Authenticity is the primary ingredient that you need to make your content marketing successful, and that means you have to provide something unique, useful, and relevant for your readers without coming across as blatantly advertising. If you only are regurgitating old information that is available elsewhere, there is a good chance many of your potential readers already have read it, and if you are giving just another sales pitch, you will lose their attention fast. The best approach is to describe problems your potential customers might encounter in their daily lives or while doing business and provide scenarios in which your goods or services will solve those problems.
Ensure Your Content is Relevant
Your content marketing has to be used wisely by ensuring that you only produce relevant content to your targeted audience. You can do that by informing them of recent industry or product developments, explain how something works, or promote an event or something else that is highly relevant to the audience you intend to read it and preferably something that is related to the goods or services you provide. When you produce well-made content that is relevant to the intended audience, their natural curiosity will compel them to read and learn more and quite possibly to visit the source – your business.
Pro Tip! - Deliver value with your content. Some common ways to do this are "how to" articles that help your audience solve a problem, "top X ways to" or expanding on a popular industry topic. Publishing content that has value will start building industry authority and earn trust with your audience.
Establish a Rapport
You never want to dictate or talk down to your readers and potential customers. Instead, you want to engage them with a conversational tone and style that establishes them as equals and indicates their importance to you and your business. A great way to create a rapport with your intended audience while creating informative scenarios the illustrate problems and the solutions your goods or services provide is to create buyer personas. A persona is based upon an individual, couple, family, or possibly a business who would be typical of your targeted customers and clients. If you are a pool company, you might have several personas ranging from a young couple just starting a family to a retired couple with an empty nest and demonstrate how a pool would help to make their lives better.
Develop Your Voice
It’s one thing for you to promote your business. It’s something completely different to promote a brand image. To promote a brand image, you need to develop a voice that speaks with personality that your potential customers and clients will find compelling and endearing. That personality should maintain a level of professionalism, but it also should be one that people will find appealing and memorable so that you are on their shortlist of businesses to solicit when it comes time to make use of the goods or services that you provide.
Emphasize Quality and not Quantity
No matter what type of content you produce, from social media posts and emails to blogging content, you need to ensure you are producing quality content that readers will find interesting, intelligent, informative, and compelling. One well-written and placed piece of content in any format that generates a great deal of interest among readers and particularly among targeted audiences is far more useful than dozens of ill-conceived posts that quickly are dismissed and forgotten.
The idea is to produce excellent content that will pique interest and curiosity among readers to such an extent that they visit your website or even contact your business to learn more. Quality content also can be fun in nature, such as a funny anecdote, a “This Date in History” post about your industry, or anything else that your audience would find amusing, interesting, or otherwise compelling to read and possible even share with others.
Now that you have a basis to begin your content marketing, learn how to build a strategy that aligns with your business goals. Download our free eBook below to learn how.
