of good information in here. Next week, we'll
be talking about the content creation process and managing an editorial calendar. [music].