Take a critical look at your content
Use useful content and digital marketing to service your customers and build an audience of potential customers to drive growth and sustainability. Is your content:
- Unique
- Relevant
- Exciting topics
- Easy to find
- Reliable
- Practical
- Useful
- Helpful
- Easy to read
- Consistent across all touch points
More and more companies are producing content, and it’s becoming harder to stand out from the crowd. If possible use quality photographs, diagrams and videos to enhance your messages. To figure out unique topics to write about, listen to your customers. Then write answers to their questions and redirect conversations.
Keep your content marketing unique
Change can be overwhelming for many. However, good content delivered with appropriate digital marketing will help your customers to deal with it. Are you proactive or reactive? It’s all in how you deal with it.
The first thing to do is to establish how your customers like to receive information. You need to make it easy for them to open doors to opportunity. Then consider the options you have to use digital technology to automate repetitive tasks.
Are you feeling in a rut with your marketing, or are you looking to have your marketing energised? Create case studies on what people experienced and had liked, as well as what worked for them about your content and content marketing.
Focus on customer problems and frustrations
When you know the most significant pain points of your market segments, you can build the right content, with the proper digital marketing to address them. While many marketers talk about driving traffic, to learn how to attract traffic to your business with better content and better customer experience will produce superior outcomes.
Be sure your content and the digital technology meet the needs of those in each of your market segments. It’s even better if you can show thought leadership by teaching your market segments how to do something through your useful content and digital marketing efforts.
Useful content comes from useful feedback
How have your customers received your digital marketing? What are the benefits and experiences they value? How and where can you make improvements? Reach your ideal customers and create advocates.
Too often companies assume they know what motivates their customers, and more often than not, they are wrong. Never rely on your understanding of what is best for your customers. Know what is happening and take advantage of influencer marketing.
Make use of metrics and dashboards
Measure what you manage, make sure you are using the useful content. If you can’t measure it, you are relying too heavily on luck. Traditional testing is no longer fast enough to keep up with exponential change. You need a way to speed up feedback times, and a move from manual to digital tracking can be the best way to go.
Automate your processes? Which aspects are most important to consider when setting up metrics and dashboards? Share real metrics, coming from an open and authentic place. Ask your stakeholders to give you feedback on the metrics you use.
A simple process for creating useful content
Useful content rarely happens by accident. A simple, repeatable process helps you produce material that customers value and keeps your marketing consistent over time.
- Collect the questions customers ask by phone, email and in person, and keep a running list.
- Choose one question at a time and answer it clearly and in plain language.
- Add practical examples, steps or checklists that readers can apply straight away.
- Use headings, short paragraphs and images so the content is easy to scan on a phone.
- Finish with a clear next step, such as making an enquiry or reading a related article.
Once a piece is published, share it across your email newsletter and social media, and use it to answer future enquiries. One well written article can serve customers for years.
Keep your content up to date
Content that was useful two years ago may now be out of date. Review your most visited pages regularly, refresh the details that have changed and remove anything that no longer reflects how you work. Updated content builds trust with readers and gives search engines a reason to keep showing it.
