Content marketing is an important aspect of successful operation for many businesses, but content creation can represent a real barrier to success. Good content should be engaging, informative, and most importantly, digestible to viewers. Unfortunately, many businesses struggle to find ideas that will resonate with their current and prospective customers.
The internet is full of content, and that can be a problem because consumers are becoming savvy researchers. Good content helps brands stand out from their competitors. Great content writers are also great researchers. They do their homework to find out what type of content their audience is craving. If you’re not a professional content writer, or if you’re new to marketing content writing, you should start by looking no further than your current and potential customers. Once you consider their age, gender, and other demographics, it’s significantly easier for you to hit your target market with the most effective content. Also consider their pain points — what issues are they currently facing that your product or service can help solve? You need to be very familiar with your audience before you can best determine what type of content they want to read and how they want to consume it – writing format, short video, infographic, check list, podcast or other formats.
Once you’ve established a target audience, here are five ways to provide content that they won’t be able to get enough of:
- Look at your successful industry peers, or competitors if you prefer that term, and research what they’re doing. Developing companies can learn a lot from the moves of a successful firm. Discover what content they’re putting out and decide whether that could work for you. At the end of the day, you’re only as strong as your strongest competitor.
- Provide content on current trends. For instance, the Millennial cohort is about to be a larger consumer group than Baby Boomers, and Millennials care about what others are doing or buying. According to a Qualtrics survey done by Credit Karma, nearly 40% of Millennials will overspend to keep up with their peers. Some examples of content relating to current trends might be a fitness apparel retailer publishing information about popular upcoming races, or a landscaping company blogging about the best plants for the season.
- Showcase a story of a customer about how you helped them either satisfy a need or solve a problem. You can ask customers to submit stories about using your product or interacting with you, and you don’t even have to do a lot of the content writing yourself. This type of content both creates a visualization of your product or service and establishes trust.
- Share photos that represent your product or service and if possible, a customer interacting with it. Doing so will increase your content usage by making it more consumable and user friendly. For instance, Facebook posts including a photo receive 87% more engagement than posts without one, and tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without one.
- Provide product or service tips for your current and potential customers. This type of content is useful, direct, and relevant. A customer likes to know that you commit to their satisfaction beyond initial purchase, and creating content that guides them through using and taking care of your product is an effective way to do so.
At the end of the day, knowing your customers is the ultimate key to optimizing your content. With your customers in mind, try utilizing the previously stated five possible methods to develop content that will resonate with them and create engagement. Are you stuck, or need help developing content for your brand? Concierge Marketing can help. Contact us today to set up your free 30 minute consultation!