How To Attract Your Target Audience Using The Right Content

In the era of digital marketing, a stellar online content strategy is important for business. With 81% of internet users searching for products or services online, the right content is the best way to attract your target audience.

While high-quality and valuable content is undoubtedly key, it may never become visible without the right strategy. Knowing when, where, and how to publish your content can help improve website rankings, boost brand awareness, and establish credibility in your field.

Let's take a closer look at the benefits of an online content strategy and how to make it an integral part of your marketing campaign.

What is an Online Content Strategy?

A content strategy is a plan to develop and share valuable content for your target audience. It determines the type of content your business needs at a particular time.

Content strategy is the process planning, creating, delivering, and maintaining content across multiple marketing channels, including:

• Website
• Social media
• Email
• Other websites (as guest posts)

By serving up high-quality content to your audience in the right place and at the right time, you can significantly improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

What is the Purpose and Benefits of an Online Content Strategy?

The key benefits of an online content strategy include:

• High search rankings — by sharing valuable content on your website and adjusting it to main SEO requirements, you can achieve high rankings on search engines, thus increasing your brand's visibility and boosting lead generation.
• High conversion rates — while high rankings can attract prospects to your website, the valuable content they find there can convince them to convert.
• High retention rates — a smart content strategy can keep existing clients in the loop to make sure they continue affecting your company's profitability.
• Competitive edge — valuable content can set you apart from the competition and help new clients choose your business over others.
• Consistency — a content strategy allows you to publish content consistently, streamlining the marketing strategy, and keeping the entire team on the same page.

Overall, the purpose of an online content strategy is to improve your marketing ROI, increase the company's profitability, and help build your credibility in your chosen field.

Things to Consider 

With the content strategy being an important part of your marketing plan, you need to consider the following aspects before diving into the details.

Identify Your Target Audience

Whom are you designing your content for? You probably already have a buyer persona created for the rest of your marketing tactics. Use it to understand what type of content they are looking for.

Besides the general information about the persona (demographics, pain points), you can also consider buying patterns and history of interaction with your brand. This can help you understand what type of content each segment of your target audience needs at a given time.

For example, you would create different types of content for:

• Top, middle, and bottom of the sales funnel prospects
• Existing clients
• Clients that prefer homeopathic and naturopathic therapies
• Prospects looking for body practices

Your content should address pain points and provide informational or actionable solutions to each part of your target audience. Then you can use different channels to deliver the content to specific segments.

Pinpointing Business and Marketing Goals

Your business and marketing goals should dictate your content strategy. For example:

• Brand awareness — you would create content that focuses on your company's story, write blog posts and website pages related to company culture, create videos that include your company's motto, and so forth.
• Brand loyalty — you would create high-quality blog posts aimed at existing customers' needs and pain points, share personalised content across social media, provide advice, share tips and tricks through video and infographics.
• Customer education — you would create blogs, articles, e-books, and white papers aimed at sharing educational content about your niche with both potential and existing clients.
• Lead generation — you would create landing pages with high conversion potential, focus on customer reviews and testimonials.
• Credibility — you would publish valuable content that shows your expertise and publish guest posts on trustworthy websites.

While it's possible to build a content strategy around all the above goals, it would require a formidable budget. The best approach is to take it one goal at a time. Many pieces of content you create to achieve one goal can be suitable for the rest.

Planning and Publishing Your Content

Even the highest quality content may not help achieve your business goals if you use the wrong format or publish it in the wrong place. Depending on the parameters of the target audience and your marketing and business goals, you can choose the format. For example,

• Lead generation — e-books, podcasts, contests
• Brand awareness — how-to blogs  and videos, infographics, SlideShare presentations
• Education — e-books, case studies, white papers

To optimise your marketing budget, don't try to publish your content on all possible social media channels. After putting it up on your website, choose one or two channels where the target audience spends the majority of its time on.

Pro tip: Millennials spend more time on Instagram and YouTube while Generation X prefers Facebook.

Using a Content Calendar

Creating a content calendar helps you optimise your creation and publishing schedule to avoid the stress associated with urgent deadlines.

You can create a monthly theme and build each content piece around it. The majority of social media platforms allows you to schedule posts so you don't have to worry about missing them.

Consistency is the key to your content strategy. As soon as you stop publishing your content regularly, your entire marketing campaign could suffer. While there is no magic formula for how often you should serve up the content on social media, you should keep the content consistent.

The frequency of the posts depends on the niche. For example, a clothing store could publish five posts a day on Instagram, promoting different products. Meanwhile, a healthcare service provider like an expertise-focused complementary therapist would only need to post once a day. According to Coschedule, the best time for healthcare providers to publish social media posts is in the mornings.   

Do you have a content strategy for marketing your natural therapy business in 2021?

Now is a great time to set time aside to work on a plan for the year ahead. A comprehensive content strategy can help you achieve a variety of business goals. To develop a high-quality strategy, you need to know the audience, understand your immediate business and marketing needs, and implement efficient content planning tactics.

Once you have your content strategy in place, make sure that any advertising you do to promote your business complies with the general code of conduct requirements, if appropriate. Click here to view the Advertising General Code of Conduct to ensure that the advertising you're doing (whether through television, radio, internet, print or any other form of media), complies with the law.

Get support for your natural therapy business in 2021 with IICT's membership and insurance. We help members save time and money on expenses and also provide tools and support to stay abreast of changing industry regulations and compliance requirements. Find out how to join IICT here or contact us on +61 2 5629 7777 Monday - Friday 10am - 4pm NSW, Australia to speak with one of our friendly and helpful Member Services team.