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Hey, what's up guys? This is Zack from HookLead. Today I'm going to talk about content marketing. I'm here to tell you from experience that first off, content marketing works, works very well, but it only works well if you have a solid strategy behind it. I'm just producing content for the sake of producing content will not get you very far and you'll waste a lot of time and effort and, and you won't really see the fruits of your labor. The strategy is, I wouldn't say it's everything because you have to have good content, but the strategy makes a huge part and the success or failure of your content marketing campaign. So not just for content marketing, but for any marketing for that, for that matter, you always want to begin with persona research. So figuring out who is your target audience, who are your buyers, right?
You want to learn everything you can about them and create buyer profiles around every single one of them. You're likely gonna have several, but she want to, instead of just saying, hey, anybody is great for service or a product, you really want to kind of get much more specific. Right? Who are they, what's their demographic information? What's their age range, their income, do they have families or they retire, do they live and in the suburbs to they live in the city, for example. what are their frequently asked questions or common objections? How do you help them, where do they hang out? You want to compile all of that together into a nice a buyer persona and then you can take that information and honestly, a lot of it, a lot of the information that you get out of there is going to be content ideas for your strategy, especially when it comes down their frequently asked questions.
Because if you think about the buying process, especially online, if this is a buying process, the first part is research. Where do they do research now online? What are they researching questions, that's where they start when they're kind of in the awareness phase, when they, when they know that they may need something, I'm there researching before they start comparing and before they pull the trigger, frequently asked questions are a great way to address that research mode, get your brand in front of them and just go ahead and start the process of delivering value and, uh, and sucking them into your funnel. So start there and then start mapping out your content strategy. Right? So you want to do that. I'm keeping a couple of things in mind. First, what kind of information is going to be helpful for your buyers or for your target audience.
It's going to help them with their buying process, what's going to answer their questions, what's going to help them with their research when they are comparing different things. Common objections, it's an opportunity to kind of overcome some of those with content. Make it easier on your sales process. And increase those conversion rates and number two, and this part is very important as you want to have a keyword strategy because content is very powerful for SEO, for search engine optimization. So what you want to do here is have a keyword strategy. You want to go after long tail keywords. For example, you wouldn't want to optimize around the word real estate, for example, great neighborhoods for families in suburban Chicago, something to that nature.
So just very specific, that gets after the long tail. Reason being is, you're not going to get a ton of search volume from that, bu the chances of ranking for phrases like that is going to be much better. So when you kinda think in aggregate, you're publishing posts after post after post over time, even if you're getting a small little bit of traffic from each one, all those added up over a year or two can really snowball into a lot of super targeted traffic. When you're doing your keyword research as well, thinking about the buying process, so have content for when they're in the awareness stage or when they're researching, when there a consideration stage when we were kind of pitching your product or service versus other options. And then the decision phase, what kind of content is going to help them ultimately bring them in and pull the trigger, what kind of searches are they doing when they're ready to buy, the keyword queries and research mode and decision and buying mode are going to be much different.
Right? So keep all that in mind and and go ahead and map out your content calendar for, I'd say probably do it on a quarterly basis if you do it every ninety days. That gives you the opportunity to have planning and have a strategy and have something to execute over the next several months. But it also gives you the flexibility to pivot if something comes up as far as a current event or just something that you want to kind of jump on to get content out there. And also thinking about content in regards to obviously you want written content, blog posts, articles, but video is a very strong piece of content now. Graphics, images, different things like that. So you don't necessarily have to handcuff yourself to only blog posts, right? You can kind of break it up.
Also write for a, just kind of knowing how people's attention spans are. So for example, when someone gets on a page nowadays, your content has to pass the scan test. So what that is, is they're going to hit the page, they're going to read the title, OK? There's a title, make me want to at least scan the page to see if I want to read it. If yes, then they scan the page to kind of pass a scan test. Do you want to have sub-headings? So instead of having 500 words of content is all paragraphs, add subheadings, right? That way they can scan and say, OK, yeah, I want to know more about that. Then I go back up to the top and they'll read it. So having subheadings helps pass the scan test to keep them on your page a little longer.
That's great for Seo because there might be opportunities for key words within those and then also be sure to always include a call to action at the end of your articles. So it could be, and again, you want to map your call to action to where they are in the process. So if it's like an awareness research, maybe it's a download an ebook or a white paper or watch a free video or something like that. If it's a consideration phase, kind of middle of the funnel, maybe that's a demo or a in depth white paper or a comparison chart between yourself and competitors. I'm this kind of thing about like their buying process. What kind of information would be helpful for them and then all that content you want to put behind some kind of a wall.
For example, a top of funnel, if it's an e-book, put it behind a landing page, I've name an email, and if it's middle of the funnel, you could probably ask for their phone number, maybe another qualifier in question. The decision phase is pretty self explanatory. That's where they're gonna either become an official lead or buy something from you or talk to them on the phone. But I'm a pretty high level, a bit, pretty in depth at the same time. That's a lot of information to get you started. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. If you need help with your content marketing and your overall marketing strategy altogether, please reach out to us. This is Zack from HookLead, thanks for tuning in. Thanks. Bye.