Clients want to be assured that their content and message is being found, heard, understood and acted upon. I do too!
The challenge is to get customers attention at the right time, in the right place with an engaging message. That is often a tall order.
As we look at the marketplace, let’s start with the 3 basic points that all organizations need to understand and deal with when developing a content strategy.
1) There is an overwhelming wave of readily available information about anything and everything. With more technology advances, our access to information has become increasingly easier and almost limitless. Search “communication” and there are 290,000,000 results or “content strategy” with 563,000,000 or “spoon” 32,600,000 results. These numbers are only going to increase. I am sure we would all agree and recognize the depth of information and how that affects our content strategy.
2) Time is limited. All of us have only 24 hours a day or 1,440 minutes a day. And, all of us are prioritizing our time as best we can to include the basics of eating, sleeping, taking care of ourselves and keeping relationships with loved ones, colleagues and friends. No one can add to their time.
3) The marketing environment is complicated. There are many communications vehicles and marketing messages are around us all the time.
So, we are all busy, inundated with information and overwhelmed by the complicated options and information available to us.
What does that mean and what can we do?
Start by developing a deeper understanding of your audience. This is definitely not easy but worth the time and effort. In the past, companies have relied on demographics (age, race, gender, annual income) and geographic (where they live) to segment their audience sometimes psychographic elements were added but since psychographics is more difficult to define it has been a smaller part of the mix. However, psychographics is really important to a more thorough and in-depth knowledge of the audience. Psychographics is also more effective at getting to the real motivators–it includes a study of how your target audience thinks, feels, acts and what they believe.
This requires that we acquire a deeper (much deeper) knowledge of our audience and that the communications message not only be delivered when, how and where our audience is but also be compelling and engaging to get the little time and attention that is currently being filled with vast amounts of information.
