If you want the time and effort you expend on creating content to count towards the growth of your business, then it needs to connect with the people you’re looking to attract. Here are three ways you can make that happen.
Know Who You Want To Connect With
Who or what is your ideal customer? Who are the people or businesses you want to work with the most? Build as clear a picture as you can of them, and keep adding to it. The more you refine the idea of who you’re speaking to, the easier it will be to create content that they can connect with and relate to. Here are some questions you can use to get you started:
- What do they want to do/achieve/feel that you or your service can help them with?
- How do they use or experience what you sell?
- What else does it give them or do for them?
- What’s important to them?
- Who’s important to them?
- What’s their role in life/at work and how can you help them fulfill that?
Build Your Content Strategy Around Your Business
If you want to appeal to the kind of people who are looking for, want, or need the service you provide, then you need to put your business objectives at the heart of your Content Strategy. That doesn’t mean that all of your content has to be about what you do, just that your business objectives should drive your content. Try this exercise:
Put your business objectives on some flipchart paper, and brainstorm with your colleagues, or a business buddy if you’re a solopreneur, how you could use content to help you meet your objectives, and what kind of content would work the best. From this you can pull some high-level content objectives to form the basis of your Content Strategy.
When you create an individual piece of content, be clear about how it fits into your Content Strategy, how it contributes to your business objectives, and how it fits in with the rest of your sales and marketing activities.
Tell A Story
Human beings are hard wired to love a story. Stories bring your business to life, they help the reader to see themselves using or experiencing your service, and show them how much better their life is for buying what you sell. If your business is not for them, stories help them figure that out, thereby screening out the people who wouldn’t benefit from working with you. And screening in the people who would.
Telling a story draws your readers in, and gives you the opportunity to show them things they may not have considered. And helps to reinforce information they may have read somewhere else on your website. And they’re like gold-dust for the people who need to hear something more than once before they’re convinced that they should buy. Stories Sell.
If you put your customer and your business objectives at the heart of your Content Strategy, you can’t help but create content that connects. Make your content tell a story, and you’ve got the magic ingredient.
How do you create content that connects?