It is a fact that content marketing is one of the cornerstones of a well-rounded digital marketing strategy. The problem is brands and marketers have deluged the Internet with tons of content. Therefore, your business must write compelling content that cuts through the clutter—content that converts.
The following are six steps that will help you write content that converts your audience into loyal followers and customers.
1. Put Yourself in the Buyer’s Shoes
Everything begins with what the buyer wants, needs, dreams of, their prejudices, challenges, and concerns. Put yourself in their shoes to know what they are seeking and need.
2. You Are the Expert
The content you publish must be within your understanding and expertise. In other words, don’t write about what you don’t know. Offer content on the subjects that you understand better than anyone else, including your prospect, which will help them know what their options are and help them make a decision.
3. Study, Prepare and Plan
Don’t make the mistake of writing whatever comes into your head at the last moment. The content your create must reflect your brand’s overall mission and have a purpose. The lack of a clear strategy will lead to a random blog or video channel and an inability to create content that converts your readers.
Create a content strategy centered on your brand: what is it that makes your company, product, or service unique? What is the most exciting way you can get this information across to your targeted demographic? What would grab their attention? Put yourself in their shoes ( as in step 1), and come up with topics, images, ideas that will be innovative, educational, or informational and extremely useful to your demographic.
Next, create an editorial calendar that lays out your ideas in a chronological or themed fashion. For example, if I want to teach my followers about email marketing, I can develop a series of blog posts or videos that show how to set up a drip email marketing campaign from the landing page to the drip email series.
4. Post Regularly
One blog post a month isn’t going to cut it. Twitter streams, Facebook newsfeeds, and YouTube videos are blasted out by the millions per day. Twitter users send out 9,100 tweets per second! On WordPress alone, 2.75 million posts are published each day.
To compete with the massive amounts of content available to readers, you must publish regularly and promote your content after publishing.
Publish new blog posts at least two to four times per month. Get greater reach by creating short videos that cover the main points of your blog posts and sharing them on all your social media and video channels. Evergreen content — content that does not go out of date– can be re-shared continually.
5. Care About What You Create
If you don’t give two cents about what you write or design, then no one else will. If you put blood, sweat, and tears into a project, and it’s valuable, with the right amount of exposure (No. 4), other people will care—and share.
6. Get Off the Couch
The four-hour workweek is not real. If you do not prioritize and sit down and do the work, you won’t get anywhere.
So get off the couch and start thinking about how you’re going to produce and promote high-grade content for your business. Or start searching for someone to do it for you if you don’t have the time because you are engaged in running your business.
In Summary
Writing content that converts takes intensive work, but it will pay off by creating an authoritative brand presence, generating ongoing traffic to your site, and converting your audience into loyal followers and customers.
Shameless Plug
Crackerjack Scribe produces content daily for a range of clients. I’m a former editor of a newspaper and magazine, so I know my stuff regarding content. We’ve got a fantastic team of professional writers who know how to do research and write engaging articles. If you need high-quality, engaging content that will convert your target audience, give us a call at 323-205-6436 or shoot us a message using the form below.