Content marketing can be a powerful tool when used to its full advantage. It’s a great way to increase not only the quantity of the traffic to your site, but the quality as well. Getting new customers to your site is important for your business to grow, and it’s all about growth. Read below to find out how to use content marketing to attract new customers.
Identify Your Target Audience
Who are you looking to sell to? Is your product or service aimed at educated women over 40, millennial men, or homeowners with pets? Get as specific you can with your target demographic, narrowing down the age group, education level, gender, industry, and whatever other attributes are applicable.
Once you’ve narrowed down your demographic, you should create possible buyer personas. Let’s take the example of a company selling a new, painless way to wax eyebrows. One buyer persona might be Jill, a highly educated professional in her early thirties. Jill is very interested in fashion and keeping up to date on the latest trends.
Research Those Personas and Their Habits
Once you’ve created appropriate buyer personas, do your research on them. What are their common problems and concerns? If we take the example of Jill, she might be focused on maintaining her appearance, but has a busy life and needs to know how to do so in the least time consuming way possible. In this case, you have identified that saving time on beauty routines is a common issue associated with your buyer persona.
How do you execute this research? You can start with social media. Read through postings of people who match your buyer personas and look into what content they interact with. Utilize search engines as well, researching what concerns these people may have. There are many online methods to researching these personas, but perhaps the most effective would be talking to actual people. Reach out to people who match your buyer profile and interview them. Ask them relevant questions and figure out the best ways that your product or service can help them.
Create Content
Once you’ve done your research, you can use it to create content that will attract customers. Make sure you’re producing content of high quality, using SEO, keywords, and good information. It’s important to produce quality content constantly to stay relevant.
Now that you’re knowledgeable about the customers you want to attract, use your research to create content that’s relative to them. Create content that addresses their needs and peaks their interest. In the early stages of a sale, your content should seek to educate your reader.
When you’re looking to convert these prospects into customers, create content that provides proof points to the sale. Explain why your product or service is the right one to fit their needs. Show them that your product or service has proven success in order to build trust and close the deal.
Promote Your Content
It’s important to constantly create new content, but simply creating content won’t attract as many new customers as possible. Once you’ve created the content, you need to promote it. Make slight changes to old content and adapt the mediums that you use. Promote your content on social media to ensure higher traffic. Making changes to your content will ensure that it and your site as a whole stays relevant.
The best way to promote your content is through shares. In order to make your content shareable, it needs to be interesting and informative. It should feature headlines that make people want to click and share. Content that is frequently shared often includes disproving a common theory, nostalgia of some sort, and relevant current events.
Research what makes content go viral, because viral content will boost your traffic. In general, content goes viral when it’s full of practical, useful content but also evokes high arousal emotions of some sort. In short, if you entertain your reader they’ll share your stuff.
