5 Tips for Attracting New Customers with Content Marketing

Content marketing is vital for improving search engine rankings, driving website traffic, nurturing existing leads and attracting new ones.

Publishing content used to be a nice idea for businesses who wanted to show they were experts in their field. Not any more! Getting regular, relevant, quality content out there is now an essential part of your marketing activity. Notice those words at the beginning of the last sentence – regular, relevant, quality. It’s no good just posting any old thing and stuffing it with key words you think people might search for. Your content has to be of interest to your readers.

Here are five proven techniques to help you with your content marketing.

1. Identify your Unique Selling Point (USP)
Every business should have a unique selling point and the first step is to identify yours. Nowadays, with content marketing about attracting visitors I prefer to call it a ‘buying point’. Why do your clients or customers buy from you? Once you’ve worked that out you can adopt the appropriate voice, tone and stories into your content.

2. Know your audience
This is critical to the success of your content marketing efforts. Identifying and building your buyers’ persona will help you direct the tone and content of your material. You need to understand what interests your existing and future clients or customers. What are their concerns and needs and where are they online? These templates from Hubspot may help you.

3. Match your content to the buying cycle
Knowing and understanding your buyers’ cycle will help you identify suitable topics and when to post them. It will also help you work out the most appropriate type of content, e.g. case study or video?

4. Map out Ideas
Having done the three points above you should now know enough to be able to map out ideas for topics which will be relevant, helpful and even fun for your readers. Using different formats will help keep variety in your content. Repurposing or curating third party content can also help your message and also demonstrate your expertise and willingness to help. Remember, you should always give the appropriate credits whenever using someone elses material.

5. Have a content calendar
Now you’ve got all your content ideas you need draw up a content calendar. This is critical if you want to be organised and make sure the right content is going to the right people at the right time. Industry relevant events and any other important dates are worth including. In addition make sure you include dates and deadlines for writing and publishing tasks, including who is responsible for them.

Following these five steps will help you to create and develop an engaging content marketing strategy. You will be able to make the most of the latest techniques utilising social media, blogging, email and social selling techniques which will ultimately lead to more traffic and increased sales.

If you’d like help putting together an effective content marketing plan for your business, get in touch.

Got any additional tips or things to avoid? Share them in the comments box below.

2 Comments

Using Curated Content Properly - WSI-eMarketing BlogWSI-eMarketing Blog January 13th, 2016 Reply

[…] have an effective content marketing plan you need to regularly post content on your blog and across multiple social media platforms. Unless […]
Five steps to getting your content marketing right - WSI-eMarketing BlogWSI-eMarketing Blog January 13th, 2016 Reply

[…] that your customers or clients get to know about you before they even need you, that’s where content marketing comes in. But have you really considered why people are reading your content? It’s not always as […]