Content Marketing: Building a Monument of Thought for your Buyer

Starting your story telling helps to better understand your buyer.

I am completely over the top passionate about content generation for business purposes. In short CONTENT RULES! In fact I am so overwhelmed by it today that I feel compelled to throw together this post. There are times when the passion gets the best of me and the result isn’t nearly as compelling as I was ‘feeling’ at the moment, but it is my hope that you’ll find some value in these couple of hundred words. Where is that value to be found? Ultimately you will be the judge but I hope that you’ll find it by gaining new perspective over the importance of your story telling.

Here is the deal. If you know, and I mean really truly KNOW your buyer and have had success in developing the themes of the message to be used when communicating with that buyer you have the foundation for content. Where it gets dramatically and fantastically exciting is how this foundation will allow you to construct a monument of thought that is dedicated to consistently reinforcing the message in a way that adds value to the buyer’s world.

Look, this is worth repeating, and in my opinion isn’t stated nearly enough. Content works best when you have invested a fair amount of time in truly understanding every single thing there is to understand about your buyer. And in turn have identified their varying needs across all the stages of your sales cycle. There is much packed in that sentence and to some it may seem discouraging or even a little daunting. Truthfully it doesn’t need to be, but that is a post for another time. The point is that you need to own your buyer. Developing content for them is a good way to not only evaluate the degree to which you know your buyer, but improve your buyer intimacy.

OK, so we now understand that the foundation is critical. Once it exists the building can begin. Maybe cautiously at first, but the construction of a story around the very foundational theme of the value I have to offer my buyers soon yields unencumbered river of creativity that results in more unique and even entertaining content. Content that is right in the wheelhouse of what the buyer cares about. Content that can be used to drive tangential perspectives to your value story that adorn your thought monument like some well designed architectural flair serving to increase the structure’s beauty.

Getting carried away again? Perhaps but I do like the imagery of foundation and monument. Foundation critical to construction and a monument is an iconic representation of something else. A person, an event, a milestone, etc.

How, then, should I start to develop content and continuously repurpose and re-imagine it in order to keep it fresh? There are non-linear steps that I believe you can take to build a habit of content development and reimagining. I’ll share those in the next post. In the mean time why not provide feedback on the necessity of buyer knowledge. Right? Wrong? Overstated? Obvious? What says you?

In the meantime it is important to state that I owe both CC Chapman and Ann Handley a good deal of gratitude for putting forth probably one of the best reference guides for creating content. Their book Content Rules is exactly that, and I highly recommend you pick it up to help your content development.  Late last year I was able to interview the two of them when the book was launched, here is a segment where they discuss the importance getting started with content marketing in a way that improves your understanding of the buyer.  This will answer the inevitable question of “what if I am not 100% I have my buyer down cold?”

photo credit: Ryan McDonough