If you’re a sales consultant or a marketer, you probably already know how powerful content marketing is and how it is able to drive traffic, promote brand awareness, increase engagement, generate leads, and improve conversion rates.
But you won’t automatically reap all of these benefits just by giving content marketing a shot. Creating great, effective content is both a science and an art, requiring requires skill, experience, and strategy to execute correctly.
This article will help you and your writers find your brand’s unique selling proposition to craft compelling, memorable content and connect to your ideal target market.
Source: unDraw
Know Your Dream Client
One mistake that beginning content marketers make is creating content willy-nilly with no particular purpose. This type of content goes straight out into the crowded landscape and gets lost in the void.
Why? Because it was shot out into space, not directed with focus at a particular audience.
If you want your content to resonate, you have to know who your ideal client is. Who is the audience for each and every individual piece of content you make? If you don’t know the answer to this question, you’ll have to start back at square one.
Here’s a hint: if you want your content to help sell your product, your content’s audience should be your target client.
The good news is that you probably already know who that is if you’re working in sales or marketing.
Understanding exactly who your ideal client is a crucial step in content marketing, one that should be done long before you start writing. Know everything about this demographic. Creating a customer persona may help. Because at the end of the day, you can’t hook your target client if you don’t know who that is.
Be Useful
One of the most important things to know about your content’s target audience is what his or her problem is. We’ve all got them, and your job is to solve your target audience’s – or at least to help them move closer toward a solution.
Because the bottom line is that readers want content that is useful to them and that is worth their valuable time.
That is what will make them click, that is what will make them read your entire content from beginning to end, and that is what will make them go on to take the action you want them to, such as sign up for your mailing list or click through to your product page.
Ask yourself:
- What does my content have to offer?
- What does my target audience want and need?
- How can I help them?
For example, if you’re a dog-walking company trying to reach the demographic of urban working professionals in their 20s and 30s who love their dogs but are too busy to walk them, you may want to create a blog post giving your audience “A Full-Time Worker’s Guide to Keeping a Pet Dog Happy and Healthy.”
And this post shouldn’t just be a vaguely disguised ad for your company. Internet users are savvy and they can see right through that.
Your content should be genuinely helpful first.
Promoting your services can come second, but only if you already checked the “valuable” box.
Get Personal
What is the difference between blah, mediocre content and memorable, sticky content that encourages your audience to engage and builds a positive association with your brand? Humanity. (Yes, even if your product is all about dogs.)
The reality is that as logical as we think we are, people make decisions (including purchasing decisions) based on our emotions.
We don’t connect with 0s and 1s on a computer; we connect with people. And we don’t understand the world through facts and figures; we understand the world through stories.
Great content creators know this and imbue their content with a personal, human touch that connects with the reader on an emotional level by telling a story.
That’s what cuts through in this often cold and cynical internet landscape oversaturated with content and people trying to sell you something.
Now, we’re not saying that all of your content should be a tear-jerky sob-fest. Much of the time, that won’t make sense for your brand, product, and audience. But the more that you can make your content feel authentic, real, and personal, the more you’ll hook your audience in.
Be Different
Like we mentioned above, today’s consumer is inundated with a lot of content and a lot of choices. In order not to get lost in the fold, you have to know what makes your brand – and therefore your content – different.
Is it your sarcastic, biting brand voice?
Is it your ability to publish content at an impressive frequency?
Is it the fact that you have tips and tricks to share with your audience that nobody else on the internet knows about?
Is it your pitch-perfect SEO that gets you to the top of the first Google search results page every time?
Is it your expertly-crafted, witty headlines that audiences can’t resist clicking?
Whatever it is, there’s got to be something that differentiates you from the masses and makes you unique, or else what’s the point? If your content isn’t in some way different from – and better than – your competitors’, you’ll have to take some time to find a way to make it so.
And if you can meet all of the above criteria, creating unique, personal, and valuable content for a specific target audience that you know inside and out, you’ll be able to see all of the benefits of effective content marketing, including higher traffic, more likes, clicks, and comments, better brand awareness, more sales leads, and better ROI.
It may not be easy, but it is fairly simple.
Will you be one of the brands that does it right?
Joel Mark Harris graduated from the Langara School of Journalism in 2007. Joel is an award-winning journalist, novelist, screenwriter and producer.
He has ghostwritten numerous books in all types of genres including true life crime, business, memoir, and self help. With over 1,000 blog posts to his name, he has helped hundreds of business owners scale their business and increase their visibility. You can email him at info@ghostwritersandco.com
