A lot of companies still rely on traditional marketing methods to gain more traction and visibility. But what if there was a way to gain the same results without all the overhead of a traditional marketing department? You could experiment with AI-driven content curation to create beautiful and effective marketing materials without needing a separate team. But to ensure the success of these experiments you need a solid grasp of what elements truly drive a buyer’s action.

Where Do I Start?

You can begin by asking yourself some targeted questions. For example, if you’re experimenting with creating a marketing plan, you might want to know:

• What is the goal of the plan?
• Who will be my initial target audience?
• What types of content do they consume?
• What materials (marketing tools, such as landing pages) do I already have access to?

The answers to these questions will guide you in determining what content to include in your marketing materials. Ideally, you want to have a mix of both old and new materials to ensure you reach your target audience with a range of experiences.

What Is the Goal Of the Plan?

Determining your target audience’s goals, aspirations, and motivations can be a helpful starting point for developing strategy. To ensure your marketing materials are effective, you must consider what phase of the buyer’s journey you’re in.

You can use the answers to the questions above to get a clear picture of where you are and what you need to do next. Are you marketing to existing customers to encourage them to make a purchase? To get new customers to try your product or service? Or, do you want to grow a fanbase and become a destination for those seeking your product or service?

Each phase of the buyer’s journey is defined by specific actions that the visitor takes. You can use this fact to your advantage by aligning your online marketing initiatives with the goals of your plan. Are you driving traffic to a sales conversion stage? Or are you simply establishing trust among potential customers?

Who Will be My Initial Target Audience?

From the very outset, you want to ensure that you are creating marketing materials that will be used and understood by the people you are hoping to reach. For example, if you’re designing a sales presentation for a CEO, it would be smart to include all of the material they will need to succeed:

• The presentation itself (written content, design, etc)
• The speech (via podcast or webinar)
• The supporting documentation (i.e. fact sheets, financial analysis, warranty information)
• Everything in between (web content, digital files, etc)

To refine your initial target audience, you can use a tool like Nucleus Vision to create buyer personas. This will help you understand what type of content speaks to your audience and helps you tailor your message to be as effective as possible. You can also use this tool to determine how you’ll measure the success of your plan.

A buyer persona is a fictional character designed to help you understand and communicate with your target audience. With a buyer persona in mind, you can develop a strategy designed to generate interest among potential customers.

What Types of Content Do They Consume?

Once you’ve established the goal of your plan and designed the initial target audience, you can begin to think about the types of content you will use to reach those individuals. This is a crucial step as you don’t want to overload your visitors with excessive and unhelpful content. You want to have a healthy mix of the following:

• Informational materials (e.g. white papers, blog posts, etc)
• Case studies
• Product demos
• Video tutorials
• Interactive elements (e.g. quizzes, forms, etc)

Consider each of these mediums carefully. While informative materials and case studies can be quite useful, over-reliance on these formats can reduce the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. To put it simply, while informative materials can provide a wealth of data, watching a YouTube video of a product demo is almost always more effective.

Through creating and curating a variety of content, you can use websites like BuzzFeed to experiment with different formats and investigate which ones are most effective for marketing. From here, you can craft a strategy and begin to build out your plan for content.

What Kinds of Materials Do I Already Have Access to?

Another important factor to consider when developing an effective marketing strategy is your available resources. Do you have a designer you can enlist to create a beautiful website? Is your copywriter capable of crafting high-quality, engaging content?

If you’re looking for someone to help you with your marketing materials, consider the following materials you have access to:

• Website (including web content, such as blog posts and web pages)
• Product pages (such as those on Amazon or Google)
• Social media channels (including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram)
• Email marketing platforms (including MailChimp and HubSpot)
• Content calendars (such as the one on HubSpot)]

If you have access to a handful of materials, you can begin developing a content plan. A content plan details the various types of content you will use to drive traffic to your site and boost engagement among your audience.

Landing Pages

Every marketer should have a basic understanding of what a landing page is and how to create one. A landing page is simply a dedicated page on your site that is designed to convert (i.e. pull in) visitors into leads and eventually, customers.

In designing a landing page, you have many options. You can use a tool like MailChimp to simply create a template with basic information (e.g. heading, description, etc.). Or, if you’re feeling adventurous, you can use a tool like Squarespace to build a fully fledged website with a landing page template included.

Regardless of whether you use a tool to build out your landing page or you do it manually, you must tailor the page to be as effective as possible. Once you’ve finished building your landing page, you can use conversion tools (i.e. analytics tools) to track the actions of your visitors.

Design

An important aspect of developing an effective marketing strategy is the design of your website and social media platforms. You can use a tool like Squarespace to create a stylish, fully-realized online presence that draws in the right audience.

A key element to consider is color. If you want your marketing materials to be effective, you must ensure that the colors you choose for your site and social media platforms match.

For example, if you’re designing a sales page or a blog post for Google, you must use the Google logo in the design. Doing this will make it much more likely that your audience will recognize the page or post as being associated with Google. If you forget to use the Google logo, you could end up with a page or post that looks nothing like it was approved by Google.

Testing

To ensure the success of your marketing strategy, you must continually test, evolve, and refine your plan. This means you’ll be updating your content strategy as you go along, measuring the results of your changes and making further adjustments as necessary. If you set the right expectations from the outset, this will help eliminate any confusion down the line and ensure you have a clear understanding of how each piece of content is performing.

To start, you can use a tool like Google Analytics to easily track the traffic (and hopefully, some revenue) generated by each of your content pieces.

As you gain experience with this process and continue to grow your audience, you can use the data from these tools to determine the most effective ways to communicate with your target audience. The above information should provide you with a clear idea of how to turn your marketing PDFs into effective online marketing tools.