Brand promotion: How to lay out the content marketing matrix?

First of all, let’s make it clear: Although the ultimate goal of content marketing is to increase sales or brand image, it does not mean that your content should be full of self-promotion. Content marketing is about building trust by providing valuable content so that consumers will pay for you proactively.

Layout of content marketing ecosystem based on the “user purchase journey” thinking

Now that we have a content strategy, how do we make it a system? We all know that content marketing is not a one-time action, but an ongoing strategy. We need to plan the content marketing ecosystem based on the "user purchase journey" thinking.

Awareness Stage

Consumers in the awareness stage may not know much about your company, products, or services. At the same time, consumers at this stage are not clear about what they need to buy, let alone specific products from specific companies. It sounds a bit confusing. For example, you have just finished exercising and feel very thirsty. You want to drink something to quench your thirst. You walk to the refrigerator in the supermarket and find that you can choose mineral water, tea, carbonated drinks, sports drinks... there are far more than one choice.

Therefore, consumers at this stage are not ready to listen to your sales pitch. Consumers at this stage prefer educational and entertaining content. The main task of merchants at this stage is to establish brand awareness, demonstrate industry authority, and win the trust of consumers. The content themes of this stage can revolve around:

• 1) Industry trends, suggestions, and tips:
• 2) How-tos
• 3) Educational content (focusing on introducing the common features and technologies of industry products), such as What's xxx...
• 4) Interview content with industry KOLs

For example, Moz, one of the most famous SEO companies in the world, everyone who has browsed or paid attention to the Moz website knows that it contains a large number of internal experts talking about industry advice, how-tos content, and useful information from guest celebrities.

Once the content theme is determined, the forms are diverse, so we will not discuss the specific presentation form here. After all, good content can be packaged into many forms, from a post, a picture, a video, a white paper, or even a lecture. You can refer to the content and format suggested by Search in the awareness stage:

Evaluation Phase

During the evaluation stage of the user purchase journey, consumers understand that your product or service can meet their needs, but don’t be too happy too soon, as there are many competitors waiting to compete with you.

Therefore, the goal of this stage is to stand out from the crowd of competitors and help consumers realize that your products, solutions, and services are their best choices at the moment.

Providing introductions to product parameters, technologies, etc. can help customers understand your products and services. Of course, when customers make comparisons, it is also a good choice for you to provide a report first and explore the highlights of your products or services. Content topics for this stage of the buying process could be:

1) Products and solutions

2) Benchmarking products and services of competitors

Cisco once produced a series of interesting animations to promote new products. In the videos, the animations directly compared the products of its competitor Juniper to highlight the new features and highlights of Cisco's new products. (ps: It seems that American advertisements can openly diss competitors.)

3) DEMO

4) Case Analysis

5) Customer Stories

6) Common Q&A

7) Expert Report

Purchase Phase

In the purchase phase of the customer journey, the consumer has already decided to buy, but needs more information to convince him that the deal is worth it. Highlight the unique value proposition of your products and services. Content topics for this phase could be:

1) Customer Testimonials

2) Product Reviews

3) Discount information (such as coupons)

How to create content that users care about?

When creating content and you don’t know where to start, how can you quickly find content topics and create content that users will care about?

In fact, it is not as difficult as you think. The sources of inspiration are multi-dimensional:

1. User Profile

The previous article mentioned that user portraits can help you identify your users and understand their problems, demands, needs, and pain points. Create content around user concerns, such as setting up Q&A to answer questions that users frequently ask.

1. Friendly

Continue to pay attention to friendly competitors and explore their high-value, trending and hot content. When you don’t know where to start, you can learn from your competitors and create your own content based on the analysis results.

When I was working on 2C content, one of my jobs was to keep an eye on the social media trends of my competitors, record their most popular posts on a monthly basis, and analyze the reasons for their high interaction rates. By comparing and analyzing with competitors, we can find some common features of popular content. At that time, we were learning and imitating the popular content of our competitors, creating some popular content, and achieved a good interaction rate.

1. Industry Trends

You should never be complacent at any time. No user likes to hear you brag about how great you are. Following and discussing industry trends will increase users' favorability towards your professionalism.

That’s all for today. Have you learned any new skills?

You are also welcome to leave your thoughts and opinions in the comment section so that we can communicate and make progress together.

Related reading:

1. Brand marketing promotion: the underlying logic behind Durex’s content marketing!

2. Marketing promotion: 10 tips for content marketing!

3. Content marketing: How to increase user purchase rate through seeding articles?

4. Marketing promotion: How to start content marketing from scratch?

5. Product operation: the overall operational framework of content marketing!

6. How to promote App overseas through content marketing?

7. Marketing promotion: How to do content marketing well?

8. Avoid these 6 mistakes in content marketing strategy in 2019!

Author: Echo Yan

Author: Echo Yan