If you want your content to generate new business leads, shares and links from other sites, it needs to be compelling enough to inspire users to act. To create this type of content, it's necessary to put yourself in the shoes of your customer, to really understand and truly, deeply feel what he or she needs to get from it to do so. This takes several strategic steps to achieve:
Identify your Objective
Content typically serves one of two purposes:- It draws prospective customers into the sales funnel at whatever phase they are currently in to nurture them until they become qualified leads
- It aims to establish you as a thought leader with a view to attracting links and shares by authoritative people in your industry.
Step into the Buyer’s Shoes
Stepping into the customer’s shoes requires you to develop a buyer persona. This is a theoretical picture of your ideal customer--who they are, where they live, what they do for a living and what their wants and needs are. Analyze both your current and prospective customers for the character traits and demographics they share to identify who your buyer is and what he or she “looks” like. Then apply your research to your marketing message to figure out what sort of language and wording, medium and channel your buyer is most likely to respond to.
Develop the Content
Creating compelling content to win over your buyer persona takes time and effort. Remember, the material needs to be interesting enough to grab your target customer’s attention, authoritative enough to persuade him to believe in it and convincing enough to get him to act on it.
- Quality of content is essential because few prospective customers are likely to be impressed by copy that contains poor spelling and grammar, sales-y messaging or biased information.
- Include a strong message that is strategically crafted to fill the need identified in your buyer persona. Don’t try to be everything to everyone – you can’t persuade people en masse to both share and buy your product.
- Disseminate your content across all the channels you can--not by posting in inappropriate places, but by coordination with industry print publications, setting up social media profiles and creating a great website and blog. You should carefully consider ways to make your content easy to share on social networks.
Find Placement Options
Use social media postings, paid social ads, discussion forums and other community resources to showcase your content wherever you can develop followers. LinkedIn groups are an option for “seeding” your target audience. Alternatively, content placement should be where it can drive traffic to the channels most likely to generate sales leads.
Compelling content delivers against its objectives. Your content should result in new business and multiple sales leads.
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