How To Craft Content That Attracts New Customers

Are you struggling to attract your ideal customer?

No matter what you do, you feel stuck with the number of conversions you’re seeing.

You can’t seem to generate enough leads and turn them into long-lasting customers that will sustain your business.

Your answer?

High-quality content.

91% of marketers are now using content marketing, and 84% of organizations have a content strategy in place.

Content marketing is a game-changer and has revolutionized the way businesses operate.

If you can deliver engaging, valuable content that speaks directly to your target customers – you’re golden.

In this post, you’ll learn exactly how to craft valuable content that will attract your target customers every single time, and keep them coming back.

Let’s jump in.

Ensure you truly understand your target customer

Before you can even think about creating content or worrying about your content marketing strategy – it’s imperative that you have your target customer nailed down.

If you haven’t clearly defined your target customer – you’re just taking shots in the dark.

And it will be nearly impossible to craft anything of value.

So how can you get a clear understanding of your target customer?

  1. Research your prospects
  2. Decipher what problems they’re facing, that you can solve with your content.

When researching your target audience, you have a handful of options to choose from. And luckily, you don’t need to spend a dime doing so if you don’t want to!

Of course, there are some methods that you can opt for that do cost money – but you certainly don’t need to spend a cent to nail down your target audience effectively.

How to research your target audience:

  • Use social media to conduct market research (Linkedin, Twitter, etc).
  • Use Facebook groups (where your target customers hang out).
  • Quora (there are questions/forums on every subject known to man. Find people who fit the criteria on there and see what kinds of questions they are asking).
  • Check your Google Analytics to see who’s already visiting your website (particularly their demographics and interests functionality).
  • Look at your competitor’s customer base (on social media or wherever else you can find them).

These are just a handful of ideas, and there are plenty more out there. Get creative – and you’ll find that it’s far easier than you think.

You’ll want to use this information to create a buyer persona to dig even deeper into who your ideal customer is.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your target customer.

Note: You may have heard this term by a different name. For example; customer persona, audience persona, avatar, customer profile, etc.

By creating a buyer persona you’re getting an in-depth look at your target customer, and what’s inside their heads.

What to include in a buyer persona:

  • Demographics
  • Personal information
  • Career/employment information
  • Challenges they face
  • Needs
  • Their goals and ambitions
  • Behaviors

And the list goes on. There are so many things you can include – depending on how deep you want to go.

You want your customers to be scratching their heads, wondering how you knew exactly what they wanted and needed at that present moment.

Every business’s buyer personas will look tremendously different.

Here’s an example of what Digital Marketer’s buyer persona looks like:

Digital Marketer Buyer Persona Converting Content Creation

You need to know these things in order to create solutions to their problems in your content.

When you get clear on exactly who your ideal customer is, you’ll be able to create content that addresses their pain points and challenges specifically.

And that’s what will help your content cut through the noise.

Create a content marketing strategy

Crafting a content marketing strategy that works well for your business is an imperative first step to attracting your ideal customers.

You’d be shocked by how many businesses don’t have a concrete content marketing strategy.

In fact, The Content Marketing Institute found that 63% of businesses don’t have a documented content marketing strategy:

Content Marketing Institute Pie Chart

Slapping up just any content and calling it a day won’t give you the results you want. And without some sort of strategy and game plan – that’s the reality of what you’d be doing.

Not to mention, you’ll be left in the dust, while your competitors are raking in the dough.

However, keep in mind:

Creating your own content marketing strategy shouldn’t be an exact replica of what you see other businesses doing.

Identify what your competitors do well, and what they don’t. Then fill in the gaps.

Now, there a couple steps you should follow to ensure your content marketing strategy is effective.

You can get much more in-depth with your content marketing strategy, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll go over the two main components.

Main components of an effective content marketing strategy:

  1. Narrowing down your goals and plan of action.
  2. An in-depth look into your customer’s pain points and largest challenges, or your buyer persona.

As I said, you can go a lot deeper, like by going into your brand story, your mission statement, or other aspects. But this is definitely a great start to get the ball rolling.

Your content needs to be goal-driven

Avoid publishing content for the sake of it. Everything you publish needs purpose.

Here’s what this means:

You need a clear objective for your content. This will help you monitor performance, and get an ROI from your content strategy.

You also need a clear call-to-action that tells your visitors what to do next – this will tie directly into the objectives for your content.

This could be encouraging visitors to read further blog posts, join your email list, download a lead magnet, subscribe to your YouTube channel or something else.

An in-depth look at your customer’s pain points

The key to attracting your target customer is by creating easy solutions to the problem’s they are experiencing.

This is where having a buyer persona comes in handy. Because it can tell you everything possible that there is to know about your customers or future customers.

Even if you don’t go ahead with a buyer persona, it’s imperative to have a strong understanding of the challenges and pain points your target customers face.

If you know their struggles like the back of your hand – you’ll be able to curate the right types of content that will directly solve issues they’re facing.

Figure out what types of content you’ll use to attract your target customers

Unless you’re new to content marketing, you’ve likely heard of at least a few different content types you can use.

It’s important to go beyond simply delivering blog posts.

Here’s why:

When you expand to other content types, you’ll expose your brand to a completely new audience. Allowing your brand to grow a larger audience.

A few different types of content you can use:

  • Blog posts
  • Podcasts (or audio versions of blog posts)
  • Slideshare presentations
  • Case studies
  • Infographics
  • Videos
  • Whitepapers

There are plenty of other ideas out there. And while there are certain content types that work better for specific businesses (e.g. whitepapers), there are some that are universal and tend to work in every niche or industry.

Blog posts are a great example. They open your brand up to acquiring search engine traffic.

And they’re relatively easy to create without much specialised training (when compared to something like video content).

But, as effective as blog posts can be, you’ll still want to branch out and try other content types.

A great way to start is to use your blog posts as your “anchor content” – from there, you can repurpose your blog posts into other content types.

Each content type will have a promotional strategy that will allow you to tap into a fresh audience demographic that prefers to consume that specific type of content.

For example, Slideshare has a huge built-in audience that you can share Powerpoint presentations with.

And for video, you’ll want to focus heavily on YouTube – just be sure to treat it like a search engine.

For podcasts, you’ll be able to leverage platforms like iTunes and Soundcloud etc.

Once you start leveraging other content types, you’ll be able to expand your reach significantly.

Craft outstanding content that keeps them returning

As obvious as this tactic may be – it’s also the most critical.

We all know that you need to create high-quality content – but what does that really mean?

Amazing content looks different to different people, but there are some things that are universal and work for any niche.

How to craft stellar content:

  1. Put your target audience at the heart of your content.
  2. Focus your content around solving challenges your audience is facing.
  3. Create a strong hook that makes them want to work their way to the end.
  4. Craft incredible headlines. Use power words, numbers, and try to incite curiosity with your headlines.
  5. Ensure your content delivers on the promise made in your headline.
  6. Format your articles so it’s not a giant wall of text. Use headings, bullet points, numbered lists like this one, and always use images. These can be stock photos, graphs, screenshots, etc.

Now that you have your content nailed down – it’s important to remember that your content will fall flat on its face without the next step.

What happens after you publish your content?

You could craft the most show-stopping article on your website – but if no one is actually going to see it, it’s pointless.

It’ll just sit in some corner of the web gathering dust. Your efforts wasted.

So, once you’ve created your content, you need to actually promote it.

You’ll want to share your content on social media, but that’s not going to be enough.

You need to develop a step-by-step promotional checklist that you can work through for each and every piece of content you publish.

In an ideal world, this means spending more time promoting it than you did creating it.

But you need to be strategic in your approach. You don’t just want more traffic, you want more of the right traffic.

To get a head start on stepping up your content promotion, be sure to check out our posts on increasing website traffic and content promotion tools.

And for some extra reading, I recommend checking out David Hartshorne’s post on blog promotion over at BloggingWizard.

Wrapping it up

Every single business on the planet wants more leads, and customers.

But most businesses don’t see the sort of growth they expect.

The key to creating content that attracts your target customer every single time always comes back to the quality and value of your content.

If you can produce content that’s useful, relevant, and solves a problem for your customers every single time – the customers you want to attract will soon follow.