What Makes a Demand Generation Content Strategy Effective?

Demand generation is only as effective as the copies you create and publish, but what makes a good content strategy?

An expert San Diego demand generation agency follows these tips:

• Identify the target audience.
• Map the customer’s journey.
• Pick keywords based on user intent.
• Match the content to their personas and sales funnel stages.
• Track and fine-tune the content strategy.

Collaborate with your team and attract the right leads. Read the article below. Let’s go!

1. Identify the Target Audience

Whether you want to raise brand awareness and engage or nurture your leads, demand generation objectives are often clear. Most businesses make mistakes with their audience. 

Some assume that they share the same market as their next-door rival. Sometimes the target demographic is broad, or the geographical scope is narrow, and the brand’s message does not resonate.

The first step in any digital marketing plan, including demand generation, is knowing your target audience intimately and using the information to build an accurate journey map.

Your initial source is your data, usually from analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. From there, you widen the coverage to include second- and third-party information.

To get a holistic view of your audience, also do the following:

• Conduct empathy mapping to understand their feelings, thoughts, pains, and gains.
• Perform surveys using open-ended and closed-ended questions.
• Interview a representative sample of your demographic.
• Organize focus groups.
• Step out of the office and observe the target market in their natural environment.
• Keep track of social media mentions of your brand and competitors.

2. Map the Customer’s Journey

Once you have properly defined your ideal audience, create a journey map. It visually represents a prospect’s experience from beginning to end as they interact with your business.

Suppose you are a La Jolla boat tour company. Your “map” might look like this:

The company can continually refine and improve the client’s experience throughout the phases. These include offering a smooth booking process or providing knowledgeable and engaging tour guides. 

3. Pick Keywords Based on User Intent

Why do some blog posts work while others do not? The answer lies in customer personas and their sales funnel stages. 

You cannot expect a tech startup CEO to be interested in content discussing, “What is a cloud?” They already know that. You might engage them with articles entitled, “Optimizing Cloud Infrastructure for High-Growth Startups” or “Advanced Cloud Security Protocols for Modern Enterprises.” 

Align your content with customer profiles and their journeys by researching and using keywords based on search intent. Since this is a demand generation, the best copies are educational. They introduce the brand, showcase your credibility, and present your business as the best solution to their problems.  

A digital marketing firm usually focuses on informational and navigational keywords. Informational key terms answer specific questions: “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “how.” Examples include “Top 10 San Diego beaches” or “Why is Carlsbad popular in the summer?” 

If the lead is already aware of your brand but wants to know more, they commonly use navigational keywords. These are “Hilton San Diego Bayfront phone numbers” or “Holsem Coffee addresses.”

4. Match the Content to Their Sales-Funnel Stage

With your user-based keywords and personas, a San Diego demand generation agency develops a cohesive, customized content marketing plan for various channels or touchpoints:

Consider this example:

5. Track and Fine-Tune the Content Strategy

Google recently announced that it will no longer display FAQ and how-to rich results on mobile devices unless you are a government or healthcare site. This news highlights two essential points that can affect your demand generation content marketing:

• Because these are high-impact pages, your traffic and conversions will likely drop.
• Nothing is permanent when it comes to digital marketing. 

The only way to make your articles relevant, engaging, valuable, and necessary is to track their performance across different channels and use the data to improve your campaigns.

Many platforms, mostly with artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning, analyze big multivariate data sets in real-time. They often measure:

• Traffic.
• Engagement, such as scroll depth.
• Clickthrough (CTR) and conversion rates.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) performance.
• Retention.
• Content interaction, such as heatmaps.
• Feedback and sentiment, such as net promoter score (NPS).

However, even some of the most advanced tools cannot measure everything. These include dark social media, where engagement happens in private messages, texts, and emails. 

An experienced San Diego demand generation agency understands the limitations of analytics. They craft strategies that focus on measurable information and anticipate and tap into the undercurrents of untraceable interactions.

Summing Up

Casting a wide net and hoping for the best does not work in demand generation. The most effective content strategy combines a deep knowledge of the target audience, valuable content that both appeals and relates to them, and comprehensive data analytics to refine the campaigns. 

This blog post shares the five ideas that emphasize these factors for a holistic and focused plan. Digital Authority Partners (DAP) goes a step further. As a San Diego demand generation agency, we offer data-driven insights and a more personalized marketing approach. 

Contact us to learn more about our cutting-edge tactics and hands-on expertise.