Content is what connects you with your customers. It determines how people view your brand and values. It educates and answers questions. And it also sells your products and services.
In today’s world, there is always an exciting new bit of technology to play with. A novel way to attract customers. Or a creative way to make a sale that no one has come up with before.
But however innovative you think your new tool is, it’s highly likely that what it needs to be successful is some excellent content.
Who are you writing for?
The key to great content is that it is not about you. It is about your customers. Everything that you write should be designed to help, appeal to, or impress your ideal customer. Creating valuable content will engage with your current customers and attract your future customers.
To do this successfully, your content has to be of real benefit to your audience. One of the best ways to ensure you are addressing your customers’ needs with your content is to use their feedback to create it. Marketing teams should work closely with customer service teams to understand what their customers’ issues are. What are they asking about? What is causing them problems? What are their complaints? What do they love about the company?
If a customer is frustrated because they can’t find some information they need, take that information and turn it into a blog post. Publish it on your social media. Put it in your next advertising campaign. By taking these issues and using them as the basis for your content, you are directly addressing what your customers need. And addressing what your existing customers need is also likely to help you appeal to new customers.
Building trust
Great content is also about building trust with your audience. Style and tone are always important, and your content also needs to speak to the customer and connect with them on a personal level. People are looking for reliable brands that they can trust. They want to buy from experts who can demonstrate they know what they are talking about.
Creating content your customers’ value will build a stronger relationship, create loyalty, and ultimately lead to more sales.
Again marketing teams can benefit here from collaborating with other departments. They can speak to the experts to gather information about how things work then use this to create practical and valuable content such as how-to guides. Or take some complex information and turn it into an infographic that can easily be shared across social media.
If your field is particularly specialised, a great way to build trust and demonstrate expertise is to create a Knowledge Bank on your website. It should be free and accessible to everyone and contain content that is of real value, answering questions and providing solutions for people. This will give you highly valuable information to link back to. Drive more traffic to your website. And position you as the reliable and trusted expert in your field, increasing your reputation and boosting your sales.
You can also use your customer feedback again to help build trust. For example, displaying recent positive reviews on your product or sales pages further reinforces you as the trusted option at that critical point of your customer clicking to buy.
Reusing content
Once you’ve taken the time to gather information and create powerful content, there’s no need only to use it once. By repurposing information, great content really can be the gift that keeps on giving. Repurposing further reinforces your message. It can help spread the information further, reaching customers on different platforms while still maintaining the same consistent points.
It’s not just a case of recirculating the same piece of content though. To create real value, you should tweak what you have to create something fresh that can appeal to a new audience.
Here are just three ideas we’ve used successfully:
• Take data from a knowledge base article and turn it into an infographic. Visual content can be a great way of summarising complex information and make it easier to share and promote.
• Take content from your FAQs and turn it into an email sequence. You already know this information is addressing your customers’ needs. By using it as a foundation for an email series, you put that information directly in front of them and make sure they find it.
• Take your positive reviews and turn them into additional content. Shorter testimonials can be turned into graphics to use across social media. Longer reviews could be used as a starting point for creating a case study demonstrating the benefits of working with you.
In conclusion
Every piece of content you produce should speak directly to your audience and be created to appeal to them. By using their feedback as a starting point, you will also be creating unique content that precisely addresses their needs. It will help you stand out amongst the competition and position you as the trusted and reliable experts.
If your customers feel like you genuinely understand them and are there to help them, then they will support you. Loyal customers are amazing advocates for your business and will help spread the positive message about you even further.
No matter how many shiny new tools we see appear, great content is still the best way to connect with your customer and build your reputation.
Keep your content interesting, fresh and of real value to your audience, and you can’t fail to see results.