Content Marketing for Purpose-Driven Businesses

At KidGlov, we’re lucky to work with a number of purpose-driven businesses. For these partners, content marketing continues to serve as an effective way to set themselves apart from others in the industry. It’s also a great way to demonstrate purpose and to help those who appreciate your purpose find you.

In today’s lesson on content marketing 101, we’ll start by talking about some basic definitions and end with information about a sandwich and a goldmine. No, really –– we’re serious. Keep reading to see what we mean.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire clearly defined audiences. Usually, this is with the objective of driving a profitable customer action. 

Valuable

When we talk about content marketing being valuable, it means that we’re providing information that the user acts upon. This information should strive to improve the user’s life, which also is what makes it perfect for purpose-driven businesses. As something that empowers the user to solve a problem, the content then asks for nothing in return because being valuable in content marketing means putting education before promotion. 

Relevant

Relevant content addresses a user’s specific question or concerns. It involves creating information that shows up at the right time via optimized search queries and makes a real connection between your brand and the user. Relevancy is all about the client and not about your business.

Consistent

Being consistent in the trifecta of valuable, relevant, and consistent means that the content is frequent in publication. It’s recognizable with a regularly applied voice and tone, and it’s easy to find when your user needs it. Publish this content when the user needs it, not when you get around to it.

Personas

To perfect the trifecta at KidGlov, we start with client personas. When we build personas, we look at many factors like age, education level, income level, geographic area, and the user’s online behaviors. Narrowing things down to a few relevant bits of information is key and by building a persona, that target audience is narrowed down even more.

A persona helps provide the ability to empathize with your audience by including additional information such as their background or a day in their life. We give each audience persona a picture and a name so that when our writers and designers are developing content, they have this person in mind.

Content Marketing Sandwich

At its core, content marketing is about having empathy for your audience and using data to better identify relevant and valuable content that’s delivered in layers. We like to call this process the content marketing sandwich. Often, content marketing experts focus on the two pieces of bread that make up the top and bottom pieces of the sandwich. 

Usually, for a top piece this includes evergreen editorials like blogs or something a user would find through search. As you think about your target persona, and what problems they’re trying to solve, your evergreen editorial will help them find that information. It also helps position you as a recognized source for high value information. 

The bottom piece of bread is how you generate leads. This could look like whitepapers, eBooks, research reports, or webinars. It’s important to note that this piece of the sandwich must have a high enough educational value that someone is willing to provide their email address to obtain it. And most importantly, once you have someone’s email address you have to nurture it. This means continuing to provide them with information that helps them get to know your company and purpose, ultimately leading them down a path of conversion.

Content Goldmine

A content goldmine strategy is all about creating the ultimate lead generation piece that provides positive returns through the content marketing trifecta. When done right, it’s primarily an educational piece that contains information that continually drives people to your site so you can capture leads and win conversions.

The content goldmine can contain bars and nuggets, meaning a centralized content piece (bar) and smaller pieces that support it (nuggets). Your bar could be a blog and your nugget could be social posts that promote it. Or maybe it’s a worksheet with a video social post promoting how to use it. When done right, the choices are endless and allow for planning out content as far as a year in advance!

These are just a few hints and suggestions for purpose-driven businesses to use content marketing to set yourself apart. Want to change the world through good business and community consciousness? Then we would love to chat.  

Bonus: if you want to dig into content marketing even further, in August we’re presenting a webinar with even more details on how to button up your content marketing strategy. Keep your eyes peeled on our social channels for registration information.