When developing your business messaging and content, start by clarifying your business goals.  Then you can align your messaging strategy with your goals to achieve your desired outcomes.

Of course, your first goal is getting visitors to read your content. Your content strategy should include plans for using benefit-laden messages and ensuring content quality. This checklist can help you get started.

Start with a needs analysis

1. Define your target customer and their most important needs.
2. Align your customers’ needs with content topics.
3. Determine what keywords are appropriate for the content topics.
4. Define a goal (desired outcome) for each page of your site.

Write and edit your content

5. Write the topic-focused content that addresses your customers’ goals. Include a call to action.
6. Edit and organize the content so that it’s very easy to read. Make sure you have:

• Searchable, benefit-oriented headlines that use your target words.
• Scannable content that provides a solution, such as tips and resources.
• Zero jargon. Simplify your content as much as possible. Be clear and concise.

7. Read your content out loud. People want to read content quickly, so make sure it flows.

Test readability and page load

8. Run some simple readability tests on your content to see if you can further improve its consumability. Try this readability test at Editcentral.com. This will help you identify jargon so you can remove it.
9. Test your page speed. If it’s not fast, you’ll lose readers. Try the free page load test at Pingdom.com. It tells you your page-load time and how fast it is compared to other tested websites. Shoot for 2 seconds or less.

Start tracking visitors

10. Get a Google Analytics account and start tracking your web visitors. Which pages are they visiting and how long? How are they getting there? Do they sign up for offers? Once you have actionable metrics, you can refine and develop your content to meet your business goals.

“Know thy customer” is a core principle of marketing, but website marketing takes this idea to another level. Because websites are so interactive, web teams and usability specialists work together in defining the “persona” of the typical visitor of the website.

The personas, or user profiles, help the web team design the functionality and messaging that supports the web visitors’ actions. Personas are also widely used in the User Experience (UX) field in creating usability test cases.

A persona is not a literal representation of your customer, but a type of customer, for example, the CEO of a software company. Starting with their job title, you flesh out their profiles with assumed details about the nature of their preferences, motivations, and expectations based on their business role.

You can add details to the profile from industry research, but the best source of information is often a sales person who works closely with customers and understands their needs and frustrations. To capture this information, a buyer persona template can be used.

Developing a buyer or user profile is a critical step in aligning content to user needs. In creating a strategy for quality content, this is the first step of the process. You may have two or three main personas and a couple of minor ones. Keep refining your personas and add details to the profile descriptions as you discover new things about your customers and users.

Some questions you can ask yourself as you brainstorm topics are:

• What is my ideal customer looking for? Or, what are the problems that they are seeking a solution for?
• How do they like to consume information? Print, online, video?
• What do they read? What do they consider expert sources of trusted information?

Drilling down into your buyers’ personas is like finding a goldmine of valuable words and phrases, “messaging” if you will, that your customer will respond to.

My next post will discuss these “golden” words and phrases, that are also called keywords, and how to use them.