Sure, you want good content — your customers want it too!
Interesting content is actually one of the top three reasons people follow brands online.
That means the content you’re creating and sharing is about more than SEO or branding — it’s about drawing an audience that’s waiting for you.
What kind of content is good content?
“90 percent of customers find custom content useful,” says Kevin Alley at PR Daily. They want to see highly relevant, customized data that relates to your industry and speaks to their needs.
- West Elm: This home goods store makes the most of the holidays for its customers with December sales, seasonal blog posts, and a Facebook album showcasing its 20% off sale, for example.
- Home Depot: Home Depot is a retail store on top of its content marketing campaigns. From its seasonal Pinterest boards to its regularly updated blog filled with DIY tricks, this company constantly offers custom content to its followers.
- Hubspot: Inbound marketing software company HubSpot uses custom landing pages to connect with followers and promote its products.
- Tollhouse: Drawing on its target audience’s values and interests, Tollhouse ran the clever “Bake the World a Better Place” campaign, which involved commercials that showcased heartfelt baking moments.
As these examples demonstrate, there are many formats to content marketing, from blog posts to videos to social media updates.
What they all have in common is an understanding of audience and a crafting of content based on that.
Consider the following tips:
- Be More Interesting: The single biggest step you can take to increase traffic and connect with fans is also the hardest: Be more interesting.
- Promote Your Content: Before someone can engage with your content, he or she has to know it exists.
- Respond to Readers: Whenever possible, when someone @replies you on Twitter, comments on a blog post, or reshares your Facebook post, respond.
Large audiences are not born overnight, find the people in your industry to help — bloggers, authors, social media big-wigs, etc.—with large, engaged audiences, and find ways to connect with them.
If you want to write content that converts visitors into customers, you’ve got to write content that’s about your audience. Instead of writing about your company and your products, write about the rewards that they bring to your audience.
Read more: 5 Things You Might Not Know About Content Marketing