The Chat - Content for Marketing: Part 1

The Chat – Content for Marketing: Part 1 – Audience, Personas, and Storytelling

Episode Overview

In this episode, Terry and Pal dive into the fundamentals of creating impactful marketing content, focusing on understanding your audience, refining personas, and mastering storytelling. They discuss the balance between using AI tools and crafting authentic, engaging content that delivers real value.

Key Takeaways

1. Understanding Your Audience

• Research is critical to ensure your content resonates with your audience.
• Without understanding their perspective, pain points, and life experiences, your marketing efforts risk falling flat.
• Pro Tip: Talk directly to your audience through surveys, interviews, or casual conversations to gain insights.
  

2. Personas: Simplicity Over Complexity

• Avoid overcomplicating personas with unnecessary details like daily schedules or overly specific demographics.
• Focus on core pain points, frustrations, and fears that your product or service solves.
• Key Insight: A persona isn’t a fictional character—it’s a distilled representation of your ideal customer’s needs and challenges.

3. The Role of AI in Content Creation

• AI can be a helpful tool for brainstorming and structuring ideas but shouldn’t replace the human touch in crafting authentic, resonant content.
• Terry’s Tip: Be cautious of relying too much on AI for audience engagement—refining content to fit your voice and audience’s expectations is key.

4. Testing Messaging Effectively

• Before investing heavily in distribution, test your messaging with small, targeted campaigns on social media or other platforms.
• If engagement is low, revisit your research and adjust your approach.
• Example: Compare competitors’ high-performing content to uncover tone, structure, and engagement patterns.

5. Delivering Value Through Content

• Effective content solves the “What’s in it for me?” question.
• Four ways to deliver value: Educate, Inspire, Entertain, or Solve a Problem.
• Evergreen content, like webinars and FAQs, can consistently add value over time.

6. Storytelling as a Core Marketing Strategy

• Humans are wired to respond to stories—use anecdotes, customer success stories, or even fictional narratives to create connection and relatability.
• Stories should be authentic, aligned with your brand, and grounded in audience research.

Pro Tips for Better Content Creation

• Use the WIFMA Test: “What’s in it for my audience?” guides every piece of content you create.
• Focus on Evergreen Content: Repurpose FAQs or impactful webinars for long-term use.
• Be Data-Driven: Regularly check competitors’ content to understand trends, engagement, and audience preferences.

00:00- Terry:

Welcome to “The Chat”, where we take you behind the inbound scenes of some of the world’s fastest growing companies. For the past nine years as Chatmetrics, we’ve had an exclusive inside view of how these industry leaders are revolutionizing inbound marketing and sales across diverse sectors. Each week we bring you conversations with top minds in marketing and sales, sharing insider secrets and strategies that drive inbound success.

00:39- Terry: 

Join us on “The Chat”, your front row seat to the future of inbound.

00:51- Terry: 

Hi pal. Welcome back to The Chat.

00:55- Pal: 

Hey, Terry. Welcome. You too.

00:57- Terry:

Thank you. Thank you. I must admit I’m starting to enjoy these, now I never thought I would, but, it’s starting to be some fun. The conversations alone are fantastic. So I’m enjoying.

01:06- Pal: 

Yeah, I think it’s a, it’s very eyeopening. What’s already in our heads, coming down to a video.

01:12- Pal: 

Absolutely. I think it’s a, it’s critical for, for these days and, For the content piece and sharing and knowledge. I think it, it works out.

01:21- Terry: 

Absolutely. And so the topic for today that we’re going to be talking about is content for marketing.

01:28- Terry:

It’s one of those things that is critical, I think, in terms of how successful the, the marketing is. But it’s also one of those things that’s so time consuming and difficult to get right. let’s have a conversation and, and walk through, content for marketing, Pal

01:45- Pal: 

sounds good to me.

01:47- Terry: 

Okay. Okay. look, I’ll kick off because I think there’s a,One part, the starting part for any content creation is really getting to understand your audience properly. it’s no good talking about fishing poles. If you’re going to be talking to golfers, for instance, I know that’s a bit of a ridiculous example, but the reality is, if you’re talking, if your product is a solution for, marketers, but you’ve got a sales background yourself.

02:16- Terry:

There is a risk that you could be off topic because you’re talking about the product from your perspective, from a sales perspective. That’s where I think the research, is so important, and understanding the audience, unless you’re from their world 100 percent and have lived or been in those roles, or lived, their life experiences.

02:36- Terry: 

From their perspective, then it’s very difficult to get the content right to be adding value and for it to actually resonate with the, with your audience, unless you’ve done the research. And if you don’t, then it’s just a waste of time. You’re wasting your time creating content. You’re wasting your time on the advertising or posting wherever you’re posting, wherever you’re creating it.

02:56- Terry:

One of the, aspects, with, content that I’ve found is that I’ve always had more, I’ve always had better results with content when you’re actually talking to the audience directly. As opposed to necessarily. telling them what they should be doing, or, talking about a topic in the third person.

03:20- Terry:

actually talking as though your audience are involved in the conversation and talking to an individual from the audience. So one person, so that the person reading it feels like you’re actually talking to them specifically. that’s something that I’ve found that’s pretty, successful. AI can help a lot with content.

03:38- Terry: 

But I’ve seen a lot of AI content that really is, far from, look, I use AI. I use AI. It helps me build frameworks. it gives me ideas. I do some, brainstorming with AI.but I don’t really, it, it doesn’t write content in my voice. it doesn’t write content really to the audio, even though, you can prompt it to the wazoo, it still doesn’t.

04:03- Terry: 

Write content to the audience the way that I want it written. So it’s useful,Be careful of using AI, too much in terms of trying to get it to actually resonate and engage with your audience,from a content perspective, have you had much experience with, receiving or using AI for content at all in the recent times?

04:24- Pal:

Very slightly, I’ve seen you doing it a lot and you do pretty well, with all the prompt engineering that you’ve learned. So I think that was the first time that I got the introduction of how to use more if we talk about chat GPT in specific. so yeah, I use it very slightly. like I would say.

04:43- Pal:

Out of 10, probably 0. 5 is what I’ve used it at. so yeah, because it’s, not much content that I have to write. if I want to draft something that I know is going to be a, long email with such explanation, then I’ll use it sometimes. but it’s very rare. but since I’ve seen you doing it.

05:03- Pal:

I know the, the extent that you can use it for, it’s a very useful tool. but yeah, for content marketing, there are some, some things to consider for sure what it cannot, even if the best prompt being used,

05:18- Terry: 

look, I think one of the, one of the, primary things to be aware of is particularly if you’re using, that content for SEO, for instance, the SEO component of your marketing.

05:28- Terry: 

Yeah. Look, I don’t pretend to understand how it works in the back end, but I’ve been told and really haven’t had it confirmed anywhere. You might be able to confirm this with your SEO expertise, but, I believe that the search engines and the bots are now being trained to pick up where an article is SEO generated.

05:48- Terry: 

I don’t know whether it can or can’t do that. but I do know that, it’s something to keep in mind that you don’t just want to let AI write your article, have the right keyword density, et cetera, and then just post that up. and there’s plenty of tools to check that you can use if you do use AI to build an article like that for you that can, re humanize it. but quite frankly, and I’ve used a couple of those, But quite frankly, I found that to go through the process of assessing whether it’s AI, the, humanize the content and then go back through and put the right keyword density into the SEO articles, it’s, you’re better off just writing the SEO article yourself from the beginning.

06:24- Terry: 

quite frankly, it’s,

06:25- Pal: 

in many cases, yes,

06:27- Terry:

yeah. one of the things they talk about with content marketing to make sure you’re talking to the right person or the right audience is actually to build a persona. Yeah. Um,

06:38- Terry:

I’m in a little bit of two minds about this. Some people will talk about, you know, the persona that we’re talking to is Kate. She’s a 43 year old professional mother. her kid’s in childcare. She has rushed in the morning to have breakfast and get hubby off to work. and, hubby drops the kid at school while she’s doing, starting her work and, eating meals and all this stuff, like all these detail of somebody’s, persona through the day.

07:04- Terry:

I think that I have a different perspective. I think you can get into way too much detail with that. I think if you’re much more focused on, the particular pain points, frustrations and fears that, your prospect has. that your problem can solve. I think if you’re more focused on that particular aspect and try and build out, and don’t have too many, personas that you’re talking to, I didn’t try and keep it back, keep it to, a persona is your persona is the person that has these fears.

07:37- Terry: 

And so if you’re talking about these fears and, pains and frustrations, then you’re going to be talking to, the right audience. That’s where people are solving it. I think that you just got to be careful. as marketers, which I’ve joined that field now, it’s easy for us to get bogged down into a lot of the preparation work, and the detail rather than getting to a point of understanding those views and moving on.

08:02- Terry: 

Um, how would you suggest, what do you think once you got to that point there in terms of, okay, you’ve got you some messaging, you’ve got your positioning, what are some ways, but you think you could go through and test that messaging? To see whether or not it’s not going to work.

08:18- Pal:

Are you talking about doing it for organic reach like SEO or something or in general?

08:24- Terry: 

look, in general, whatever you, whatever your, probably not so much SEO because I think that’s a little bit harder to test. you will have done the research in terms of the keywords and the demand, search demand, et cetera, et cetera, for those keywords. It’s a decision and that’s more of a long term, piece, but I’m talking more about content.

08:40- Terry:

Okay. That you’re actually going to be marketing with, whether it’s on a social media platform, whether they’re posts, whether it’s, positioning your business on your website, whether it’s, advertising that you’re going to be doing. How do you think some ways that you could actually test quickly, whether or not that’s going to resonate with your audience?

08:56- Pal: 

I think before that, I would take a step back and go into research. For example, if, if I have to write some articles or my content is based around digital marketing.like very much related to this, video that we are talking, I would go and check who’s actually ranking. I know I’m coming to SEO in this, but I think that helps a lot.

09:18- Pal: 

So it tells you a lot about the competition, who’s ranking for it. Let’s say, for example, if someone like AWS or HubSpot is ranking for it, they will not be ranking for something that is content done by some amateur in their team or something like that, right? It’s, in most cases, done on the same fundamentals that I’m talking about, that, they research it, how much competition is there for that type of content, and then what do they think they need to write to the extent of to have it, to have it outranked.

09:51- Pal: 

the competitors or what’s already there. So based on that kind of competition, you know that what’s been read a lot, what’s been ranking a lot, And what’s been ranking is obviously because of engagement, it’s engaging, it’s people want to read it. So that gives you a lot of idea that, maybe this is the kind of tone that you can just go with, which is most cases is a very gentle tone, right?

10:17- Pal: 

I don’t, like you said that, the persona, I think it’s just those, the marketers who are trying to sell you that, or hook you with get your persona, right? I get it. Persona make matters a lot, but in, it doesn’t. Really, fit everywhere. So if you’re writing for marketers, if you’re writing about a particular topic, content marketing for digital agencies or content marketing for e commerce stores, selling furniture, you can pick all of the 5 million personas and whatever you can, But if you’re selling expensive furniture, your persona is somebody who can afford your furniture.

10:54- Pal: 

So I have seen that personas work very well in very niched things. but when you have a generic thing to talk about, like digital marketing, you just got to write brilliant content and content that helps and that makes sense. And then you see what the competition is and build around that.

11:10- Pal: 

Yeah,

11:11- Terry: 

so you’re talking about, I guess that’s almost stage two of research. I spoke at the beginning about researching, the audience. So you understand them well enough to talk to them. and I guess, content for marketing, the subject isn’t necessarily just digital marketers. we’re talking about content that is for any product or service out in the, on the web.

11:32- Terry:

So I get that, we should test, sorry, we should research to make sure that once we’re going through and have decided on a positioning in the messaging, go back and check again against the, the competitors or like products and see what sort of times they’re using, what’s ranking.

11:47- Pal: 

so after you’ve done that, that second stage of research and assessing what your messaging is like compared to competitors or like businesses. for me, it’s critical to test then I think in the market without just going in and expending your entire budget on, and put all your eggs in one basket.

12:04- Terry: 

You should be able to take, small sample sizes, a small component of your budget, be very targeted with the advertising where you’re going, very specifically for your audience, and test, the messaging, run your ads, do your social media posts, and see what type of response you get, and if you’re finding that it’s not converting, you’re not getting the engagement. then, you really need to go back and have a look and understand why. And one, you might be able to engage with that particular audience and ask them why they’re not engaging. but two, it’s probably a case that you need to go back and have a look. There’s somewhere that you’ve missed in terms of the original research and understanding what’s important and what problems you’re solving.

12:42- Terry:

You can be successful in selling a product that there’s no existing demand for, but it’s very hard. It’s very hard. And so if you find that you’re not getting any engagement from the messaging you’re using. I think the first place I would do is go back and have a look again at your research Pal around the keywords and is there demand there for those particular problems.

13:05- Terry: 

and if there is, then it’s very clear that your messaging is not right. And, I like, I really do like that idea. I hadn’t thought about it to go back and have a look at, Competitors that are offering similar products or similar offerings and seeing what’s ranking from their perspective You know that they’re getting the clicks They’re getting the engagement and that will give you some good give you some guidance as well But you don’t want to do a me too. You don’t want to be the same as everybody else You really want to have that different you want to stand out and be different But sometimes if somebody’s working what somebody’s doing is working and what you’ve tried isn’t You Then sometimes it’s a case of, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

13:45- Terry: 

That’s one thing. If you can’t find that point of differentiation. But that also then means, that’s a bigger problem and means that probably that your offer, there might be some, issue with, with your offer and whether or not it’ll actually provide. It’s providing value, and I guess that’s probably brings us to the next point talking about value with the content that you produce. Ideally, you really want to be trying to focus on delivering value. value comes in different ways and, different shapes. it might be something that’s helping, a way to suggest to solve a problem. it might be entertaining and purely the value is from the entertainment side of it.

14:25- Terry: 

but generally there’s, the audience is going to be looking at the content and, and understanding, where’s the value. it’s the, what’s in it for me component or aspect. but if it’s, there’s not some value for them somewhere, then they’re just not going to engage with it.

14:39- Terry:

Yeah. the real four, four ways of delivering, value, you can entertain, you can inspire, you can educate. Or you can solve a problem. I think, if you focus on those four pillars in your content, then, hopefully, you’ll be able to deliver value to your perspective audience.

14:59- Terry: 

hopefully, we’ve got a couple of those pillars in, in this session today. Yeah. There’s an underlying test that I always use when I’m writing content for anything, whether it’s website, whether it’s a social media post or an even ad, and a couple of ads like we went through earlier today, Pal. And that’s the old WIFMA, not what’s in it for me, it’s what’s in it for my audience.

15:22- Terry:

And it’s if they’re reading this, then why would they be interested in it? What’s going to make them click on it? What’s going to make them read the next line? So I think that’s the underlying, the test that I always use. once you’ve got to that point where you’ve been through and you’ve started to produce content, you’re understanding what their fears and concerns are, you’re seeing what they’re engaging with, not what they’re not engaging with.

15:43- Terry:

And you can see that they’re getting value. they’re perceiving that what you’re generating is giving them value.it’s very difficult to be creating and coming up with new content all the time. It can be done. Obviously people do it, the businesses do it. it’s the creative side of, of writing and generating content.

16:01- Terry: 

Yeah. But one thing, once you’ve got it tested and you know what’s working, you can start to generate, evergreen content. And you can get it to a point where, you’re producing, there might be something like this, podcast or you’re producing, it might be a particular webinar that you’ve run that was, so many, nuggets of gold and particularly nuggets of gold will often come from the FAQ section at the end of a webinar.

16:24- Terry:

That you post it up then as more of an evergreen piece of content that will just keep adding value. The same piece of content adds value to new audiences as they’re coming through. content in my mind, really is about storytelling. as human beings, we’re hardwired to love a good story.

16:45- Terry: 

these could be personal anecdotes, customer success stories. or even fictional narratives, but drive home a key message, again, that should be around, particular fears, emotions and frustrations that are relevant to your audience. keep it authentic. It really needs to be kept authentic.

17:04- Terry:

You really need to, make sure that it’s also relatable. and you want it to be aligned with your overall brand message. if you’ve got authentic message going, that you have a level of integrity behind in terms of the message that you’re delivering and the reason why you’re delivering that message.

17:21- Terry:

if it’s relatable and aligned to your research and what you understand is important to your audience. and you presenting your brand in a consistent,way,I think that’s, that’s probably about the, the most you can hope for to be able to achieve. It’s easy when you say it fast, but I think, keeping it authentic, relatable and tied to your overall brand messaging, is a level of consistency that we all strive for as far as delivering content is concerned.