Chicago Content Marketing Agency

Part of the content marketing process is getting to know who your customers are. This starts with a comprehensive review of your current and ideal clients and customers. We help you better understand your Ideal Customer Profile.

After we gather the demographic data for your prospects, that data shouldn’t just stay on the page. You need real-world data, from the actual people you serve or intend to serve. We go out into the field and collect feedback from your current customers to discover the burning questions in their minds that your content could answer.

A Chicago Content Marketing agency shouldn’t just help you target every prospect.  We want to zero in on the ideal prospect—loyal, longstanding, lucrative brand advocates. What does that ideal prospect look like? We create user personas—avatars of your ideal prospect. This persona gets a name— “Enrique,” “Margaret,” etc.—as well as a catalog of their demographics, occupations, and passions, so we can target your content to them specifically.

Now that you know your user demographics, have collected user feedback, and understand your buyer personas, you can start to prioritize your audiences. Who will you address your content to first? Who are your higher-priority customers? Lower-priority audience demographics won’t necessarily be ignored, but a Chicago content marketing agency can help you get strategic about when and how you target content to them.

So you want to start a content marketing campaign. Do you have to start from scratch? Or do you have content assets already that can be repurposed? Any good Chicago content marketing agency will kick off the process with an inventory of your current content—written content, audio/video content that can be transcribed, etc.—to see how far along you already are and what gaps remain. 

Modern organizations don’t build strategies on gut instinct—they follow the data, especially with respect to digital marketing. The digital world is awash with data, available publicly or for sale. A Chicago content marketing agency can identify the right data to collect or buy, then analyze it for insights about what content your user personas would find most appealing—as well as what content is most likely to reach them. 

With an inventory of your current content and armed with data, a Chicago content marketing agency can begin to build a content plan—a list of content assets to be created, including the length, structure, and keywords, a gap analysis of what still needs to be created, and a timeline to create and deploy those content assets for maximum impact and exposure. 

A content marketing strategy can be many things, but random and scattershot it is not. There needs to be structure and priorities, including a consistent schedule and targeted campaigns to reach specific audiences and user personas. A Chicago content marketing agency can help make sense of the noise and develop a coherent content marketing strategy with structured, attainable priorities and benchmarks.

The goal of SEO is to appear high on search engine results pages (SERP) and present a compelling answer to the user’s search query. An early step of content marketing is discovering what those queries are likely to be. A Chicago content marketing agency can perform keyword research to identify the right keywords to rank highly for & write the best content that answers users search intent.

Your blog and pillar pages must have on-point technical SEO and on-page optimization, including mobile responsiveness, fast load speed, properly nested headers, optimized meta content, and easy crawlability via XML sitemaps, structured data, etc.

Large site indices and a large volume of content helps SEO, but it’s no substitute for off-page optimization. For the best results, you need both. Off-page SEO includes listings of your domain in directories and high-quality backlinks to get the rest of the internet voting for the authority of your content.

Static content (old content) suffers from an SEO standpoint. You can’t just post a blog and then forget about it—not if you want the content to drive revenue for years to come. Your content requires periodic refreshing and updating. A Chicago content marketing agency can make sure your content is always fresh and SEO-friendly.

There’s no one way to write great content. Your content strategy should include a variety of content types. The case study is particularly powerful for many organizations, because it demonstrates your value proposition in action. A Chicago content marketing agency can help you identify the best case studies, structure the case study as a gripping story, and stick the landing.

Blogs have been around forever, but they don’t have to fit the mold of the traditional “blogger.” A good blog for an authoritative organization, like a law firm or a university, resembles a digital newspaper more than anything else—a source with credibility. The blogs themselves respond to the keyword research performed by the Chicago content marketing agency, answering questions that your prospects type into search engine queries.

There’s writing, and then there is copywriting. It is a separate art and talent to engage a reader on a business subject, express the value position without excessive jargon, identify the reader’s problem better than they can identify it themselves, and persuasively communicate your ability to solve that problem. A Chicago content marketing agency can help you thread this needle, arming your digital footprint with business content that converts.

White papers are longer and more in-depth, and it’s harder to write quality long form content compared to short form content. Moreover, the white paper needs to be expert enough to convey authority, but layman-friendly enough for your users to comprehend and draw value from it. A Chicago content marketing agency can help you get your white paper game on point.

An organization’s email list is one of its most valuable assets. It’s a channel to distribute content to a targeted audience at minimal expense. Companies can print money, simply by sending great emails to an engaged list.

Social media is a powerful force for building a brand and cultivating loyal customers. By keeping valuable content in a prospect’s social feed, you become a familiar face, a known quantity, “top-of-mind” in your industry. We want you to stay “top of mind” for your prospective customers so when they need your products and services, they come to you.

Thought leadership allows you to show your authority in your prospect’s industry without selling. It establishes you as the go-to resource. Through guest blogs and collaborations with other brands, you can tap into the attention of interested prospects. A good Chicago content marketing agency has the contacts to help you establish your brand as a thought leader in each of your target industries.

The easiest and quickest way to get a prospect’s eyes on your content is to pay for it. This could come in the form of direct-response digital marketing (search engine and social media ads) as well as sponsored content on established platforms. Over the long term, SEO will be the higher-margin advantage of your content marketing strategy, but paid ads can produce early results and help you split-test your content. 

Creating user personas is an important early step in a content marketing plan, but user personas are not static. As a Chicago content marketing agency begins to gather feedback and monitor the results of the campaign, the original user personas might begin to seem outdated. It’s normal to refine and update them for better and better audience targeting. 

Organizations that cut corners with their content suffer over the long run. If a user discovers your content and it is slipshod or unreadable, your authority and expertise suffers in the eyes of the user. They trust you less. By contrast, quality content will keep them coming back for more. The more they engage with your content, the more likely the user is to become a loyal customer.

A content marketing strategy should not neglect marketing collateral—the content that helps the sales and marketing team do their job. This could include sales scripts, ad copy, sales pages– anything that persuades a prospect to convert to a customer. User personas and keyword research are highly transferable assets in transitioning from traditional content to marketing collateral. A Chicago content marketing agency can help get your collateral in order.

Content marketing is a form of digital marketing, and any digital interaction can produce data. Analytics tools provide a window into that data so you can collect it, categorize it, and draw actionable insights to improve your content marketing strategy. A Chicago content marketing agency can help you install the right analytics tools, identify key performance indicators (KPIs), and make sense of the data.