Creating value for your customers is the soil in which your seed of trust sprouts. It’s much easier to sell to prospects who already know you through other marketing initiatives (like your blog) than to drop them in the middle of a landing page and expect an immediate conversion. Establishing ongoing engagement with your readers means they’re already warm prospects.
But how do you create value in your blog posts?
Don’t Write for the Search Engines
Are search engines buying your products or services?
NO!
You need to be aware of what the search engines are looking for when ranking content. However, going overboard means you’ve published a post that has not created value for your customers.
Why is your customer clicking on your post and spending precious seconds (hopefully minutes) reading your content?
Because you promised them something in your headline…
Something that they need to know.
Or you’re answering an intriguing question.
If you’ve written a click-worthy headline (Need help with that? Contact me), but don’t deliver, guess what?
You just lost a potential customer.
Always write with your ideal prospect in mind and provide content that is useful to them or entertaining (bonus points if you do both).
Get to Know Your Audience
You can’t write a post that applies to everyone and expect it to get shared or ranked these days.
Why?
Because there are millions, if not billions, of general topic posts that have already been published. Trying to compete against them, particularly if some are comprehensive and published by recognized expert brands, is a waste of your time.
Getting to know your audience means you’ll develop niche topics that create value specific to them. And once they realize you’re speaking directly to them, solving a problem specific to them, you’ve got their attention.
Do that enough times, and you’ll also gain their trust, bit by bit.
Are you trying to sell budget-friendly appliances?
Target your content to younger buyers who have just graduated college and are living on their own for the first time.
Or what about investing advice?
Target your content to busy new parents who haven’t gotten a full night of sleep in months and are so brain-fogged they have no idea how their portfolio is doing.
Are you marketing a new top-of-the-line gaming computer?
Target competitive gamers and guild leaders who need the best performance possible.
See where we’re going here?
On the B2B side, if you’re a small business bookkeeper, you would target a specific niche too.
Perhaps you want to help construction contractors or landscaping companies. In that case, ensure that you’re posting content about how change orders affect construction billing or how to smooth out cash flow spikes during the seasonal spike in business.
Creating Value for Your Customers Means Connecting
Consider making your content more conversational to drive home the one-on-one engagement that makes readers keep reading.
Talk directly to them. Many companies are just starting to realize that they can’t be talking to the entire prospect pool during the same post. Businesses offering highly specialized products and services might be able to get away with this if they only have one customer persona.
But, in general, you need to evaluate who that piece of content needs to speak to, which circles back to knowing your audience and what they want from you before you start posting content blindly, hoping that it’ll spark interest.
Take the time to make that connection; it’ll pay off BIG later.
Creating value for your customers can also take other forms. We’ll look at that next month. But for next week, in honor of Halloween falling on a marketing Monday post day, we’re going to look at one of the most terrifying mistakes new business owners make…
