Content strategy: How to deliver results with tight budgets

Brands are walking on a tightrope with budget cuts on one sure and heightened consumer expectations on the other.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Since the dawn of the digital age, the stakes are higher today than ever before.

With ever evolving consumer habits, ensuring that your content delivers is key for brands to achieve their business goals.

Using data efficiently during the campaign planning phase will help you create, adjust and measure ROI focussed content across platforms and channels.

To know where to spend your marketing funds, use the resources at your disposal to understand your data/research to define your target audience, size of the market, and analyze their content consumption habits.

1. Where are your customers?

Your first step is to understand where your customers are. Whether it is a few cities, states, or specific regions in a particular city.

Use available resources such as reports, demographic and psychographic data, and market snapshots. To help you, you can procure it from multiple online sources to help you profile your audience by various parameters. However, the best data is the data you collect using your digital touchpoints to understand your audience, their lifestyles, and what makes them take action.

With this information, you can chart your close probable market size - specifically, the number of potential customers in that region and help you allocate funds by region.

2. Fine-tune your customer segments.

Uncover your target audience by understanding how and where your audience interacts with your brand or an independent category. Smart marketers don't stop there. They conduct research in the needs and wider interests and possibly categorize them into a stage in their sales funnel.

You would need a sizable audience to represent the population to identify your target audience. The next step is to refine your audience segments with nuances that make your audience unique. This is key to delivering ROI focussed content that helps resonates with the customer.

 

Focus on W3H1 (Who, what, where, and how?)

Who: Gender, age, income, education, social class, religion, and nationality.

Where: Location (nation, state, town, city, area, and pin code.) 

What: Wider interests, lifestyles, hobbies, influencers they follow, usage by platforms, channels, and devices.

How: Personality traits, attitudes towards the brand, how it is perceived by then and what role brand plays in their lives

3. Analyze where your audience consumes your content

Relying on terms like ‘everyone is on Instagram’, isn’t enough to justify your spend there. With data from your previous campaigns, you are likely to have an understanding of where your content has the best ROI.

Understand what draws a particular user type to a certain channel. There could be multiple reasons why a person chooses one channel over the other. And it is likely that each channel serves a number of primary purposes for different people at different times. 

Know why your audience is on that channel to create ROI focussed content across multiple formats. Audio, video, reviews, ads, and blogs independently require resources to create. It is important to know what your audience responds to best before creating content. 

4. Attitudes, interests, and motivations

When the market is unsteady with polarised opinions, many times, the most valuable insights of your audience is derived from attitudinal insights.

It helps to combine these insights with behavioral data to fill the gaps in your audience understanding. Key questions about lifestyles, motivations, interests and perceptions can get the best answers.

Here is a small list of questions to get you started

Motivations: - What drives them every day? - Family? - Security? - Health? - Money? - Philanthropy?

Values: - Is your audience price sensitive? Define what value for money means to your audience. - How do they feel after they purchase your product? Do they seek social validation?

Perceptions: Understand their point of view on a topic. Are they optimistic or pessimistic, forward-thinking and sociable, etc

Interests and Lifestyle choices: - Are they cosmopolitan? - Do they dine out often? - Do they drive a car? - Take frequent holidays abroad?

Real value lies in connecting your data. Go deeper into the attitudes, interests and perceptions of your audience for a true view of who they are and what drives them to act the way they do. 

Tight budgets require clear goals

The lesser resources to play around with, the lesser the room for error. It pays to be clear to know the business objective while creating and continuously optimizing your content calendar.

Start with business goals and then narrow down to your content goals.

I cannot reiterate the cliche enough: "your customer always comes first.”

Understand which end of the funnel you want to concentrate during your campaign.

Combine data sources for greater context.

An effective way of adding value to your insights is to combine first-party data with third-party data. 

- First-party data - While it is widely used, it is not the most detailed, or the most reliable data.

- Analytics - Gives you a basic, retrospective, and somewhat blinkered picture of how your content has performed (or is performing)

Organic first, paid later.

Do not jump to the paid channel as get-go. You need to test and guarantee if your content will fly before you put your marketing dollars. Place your efforts on organic channels before you commit to spend there.

When you see your content working. Assess the potential of spending on it (and the anticipated ROI)

In conclusion, a content strategy that has a clear purpose, continuously tracked, tweaked, and tested will have the best chance of achieving the intended result.

Thank you

Yogesh Babu

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