You must categorize your content if you want it to resonate with your customers

If you’re a moving services company, you would send Instagram story ads to someone who just recently finished moving. Your ads would be better served when targeting people who recently got a new job—they are more likely to relocate. You also wouldn’t sell supplements to someone who isn’t health conscious. It would better to promote your product inside Facebook groups that discuss the latest trends in fitness.

To be a great content marketer you have to be able to think about the level of awareness your customer has. If you create a video, are you speaking to someone who knows about your brand or someone who doesn’t even know about the problem that you are promising to solve? A customer could be:

• totally unaware of the problem;
• aware of the problem but, they think it’s not relatable;
• they may know that the problem pertains to them but, they don’t have a solution;
• they know about your solution but, are hesitant and need social proof;
• they are aware of your brand and are ready to buy (sometimes they just don’t have the money at the moment).

Does your customer know that they have a problem?

When thinking about your sales funnel, try to map your content onto it. Where do your current creative assets lie? If you’re creating too much promotional content, without creating any posts that are promoting the problem—you are missing the point.

Everyone is promoting their brand, their logo, their solution. An easy way to promote yourself, without selling too much, is by promoting the problem instead. If you educate and entertain people about a relatable problem in their lives, they are more receptive to following you. This doesn’t mean that they are ready to buy from you, there is a process for everything.

When is the right time to sell?

Once you have their attention instead of selling to them, focus on building a relationship. It is important that when we consider targeting a user on any platform, we think about when is the right time to ask them to buy. Our confidence level in knowing the right time can be indicated by them following us, by them subscribing to a newsletter, and by them engaging with our content.

All of these touchpoints will get us closer to the sale, but we shouldn’t rush the process. Often times, the customer doesn’t buy from us because we asked them to. The level of emotion that is involved in the buying process (i.e. buying a pair of socks versus buying a car) will determine how long that process will take.

Refrain from simply pumping money into your ad spend and targeting as many people as possible. Showcase your ability to be empathetic to your customer’s needs instead and showcase your knowledge on the problem. If you do this, you will stay top of mind when the customer is ready to buy.

There will be a challenge in attributing which specific piece of content lead to the sale. However, this challenge tends to be less of a priority if you don’t know which piece of content is right for which type of customer. This is why categorizing your content should be at the beginning of your content marketing strategy.

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