Bill Clinton famously said, “It’s the economy stupid.” In today’s online race to find new customers and grow your small business, “It’s the content stupid.”
Success in the new world of marketing is based largely on creating and publishing killer content that attracts prospects to your site. Marketing is—always has been—99 percent education.
Photo: iStock.com
The so-called ‘content marketing’ approach boils down to doing (on your site) what you do best when you’re talking face-to-face with prospects and customers: educate them on how to solve problems and achieve goals.
Create Compelling Content: You’ll benefit from providing regular updates of fresh content that get web (or blog) visitors so excited about your approach/way of thinking/solutions that they return or call you. Or (even better) make a purchase. Mastering the latest social media tools like Twitter or Facebook alone won’t make you successful without useful content that helps buyers solve problems.
So if the business with the best website content, wins. What does the ‘best content’ mean? Content that works hard:
- Educating prospects on a variety of ways to solve a problem
- Sharing your knowledge freely about solving problems
- Explaining objectively the pros and cons of multiple solutions (including those that you do not offer)
- Creating an online video series to demonstrate solutions
- Demonstrating how to solve the problem at hand for the web visitor. (Think ‘beginner customers/prospects’.)
Content Worth Sharing: Do you open links to articles sent to you by trusted friends and colleagues? I sure do. Think about the value of creating content that web visitors and your loyal customers send along as links to their contacts. That’s inbound marketing, viral marketing or word of mouth marketing at it’s best!
Consider the pass-along aspect when you’re developing content ideas. How can you create content that your customers will share with others? Some people believe that you can’t miss with ‘how to’ content.
Keywords are (well) Key: Prepare your valuable content using the same keywords your buyers use when searching online for solutions. Customers love valuable, specific, no-nonsense problem-solving content. And using the right keywords in your content makes your corporate web site more “findable” by your target customers.
‘Listen’ Online for Content Topics: How do you decide what to write about? How do you find the specific compelling topics that your customers are trying to find answers to? First, you “listen” to the online conversation. You monitor what’s being discussed, asked, requested, and debated.
More hints for content inspiration:
- What are the most commonly asked questions by prospects?
- What are the most frequently asked questions by users and customers?
- What are the questions customers forget to ask when they begin using your products and services?
- Which topics would make useful online videos? Helpful PowerPoint online videos?
Any other ideas for content inspiration? Stop by the excellent Marketing Interactions blog here for more on content for customers, content for prospects.
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