These days is all about content, such is the boom of content marketing that Google’s new update Hummingbird is focusing on relevancy, accuracy and authorship (relevancy of the author). But even if you have the best SEO strategy and you’re converting a high percentage of your anonymous visitors into a known audience (capturing email, company, title and other relevant details), you still need to have a content strategy in place to target your existing database, and progress them through the sales funnel.
So, how do you ensure you can maintain an accurate and well organised database that is highly engaged with your content?
Here are 6 tips on how to build and maintain a solid and well segmented audience:
1. Define and agree on your main personas
Who are the decision makers? What are your main demographics? What are your main audience groups? A good start is to align your solutions/products with your audience groups (normally by aligning job titles) or do an analysis on your analytics and site traffic demographics and group them by goals and business objectives (more B2C). In this blog post, Hubspot has come with 9 typical questions you need to ask when developing personas, just make sure you cover them so ensure you fully develop each the personas.
2. Do a gap analysis of your existing database
Once you have developed your personas, spend some time to understand the breath and depth of your database. As a start, you could analyse the number of key titles you have per company and the total number of companies with the required set of titles. This will give you an idea of how many companies you can really reach (by reaching all the key roles).
3. Segment your content depending on your personas
Try to align your content for each of those segments based on each of the personas you have developed. This will not only be critical when sending out your regular communications, whether they are newsletter or more advanced nurture marketing programs, but also when populating your site with relevant content. Think about having enough content and relevant call-to-actions for each of these audience groups.
4. Review and monitor all your data entry points
Ensure you have all your data entry points to your database well set up and that you are capturing all information you need in order to keep those segments always clean and tidy. Check your online forms, social media promotion forms, event registration forms, sales/customer service data collection methods and any other way a new opt-in can get into your database. Also, ensure you have a gate to automatically or manually disqualify any contact that doesn’t match your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile).
5. Have a good database management program in place
It’s not only time consuming to build an accurate database but also to maintain it over the years. To ensure you keep your database with the level of quality it requires, set up a marketing program to follow up hard bounces, clean and remove incorrect or fake records, understand reasons for unsubscribing and also identify your competitors, partners or any other records that you might want to treat differently from a communications point view.
6. Finally, set up a subscription management centre
Give your audience the opportunity to decide what type of communications they want to receive (newsletters, promotions, events invitations etc.), how often (daily, fortnightly, monthly etc.) and through what channels.
Digital Marketing Mind Monsters 