MCMA Event Recap
Educational Webinar
January 2019

Speaker: Nick Giallourakis (Gilly Media)

It’s time to gear up for the coming year, preparing to develop the right content for your audience. The Media and Content Marketing Association presented a webinar by Nick Giallourakis about asking the right questions to help you develop better content.

Start by going to your audience to ask questions. As you do so, you’ll come up with better content — content that moves them to take action.

“Asking your customers or potential readers seems like such a simple thing to do, but sadly it’s rarely done.” — Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute

How to Set the Foundation

Start by setting the right foundation. First, you start by identifying your potential audience. Who are they? Who are you targeting?

Once you know who they are, you need to do some research. Answer the following three questions about the audience:

  1. What topics are they interested in?

  2. Where does your audience gather information?

  3. What kind of content do they consume?

When you know the answers to these questions, you can start to understand the audience. Don’t make assumptions, though. Actually ask them. You can use the following methods to answer the above questions:

  • Online surveys

  • Focus groups

  • In-depth interviews

  • eListening across the web

“The ultimate goal is to get to know your audience...
Know your audience inside and out.”
— Nick Giallourakis

Using case studies, Nick shared specific examples of audience listening in action. By talking to the audience, it’s possible to tailor content to both client and audience needs.

How Does eListening Work?

One of the exceptions to directly asking your audience how they feel about content and what they want is elistening.

With elistening, it’s possible to see target audience behavior across the web. Nick talked about specific tools that could be used to improve your ability to track how people interact with your brand across different platforms.

Taking the information found through elistening, it’s possible to put together a brand presence analysis and see if you’re meeting your goals — and to help you find new ways to reach new audiences.

“You can actually see and even tap into an audience you might not have in specifically in your database. … Just because you don’t have someone in your audience database,
you can use alternative data.” — Nick Giallourakis

Addressing Audience Content Needs

Content development is about addressing four basic questions:

  1. Why does the audience want the content? Does it help them solve a problem?

  2. What kind of content does your audience engage with? Do they prefer video, webinars, written? Figure out what your audience needs when consuming the content.

  3. Where does your audience go to make their move? You can use items like A/B testing to see where to place something on a page.

  4. When do your clients or customers expect to see something? Timing matters. When are people looking at newsletters or reading new posts?

Try new things to see if you can get better results by tweaking what you have and seeing if something does better.

Another way to address content needs is to repurpose the content. You can turn it into different types of content to reach more people where they are. 

“The ability to repurpose content is the gift that keeps on giving...
Take content assets and slice and dice them in different ways.” — Nick Giallourakis

In the end, your content should tell a story, solve a problem, and position yourself as a thought leader. Pitching a product is less important than solving problems and standing outside the normal. Content is still king — as long as it fits your audience's needs.