This means that since digital marketing strategists almost always double as publishers after a clear understanding of who their target audiences are, there are certain steps that form the foundation of any content marketing strategy which these practitioners must understand in order to shape communication between brands and current or potential customers.

1. Brand essence: Every successful brand has a unique quality that differentiates it from competitors' and give customers a sense of belonging. These attributes are usually summarized in a sentence. This core summary is called the brand essence.

A brand essence is the main basis for a business' emotional connection with its audience and manner of communication with both potential and current customers. To content creators and digital marketing strategists, a brand essence is an important guide for ensuring the content to be created is one that best fits the business.

Marketing tactics nowadays ties stories to the brand essence. In this case, the questions for businesses become: What is your reason for existing and how do connect your story with the interest of current and potential customers?

This is so that customers do not misinterpret or get confused about the brand promise.

2. Market research and personas: A market research is important in content marketing as this greatly helps in developing target market personas.

According to Quirk, "the sweet spot for content marketing lies in an intercept between marketing goals of a brand, the brand personality as it guides and differentiates that brand in the marketplace, and the customer motivation for paying attention to a brand at all". (Quirk, 2013)

In addressing customer needs, it's important to understand your audience and the kind of content they want to engage with. One way to address this is the development of consumer persona.

A persona is simply a profile which an author/content marketer creates which covers the characteristics of a target audience for whom they are writing.

Personas are majorly based on the user of your branded content and creating a profile from those personas is all about putting into consideration characteristics of the readers, their needs and desires.

Digital strategists should always focus on the motivation of created personas, they aid in the proper segmentation and understanding of a brand's target market. From here, you'll be able to create content that'll get your message across clearly and effectively as well as identify entirely with the brand essence.

At RDM, we know the importance of using brand promise to target the right persona for our clients.

Article by Ogechukwu Okonkwo

This is a feature by RDM