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Business is all about relationships and content marketing is no different. People want to engage with individuals and platforms they trust. If you’re selling a product, providing a service or solely creating content for consumption. The key is to cultivate a relationship around your content. Are you creating value? Educating? Informing? Or entertaining?

You’ll want to engage your target audience early and often. This is why developing a content strategy process is essential to the success of your business. Controlling the content experience for your target audience is — mainly —about relationship management. Adding the structure of a content framework will hold steady no matter which objective you plug in, the system will always deliver.

Depending on your business, whether it’s B2B or B2C will determine if you need a customer loop or a marketing funnel. I personally believe that marketing funnels are better for music, retail, etc. and customer loops are better for B2B and service industries where relationship management is key. Customer loops provide businesses an advantage to not only ‘create’ conversations, they can also ‘control’ them.

Effective customer loops will inform, persuade, instruct, confirm and entertain your target audience. This is why you should approach your content as an asset class within itself. For example, your content should intentionally:

• Cultivate relationships.
• Answer key questions around hot topics.
• Eliminate fear.
• Create faith & confidence.
• Enlighten & help.
• Foster a healthy environment.
• Support your business objectives & goals.

As I mentioned in the latter, your content should be viewed as an asset class of its own. How you organize these assets using content strategy and an online journey map will determine the effectiveness of your efforts. Simplicity is always the best approach. Figure out the needs of your target audience and create content around the solutions.

This is how you control the content experience; create the conversation and listen to your customer’s needs. Google has done extensive research when it comes to the online buying process and they have coined this experience as the ‘Zero Moment of Truth‘. When a potential customer makes a conscious decision to research a product before a purchase.

Overall, creating a customer loop with content marketing will increase your conversions and give you a greater ability to control the experience around your content. The best way to do this by listening to your customer’s needs and gathering feedback. The whole concept of content marketing is to create conversations and induce feedback.

Let’s check out 3 ways you can control the content experience below.

1. Your content correlates with a real-time want or need. For example, you operate a travel blog that features the best Airbnb & Hotel deals for frequent travelers. Once you have created your content framework, you can plug-in links that inform your target audience about the best experiences that money can buy.
2. Your content informs, instructs and confirms. For example, online health clinics are great example or any service provider for that matter. You can create educational content around certain industries and make it accessible on your website or through a stand alone blog. Virtuwell and WebMd are great examples of how to build a content framework around informing, instructing and confirming your target audience.
3. Your content entertains and evokes emotion. This is a great example for all content creators to follow. One of the most recent claims to fame in the podcast space is one of my favorites, “MILLION DOLLAZ WORTH OF GAME“. The whole vibe from the title is ‘value’ on top of ‘value’ and they’ve hit that sweet spot in Hip Hop where they’re riding the wave. One of the biggest ways to sustain success in content marketing is through brand positioning and association. Whether it be topics, services, products, etc. Providing value and evoking emotion is always a recipe for success.

When you’re creating content for a customer loop, by de facto you’re creating valuable content. The most important part about controlling the content experience is connecting with your target audience’s wants and needs. Whether you’re persuading, informing, instructing or entertaining. Don’t forget to speak to your target audience’s emotional cues. Using this strategy will inherently increase your conversions and help your control the experience around your content.

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