Do you sometimes wonder why people are not engaging with your content?
Are your customers sharing your content?
Is your bounce rate high?
If your answer to the questions above is No, then it means only one thing…
You are not creating the kind of content your customers love.
It is sad.
This explains the reason why content marketing is not effective for some business owners.
The content marketing institute report revealed that only 30% marketers reported that content marketing is effective.
The fact that you are creating content and you are not getting results does not mean it is not effective.
It was Andrea Fryrear who said “Our job is not to create content. Our job is to change the world of the people who consume it.”
Is your content changing the world of your customers?
Content marketing is effective!.
Hubspot report on creating content revealed that companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5x more traffic than companies that published between 0-4 month posts.
Not only that, they also generate about 4.5x leads more than companies that published between 0-4 monthly posts.
The statistics above showed that companies that create content reap the biggest rewards in terms of website traffic and leads which can also result in sales over time.
So, how do you create the exact kind of content your customers love?
Below are 3 steps to creating the kind of content your audience loves.
Step 1. Create a marketing persona
According to Ardath Albee, “A marketing persona is a composite sketch of a key segment of your audience. For content marketing purposes, you need personas to help you deliver content that will be most relevant and useful to your audience.”
The first step to creating the content your customers love is to create a marketing persona. A marketing persona is the same thing as buyer persona or audience persona. This will help you to produce the content your customers love.
Below are benefits of creating a marketing persona.
- It helps you to understand your customer’s buying behaviors
- It helps you to create quality lead generation
- It gives insights for prospecting, targeting, and advertising
- It helps you to create content that meets the needs of your audience
- It humanizes a collection of abstract data.
According to a case study carried out by MarketingSherpa.com, the buyer persona created add a 900% increase in the length of visit, a 171% increase in marketing -generated revenue, an 111% increase in email open rate, and a 100% increase in the number of pages visited.
Components of a buyer persona
A buyer persona contains the following information about your customer:
- Name of the persona
- Job title
- Age
- Gender
- Salary/income
- Location
- Education
- Family
- Challenges/pain points
- Hobbies
- Blogs they read, etc.
How to create a buyer persona
The information above represents your ideal customer. You will fill in the gap for the details above. But first, you need to get the details ready.
The question is how do you get the information needed?
Below are reliable sources of information for the audience persona:
Website analytics
Your website analytics shows where your visitors are coming from, the keywords they used to locate you and the length of time spent on your website. If you use Google Analytics, navigate to the audience section to see some of the information you need.
It shows the demographics (age, gender), the interests, Geo (Language and location), behavior (new and returning visitors, frequency, engagement), Technology (browser & OS, network), mobile, etc.
For the remaining information that is not available in Google Analytics, you can use the methods below:
Customer survey
You can choose to call your existing customers and ask them one on one. If you don’t have any customers, you can send emails or survey forms to your subscribers and social media followers. Tell them you are carrying out a research that will help you to serve them better.
Research
Another way you can get the audience buyer information is by conducting an online research on your ideal customers. Develop an ideal image of your customer in your mind. Then, search publications, websites and social media for relevant information about them.
Once you have all the information you need, it is time to create the avatar. Luckily, you don’t have to stress yourself to do it. There are many templates and tools you can use online. All you need is to download and customize to your taste.
Audience Persona Templates
Step 2: Solve your customer’s problem
The only thing your customers care about is how to solve their problems. If you can create content that will solve their problems, you will succeed.
So, how do you know the problems your customers are going through?
Use keyword research
Keywords show you what your audience is searching for online. Some of them are using terms and keywords that can solve their problems.
For instance, an obese person is likely searching for “how to lose weight”.
So, how do you discover these keywords? This is where keyword research comes in. There are lots of free tools you can use to discover these terms, such as:
You can use the above tools to search for keywords related to your niche, product or services. Add these keywords to your content.
Use social media tools
Chances are that your audience uses social media. It is a place where people discusses several issues including their problems.
You can easily discover their pain points through this medium. Search for your audience on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, Reddit, Quora etc.
On Facebook, you can search Groups and Pages of relevant companies in your niche.
You can do a general search on Twitter using the search box. LinkedIn has a lot of groups for various industries, searching through relevant groups will unearth your customer’s pain points.
Google+ has a lot of communities you can explore.
Know what your customers are reading (Publications, Magazines, Reddit, Quora, etc)
Reading what your customers are reading will give you insight into what they want to learn. This will enable you to tailor your content, products, and services to suit them.
There are many publications online for different industries. You can search it out on Google.
Quora and Reddit are a great question and answer communities that provide insight into the questions your audience is asking. You can search for your niche and read their questions.
You can use these pain points to create relevant content that your customers will love to read.
For example, as a content writer, I discovered the pain points of my audience by reading a report (publication) from content marketing institute b2b marketing. It states that the challenges of my audience are:
- Producing engaging content
- Measuring content effectiveness
- Producing content consistently
- Measuring the ROI of content marketing program
- Lack of budget
- Producing a variety of content.
Above are what they are their pain points.
It is now my responsibility to create content that teaches them how to overcome the problems above. In so doing, I can pitch my content writing services to them.
Step 3: Leverage your customer’s emotions
When you create content that leverages the emotions of your customers, they will engage with it and share it. They will simply fall in love with it. This kind of engagement will help you to increase your ROI, readership and build your brand.
In the beginning of this content, I made a reference to a quote by Andrea Fryrear that said “Our job is not to create content. Our job is to change the world of the people who consume it.”
How do you change the world of the people who consume your content?
How do you make them love your content?
One of the best ways is to leverage on their emotions.
Upworthy, a media company invested in emotional click bait greatly and received 90 million page views in November 2013.
The question is…
How do you leverage on your customer’s emotions to make them fall in love with your content?
There are four major types of emotions you can use to make readers fall in love with your content.
i. Joy
Everyone loves to be happy. We love to be joyful. If you can create a good content that can elicit the emotion of joy in your readers, they will fall in love with your content.
It will make them laugh and share your content with friends and family on social networks.
How do you incorporate this emotion into your content? You can tell a story that triggers the joy emotion. It will make them laugh.
ii. Fear
Fear? You mean fear can make people fall in love with your content? Yes, it can. It will amaze you to know that everyone is afraid of one thing or the other.
Nobody wants to make mistakes in life. They are keen on reading and sharing contents that evoke fear. For instance, Carol Tice wrote an article titled “Clients from Hell: quick ways to spot and avoid them“
Any writer who reads the headline will quickly want to read the content. It is scary! No one wants to work with clients from hell.
iii. Anger
Berger and Milkman’s research showed that content that makes readers angry is 34% more likely to be featured by the New York Times most-emailed list than the average content.
The fact is, content that generates anger challenges beliefs, opinions and assumptions. So, people will always want to read such content.
iv. Surprise
The fourth emotion is surprise. People love content that takes an angle of surprise.
Content that discusses what they are not expecting. Such content snaps readers out of their zombie-like zone. It shocks them with new information, trends, stories, etc.
Conclusion:
Above are the three steps you need to create content your customers love. It is easier than you think.
