How to create awesome content that resonates with the reader and brings in a lot of traffic
As a business, you have a story to tell and this story telling in the digital age is labeled as content creation. It’s content with a purpose. Good content engages with the reader and creates traffic to your site; traffic that leads to better conversion rates and more sales. But how do you go about doing this?
What you will learn from this article:
Reading time: 5 – 7 minutes |
The 2 most common mistakes with content creation that drives customers away
Mistake number 1: Creating content for content’s sake
That ‘About us’ page on your website- that’s content. And the landing page- that’s content too. In fact anything written on your website or anywhere on the Internet is content. Each piece of content is there for a specific purpose; all of which when pieced together is supposed to form a series of interlocking chains that drives customer attraction, consumption and retention.
Ask yourself why your business needs a brochure or a white paper. Is it because your competitor has also got one? Mirroring other businesses is a sure-shot strategy to failure because you don’t know why they are doing the things that they are. For all you know, their strategy of customer engagement and business philosophy could be very different from yours and may not work for your business.
Bottom line:
Regardless of what everyone else is doing, ask yourself what this blog post/white paper/press release is meant to do for your business. Stop producing content for content’s sake.
Mistake number 2: Not knowing who your customer is and what they want
Let’s say you have a financial consulting business and have started a blog to gain visibility in the blogosphere.
You write about mutual funds, you write about tax saving plans and retirement funds and pretty much every topic under the sun. Week after week, you put out these awesome posts, but what do you hear? crickets..
Wondering why your blog hasn’t been flooded with comments and business enquiries? That’s because you are writing for “nobody”.
Ask yourself, is your business geared towards meeting the needs of people in the 40-60 year age bracket, who are urban, middle class people saving for retirement or is it for 20-something people who are just starting out with college debt and are unsure how to plan for their financial future? Or, is it for newly married people who want to buy their first home and are waiting to welcome their first born child?
Everyone needs money. But every target audience has different desires, fears and risk taking capacity and they all are at different stages of their financial lifecycle. Understanding these factors and creating customised content that speaks to your target audience’s fears and desires is the key to customer engagement.
If you have a product or a service that solves different problems for different demographics, you can simply create a separate list/newsletter for each category. What would be a mistake would be to blast the same content in a newsletter to everyone when they all have different needs and aspirations.
Bottom line:
Understand your customer and their pain points accurately to create customized content that resonates with them.
Why it’s important to focus on your business to create great content.
Yes, money is important but remember, your business exists to solve a problem or to meet a market need. What is it that you can do for your clients? What do you do differently than your competitors and why should customers care to work with you?
Focus on the value proposition and everything — pricing, services on offer, the way you engage with your customers, business strategy, marketing tactics, company culture and yes, even the content you create — flows from this.
If people believe that you have something of value to add to their lives, people will listen to you and before you know it, your content will start to attract customers the way bees swarm around a beehive.
As you can tell, this isn’t one of those smart hacks or shortcut tips that will give you great results instantly. This approach requires you to ask if what you’re doing is right for your business and more importantly, for your customer— it’s the authentic way to drive web traffic.