It’s every business owner’s goal to produce and sell helpful products and services. The key to reaching that goal is to create captivating content. Instead of viewing content marketing as your job, view it as your employee. Put your content to work for you. You may have to ask a lot of questions to narrow your focus and make your content deliver what your clients actually need. But ultimately, your content should be making your job easier not harder. Remember, good content doesn’t spotlight the product or service. Instead, it looks at what problems your customers may be having and offers solutions in an engaging, easy-to-grasp way.
Create content that empowers your audience.
When your clients read your content, they should feel like you’re coming alongside them and empowering them to succeed. So even as you collect data like keywords, demographics, etc., don’t forget your audience is comprised of real human beings with thoughts, feelings, and opinions. Consider what they want to know or who they want to become. It’s okay to write an entire blog post without mentioning the name of your business.
Don’t bombard your audience, bring them along.
From billboards and commercials to Facebook and YouTube ads–your audience is being bombarded daily with advertising. Filtering through all these messages is exhausting for consumers because they aren’t browsing to see ads. They are searching for solutions, sometimes to problems they didn’t even know they had. Your audience wants to cultivate relationships with brands that they can trust to be helpful as opposed to “sales pitch-y.” Instead, educate, enlighten, and even entertain them. Provide lists of helpful tips to common problems related to your product or service. Teach them how to do what you do. For example, if you own a coffee shop, teach your customers how to make a latte at home. Create a fun video with your baristas explaining and demonstrating how to do latte art. Rest assured, you will not lose business if you do this. Customers will still flock to their local coffee shop for their caffeine fix, all thanks to creative, innovative marketing.