Let’s face it: content marketers don’t have it easy.
Determining buyer personas, understanding their wants and needs, and developing content strategies that will make a connection…content marketers are expected to know what their audience wants to know before they want to know it.
When you’re under that kind of pressure, the more tools you have at your disposal, the better. Especially when it’s an underrated tool that most of your competition is misusing (or downright ignoring).
Social listening can be a very powerful marketing tool to understand what content to produce. With social listening there is a massive amount of free marketing data at your fingertips. With more than 350,000 tweets sent every minute and 290,000 Facebook statuses posted every minute, you have more access to your target market’s likes and dislikes than ever before.
When comments are made on social media, you get a glimpse into what topics are starting to trend and it’s never been easier to get relevant marketing data — if you know where to look. And, when applied properly, the core principles of social listening take most of the guesswork out of developing a content strategy.
Understand Your Audience
You’ll never hit a target you can’t see. Consistently developing high-quality, targeted content on a regular basis can be pretty tough if you don’t know your audience well.
More often than not, content marketers rely on gut instinct and assume they understand what their clients would prefer to read. While there’s certainly value in that approach, it lacks the validation necessary to truly understand your buyer needs.
At this point, it’s important to identify what makes social media such a powerful marketing tool. Forget about the fact that you have access to millions of potential clients. Forget about the fact that metrics have never been so easily calculable. What really makes social media so powerful is its ability to adapt to the constantly shifting digital media landscape.
When it comes to developing content based off social media commentary, it’s important to realize that listening is not a passive experience. To properly listen to your audience, you’ll need to seek out what your industry is saying, from analysts and competitors to your target market at large. For example, you can track what is being said on Twitter by searching hashtags, company names, or pretty much any keyword.
Truly Personalize the Content
Content marketing professionals love to talk about targeted content. The idea of isolating specific needs and presenting the perfect solution is clearly an exciting one, but the problem is that most content is not personalized to the audience.
Social listening gives you the ability to determine what communities and conversations your audience is involved in. From there, you can create all sorts of content. Tangible, solution-oriented blog posts answer your audience’s key questions and promote you as a thought leader who understands your buyers needs.
Your audience is hungry for content that actually speaks to them. Get to know them and their interests. It’s time to put social listening to work and reinvigorate your content marketing approach.
About ContentMX
What makes us so qualified to talk about all this? Well, our entire business is built around a very simple idea: content marketing is tough — but it doesn’t have to be.
At ContentMX, we focus on helping you define and target your audience and understand your buyers needs. We not only develop an editorial plan, but we write original content, curate relevant content and then provide a platform to post that content through blogs, social media, landing pages and newsletters to make sure your content gets in front of the right audience. Contact: ContentMX for more information.