Creating stand-out marketing content is an art – literally and figuratively. If you manage to really nail your content, it also becomes one of your most important assets when executing a digital marketing strategy.
“Content is the atomic particle of all digital marketing,” Rebecca Lieb, digital marketing advisor.
When it comes to creating content, such as blogs, photography, video, and social media, the more targeted you are, the better your results.
The importance of targeted content
If a piece of content doesn’t speak to a potential client, they’ll move on down the feed. If your target audience doesn’t see themselves reflected in your content then they’ll switch off.
As soon as they think ‘this isn’t for me’, your marketing becomes null and void.
The idea of targeted content marketing is to eliminate this disparity between client and service. Ideally you should be in their world – relevant and reflective of their own self-interest and image.
If you fail to connect with a potential client through a lack of targeted content, you’ve missed a golden opportunity and squandered your efforts.
Creating a client profile
Creating a client profile is absolutely crucial. Not only for content marketing, but to fuel and guide your entire business model and efforts.
You need to know who you’re really selling to.
To do this effectively, create a model of your perfect client.
Let’s say you specialise in hand or elbow physiotherapy:
- Who usually needs such work?
- What will they be feeling physically?
- How will they be feeling mentally?
- What are their likely activities?
- What are their wishes and aims?
- What’s their likely age bracket or gender?
- What treatment can you offer?
- What’s the resistance or barriers to treatment?
- How will they feel after they’ve worked with you?
You need to find all of this out and more, while modelling your content on these discoveries and observations.
Segmentation
The flip side of the ‘targeted’ coin is that all your potential clients will never fit in one basket.
Through precision targeting, you may lose out by not having a ‘catch all’ approach. You’ll surely miss some potential clients through targeting, right?
Catch-all content
Sometimes, yes, you can definitely tell people in more general terms who you are and what you do. For example, a paid Google ad may be a good place to simply state your services and give a broad example of why they should contact you.
If your ad, for example, is not targeted, then simply creating awareness of your range of services can be beneficial.
Segmented content
A fear of being too specific in your content approach can just mean that you need to create more than one target and cater to each customer segment individually.
Try to segment your main services into a few categories. A good place to start is by dissecting your previous clients in your CRM and seeing who you cater to.
If you have a good showing of older people looking to treat back pain, a separate cohort of younger sporty people looking for injury treatment, and another group of middle-aged people with mobility issues, then split your efforts into three categories and create different content for each.
You can compliment this targeted approach with generalised ‘awareness’ marketing as well.
Types of targeted content
Once you’ve pinned down what your ideal client looks like, who they are, what they think and what their pain points are, you need to craft specific content for this audience.
This is imperative, as the content you create will be used to seed and populate almost every other marketing effort you undertake. This content will used for:
- website copy
- social media marketing copy and imagery
- ads of all kinds
- emails
If you missed your content mark, all of the above will be off kilter and less effective at garnering eyeballs and sales.
Types of content to consider
Depending on our budget, aims and scope, you should be creating targeted content such as:
- Unique photography that reflects your audience, their likely activities and general demographic.
- Targeted captions and social media copy.
- Tailored ad copy and imagery.
- Blogs that speak to your audience and their issues.
- Web copy that suits your audience.
- Videos and social media stories.
- Case studies that cover situations similar to your target.
At the end of the day, if your clinic offers specific treatment, your marketing should follow suit.