What Is a Content Matrix? The Key Strategy Content Creators Need to Know!

In this day and age where social media has such a significant influence on the behaviour of online consumers, the online marketing environment is becoming more and more intense. Businesses now need to look for the best techniques and channels to promote their brands and surpass their competitors. Content marketing is a powerful weapon for today’s online businesses.

Content can be categorised into different types. Today, we will look at the content matrix strategy, a marketing technique hidden within content writing. 

What Is a Content Matrix?

Have this ever happened to you? You’ve been creating content to the point you’ve run out of new ideas to write about. The more you try to come up with ideas, the more boring and uncreative they look. These issues all make your brand unappealing to readers as the content you create is no longer engaging, which therefore results in a missed sales opportunity.

But what if you knew how to create a content matrix to write more compelling content? The content matrix is a great tool to help get you out of the situation mentioned above!

The content matrix or content marketing matrix is a framework to help categorise, organise and manage different types of content, so you can get straight to the point and communicate with your target audience.

The Content Matrix Strategy

The content matrix strategy can be categorised into 4 types of content:

Content to Educate

This type of content mainly aims to educate the readers to create brand awareness. However, this type of content may not result in conversions unless the content directly informs readers about the products or services themselves. Some examples of educational content include infographics, press conferences, reports, seminars, courses, etc. Generally, this type of content demonstrates credibility and professionalism which helps to create a good brand image.

Factors to Assess Educational Content

• % of sessions subscribed to
• The number of qualified leads 
• The number of new users

Content to Convince

This type of content focuses on convincing consumers using logic, such as explaining the benefits of your products or services, presenting case studies, offering promotions, or showing customers what they will receive if they support the brand. The target audience can then compare the products and services of each brand in the same industry before they make a purchase decision. As a result, you have to make sure your content stands out from other brands in order to attract consumers’ attention.

However, one thing to keep in mind is that persuasive content generates relatively low brand awareness. Therefore, it provides better results with a target audience who have made an initial purchase.

Factors to Assess Persuasive Content

• Shorter sales cycle
• An increase in sales value
• Higher conversions

Content to Entertain

This part of the content matrix focuses on fun and emotional communication. Entertaining content usually results in very good brand awareness. Examples of entertaining content include viral marketing, such as playing games or answering questions to get prizes. It helps boost engagement and may help expand your customer base. In short, if you want your brand to be widely known and gain more followers, the entertainment content matrix would be helpful for you.

Factors to Assess Entertaining Content

• % of sessions subscribed to
• An increase in organic impressions
• The number of people sharing your content

Content to Inspire

This type of content creates emotional connections that go hand in hand with driving sales. Even if it’s a product or service review, there is still emotion within the content to encourage the target audience to make a purchase decision. Usually, inspiring content comes in the form of reviews, content seeding, influencer marketing, or community platforms like Pantip, for example.

The question is, how can you get people to review your products or services? If your budget is limited, you can consider organising a giveaway event for customers to write reviews. Doing so kills two birds with one stone as you can have both entertaining and inspiring content in one post.

Factors to Assess Inspiring Content

• Rising search trends on the topic you write about
• Brand sentiments on social media platforms
• An increase in sales shortly after posting the content

Why Do You Need to Use a Content Matrix Strategy?

• It helps align your content to the needs of your target audience.
• It adjusts your marketing plan to align with the sales model of your products and services.
• It helps reduce content that is not beneficial to your brand.
• You can focus more on the content related to your own products or services.
• It enables you to identify areas where your content could be improved.
• It gives you new ways to create content, making it easier for you to target new groups.

Techniques for Writing Content with the Content Matrix Strategy

• Look at each type of content you create, assess the results, and see which content received the best response.
• Next, analyse that particular content to determine which part of the content matrix it falls into.
• Benchmark against your competitors in the same industry and take a look at the types of content they create to use as examples when creating your content.
• Set a good schedule for your content, and make sure it suits your target customers.
• Create your content and continually measure its performance against your KPIs.

Summary

In a nutshell, a content marketing matrix is a tool that helps you create and plan your content systematically, giving you a clearer scope for content creation. This strategy helps emphasise the consumers’ needs as well as boost the performance of your content.