Use a Scalpel, Not a Machete.
Achieving a highly effective content strategy is no walk in the park. It’s a labor of love, conquered by the brave, the knowledgeable and determined. When done right a well-crafted and finely tuned content strategy adeptly leverages today’s best communications practices into one harmonious journey.
Channel Integration
To make sure we’re all singing from the same hymnal, let’s start by defining what goes into creating a successful content strategy. To begin with, effective content strategies must create synergy across channel — A.K.A. Channel Integration. This requires creating a digital ecosystem that not only communicates with your customer across platforms – website, email, social but also tracks your customer and understands how, when and where that customer wants to engage with you. Next, it’s vital that all your content is optimized for each platform. Too often marketers simply deploy identical content across a wide spectrum of channels, paying no attention to each platform’s unique nuances. Despite appearing efficient, this approach actually creates a missed opportunity to target your customer with relevant, meaningful and contextual content. Last but not least, you want to be sure to include pixel targeting, so you can follow your customers through the digital ecosystem as well as identify opportunities for enhancements and optimization.
Audience Segmentation
Audience Segmentation categorizes or buckets people into different groups, based on behavioral data, in order to define your best customers. At Unbound, our proprietary analytics tool, Custom Target Connection, pairs your existing customer data with existing third-party data to identify and build your highest value customer segmentations. From there, we’re able to target these customers with amazing precision all the way down to a household level.
As an example, for one of our largest clients, Compassion-First Pet Hospitals, we conducted a primary research initiative aimed at tracking Net Promoter Score. Then we took those audience insights and compiled them with other customer and third-party data points to establish customer personas that shaped our view of referring veterinarians. From there, we could enhance our content strategy with these learnings to speak to our audience in more meaningful and relevant ways – custom-tailoring key benefits and reasons to believe specific to them.
Compassion-First’s content strategy is multi-faceted, driving customers through the purchase cycle – driving awareness, consideration, purchase, retention and advocacy strategies. In addition, we also developed a comprehensive brand platform that encompasses both B2B and B2C messaging strategies. It’s been a tremendous task, but it’s in our blood and by systematically attacking it all one step at a time, it’s a challenge your brand can conquer too.
Measurement and Optimization
In today’s data-rich world, it’s easy to get lost, and hard to know what best to do with it all. That’s why it’s imperative to kick things off with a clear analytics roadmap. Defining your Key Performance Indicators means determining the metrics you’re going to track that specifically align with business objectives, and benchmark goals for other key metrics — and how they ladder up to your KPIs. Establishing a clear cadence for reviewing metrics, then making recommendations and implementing enhancements and optimizations is paramount to your content strategy’s success.
Content strategies are a foundational component to modern brand’s success. However, the ability to comb through and decipher all of your available data and put it to best use against the dynamic and shifting goals of your business can prove daunting. Unbound’s nimble, agile and highly efficient team of strategic leaders can help pinpoint your company’s unique competitive advantage and how to set you apart. Fresh eyes offer a unique ability to see your customers differently, while identifying what matters most to your company.
Whether you’re a big company that needs swift results free of red tape and bureaucracy, or a small company that lacks the resources to even know where to begin, we’re here to help. Unbound brings over 100 years of agency leadership to you, strengthening your marketing arsenal and giving you the focus and clarity your organization desperately craves.
