There is a lot of talk going on around the phenomenon we all know as ‘Content’ which is the most effective mode used by marketers to target their audience. The challenge here is that this audience is a moving target and has always been slippery even before web marketing evolved. Today, it’s a bigger challenge to get hold of the audience because they have endless options. Your error could be a couple of seconds longer taken by your site to load or something you said in the tag content that does not reflect on the landing page and so on.
Most if not all the people who notice it, will conclude that the website is not reliable and slip out as fast as they came in. That’s a waste of time, effort, and money not to speak of credibility. The people who landed on your webpage and left in a hurry because they did not find what they came for are unlikely to return. It could have been due to a poorly written introduction that’s not in line with your tag content that attracted them to your webpage in the first place. What you write on your blog body is of course another matter because only 6 out of 10 visitors go that far.
Who is going to read the content you are creating?
It is extremely important to realize right at the beginning that your content is not meant for everybody out there. It’s meant just for your market and specifically for stakeholders who have any use for what you are offering. You also need to remember that you aren’t the only one who is offering it.
Therefore, you should first have a clear idea of who is going to read the content you will be creating. Next, you need to realize that your content should offer some such information that has value for the person reading it. It could be about your services or any industry insight that is not trending yet.
What exactly is the subject matter you are covering?
There are lots of matters in your niche that you can write about but choosing what to write and when is what will make the difference. Unless it covers the specific products or services you offer, it is not going to serve any real purpose for your website and more importantly for your business.
There would be several areas of the products or services you offer that a large part of your audience is not aware of. Consequently, your marketing efforts may be facing certain barriers to getting the message across to the audience about the benefits of using your product or service.
Are you providing answers to a specific question?
Keeping that in mind, you must choose the subject matter precisely to educate the audience about the need for such products or services and how it is beneficial for them. Depending on the level of understanding your audience has about the specific product or service, you could set the tone of your content.
Awareness, understanding, and appreciation of a specific product or service category follow in this given sequence. How you want to engage your audience would depend on where they stand in this sequence. For instance, if they are aware of but don’t understand it well enough, then you must answer their basic questions.
Does your content offer an actionable trigger?
Similarly, if they understand the specific product or service but are not able to appreciate the need to purchase it, you must focus on the need it fulfills and the benefits they can get. As the owner of the brand selling the product or service, you know better than anyone else how to raise the pitch about the need to buy it now.
Remember that all throughout, you must not get into overdrive about the benefits of what you are offering. Your reader must not get the feeling that you are offering something that sounds too good to be true. Hence, stick to verifiable information and provide references wherever it is required.
Is your content original and reliable?
The online content space is replete with instances of copyright violation wherein people simply ‘lift’ content from wherever they can. You need to stay away from dishing out such content because that won’t suit your purpose for the simple reason that it wasn’t made for your product or service.
If you truly believe that the product or service you are offering is exclusive and offers benefits to users who are going to love it, present them in the content as best as you can. Put on your thinking cap and step into the users’ shoes to see how it is beneficial and why one should buy it. Only then would you be able to get to the sweet spot in your reader’s mind.
Online marketing is all about content but you cannot take your feet off the accelerator because there are scores of your competitors who are jostling for the same space with you. You must continuously create original, precise, and valuable content about your product or service to remain visible to your audience. For that, you need to always appear on the upper half of the first search engine result page (SERP). When you regularly post high-quality content about your product or service and what your audience gains from it, the results would invariably reflect in the SERP.
