Marijana Kostelac

Marijana Kay is a freelance writer specializing in long-form content driven by research and storytelling. She works with fast-growing SaaS companies like Pipedrive, BuildFire, and Recart, as well as Fortune 100 companies. Some results her content achieved so far: multiple page 1 rankings, doubled conversion rate for free trial signups, and a 250% traffic increase. She also hosts the Content Love podcast, where she chats with top marketers to uncover in-depth, practical insights into advanced content marketing strategies.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Marijana’s success

 Advanced blog post creation strategy: planning, research, writing, editing, optimizing

Result if you follow the steps in Marijana’s session

Content marketing that takes buyers needs into account and helps to move prospects along the buyer’s journey
 

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

So step number one is planning. You can’t really, well you can, but you’re gonna have a hard time. But you shouldn’t really sit down at your computer and say, well, I’m gonna write a blog post now and you have no idea what the topic is or even more importantly, what is the pain point, the emotional state that you’re playing towards and that blog post.

So how I like to put this for my clients or for just people I talk with is, you have to kind of place them yourself in your audience’s shoes. And what I mean by that is understanding what part of the process of their buying process they are right now.

So for example, if you’re a b2b company, and you are selling a bookkeeping software, and this can be, obviously, it can vary in price ranges and whatever else. You can target small businesses, whether you can target enterprises with it, but what’s most important is, you should know at the time when someone comes across you what stage of awareness or what stage of familiarity with your product, they are not just your product, but just your overall offering.

So if you’re offering a bookkeeping software, do they know what goes into a bookkeeping process? Do they know what it takes? You didn’t know how long it’s going to take them to. They know if they need to hire a person. There’s all of these different questions they can ask themselves and it tells you what part of a purchase process they are in.

So they can, this will obviously vary based on your specific industry or even your specific offering, you can have multiple of these, but most of them are going to fall into three, which are awareness, consideration and part like the time when they’re deciding about a purchase or awareness, consideration and decision.

And in the awareness stage, they’re probably not going to know about anything about their problem. They’re gonna know they have a problem but they won’t know what specifically they need to do in order to solve it.

So they need to learn and educate themselves so once, and obviously, what decision process, or sorry with consideration process they’re going to be one bigger, know there are options out there, but they’re not going to know enough about them.

And then in the decision process, they’re going to know, want to know about things like features and price and all of these very purchase ready pieces of information.

So once you see, look at these three kind of big overarching places where you can fit each of each member of your audience of your ideal audience, then you can go ahead and map questions that they are going to be asking yourself themselves. And once you know them, you can actually go ahead and map the content based on that.

So you’re not just coming, you know, there are so many businesses who come out and say, we want to do content, let’s write about five myths about whatever or five tips to do X. And it’s very vague, because it doesn’t play into what’s really, truly bothering that person.

And that’s something that I’ve made my, like, career mission to, like, understand about the audience that I’m targeting, because I’m sometimes writing for salespeople, sometimes I’m writing for their managers. Sometimes I’m writing for, you know, business owners who need to get on, who wants a mobile app created. It’s very different, what they’re going to come across and their issues.

So once you know that, once you know that they have very different questions throughout that process, you’re going to want to go ahead. And for each of the pieces of content that you believe fits into answering that question, you’re going to want to define something that’s called, what’s in it for me or WIFM. And that basically means why would anyone bother reading this?

It’s not a matter of just showing up and being like, hey, here’s my piece of content, I hope you read it. It’s going to be well, this is actually going to be career changing, life changing, this is gonna really transform like a part of your day while you’re in work or something, the way you do something. So that’s kind of how I approach this.

And when you do this, you’re actually going to think about the pain points that you’re trying to solve. And this will, in turn drive your call to action in the blog post and also your goals for it.

So what are you going to actually measure? Is it going to be email signups? Is it going to be you know, traffic shares, whatever else you’re trying to actually achieve with the blog post.

And by doing that, you can kind of, with that in mind, you can go ahead and going to Google and just search through what’s already there about that question. You can see if there are gaps, you can see if there are, you know, if people are not actually replying or answering the questions that your audience has, and you have a room, the room there to kind of build upon what’s my saying.

So this is really important to just understand that pain points and based on them, based on your awareness, consideration, decision to go ahead and map pieces of content, or just overall topics that are going to cover from which thing, you’re going to build the WIFM.

I think, without that, you should move on to the next stages. And once you do that, you can actually go ahead and start with the next ones that we’re going to cover.