With the recent changes in Google, content creators are suddenly discovering that a new burden has been placed on them. There's now an even greater need for legitimately interesting and compelling content for business websites.
What makes for compelling content? Fundamentally, it's content that a visitor wants to see. When developing material for a website, the foremost question in any content creator's mind should be, “What would my audience want to see?”
Of course, determining that is the tricky part, so we've broken it down into a series of simple steps. If you find yourself out of material, give this a run-through and see if it helps!
Five Steps To Developing Engaging Consumer-Focused Content
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Define some customer segments.
For starters, take a look at your numbers and carve out some general consumer segments, based both on who's visiting your site, and who you want visiting. For example: “Male Executives, ages 35-60, responsible for office supply procurement.”
Starting with basic demographic information is fine, but look to expand the profile. You want to be able to build solid buyer personas, which can describe what a day in the life of your model buyer looks like: What they do in the morning, what type of job they have, how they relax in the evening, and soforth.
If you're looking for information, try watching social media groups for your target segments. It's a great way to “peek” at their interests.
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List their goals and pain points.
Once you have a decent grasp on your target markets, the question is how your company fits in. Think of things they want to achieve and things they want to avoid. If your product helps with either side, you've got the basis for some good content. For example, for our exec, some pain points might be:
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Finding cost-effective suppliers
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Fighting for budgeting
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Ensuring proper disbursement of materials
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Stopping office supply lossage
Don't limit yourself to just items directly related to your company, though. A broad range of topics creates a blog with wider appeal, which is necessary to keep bringing new readers in.
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Now, phrase it in the form of a question.
More and more people are simply typing questions into Google, rather than running searches as we used to think of them. So, take those goals and pain points and turn them into questions your hypothetical consumer might be typing into Google while doing research.
For example: “How can I prevent office supply lossage and theft?”
Those questions are now the basis for each title. Try to include the question itself at least once within the content as well, to reinforce it with Google's indexing spiders.
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Create an editorial calendar.
Organization is key to having successful and consistent blogging, so create a spreadsheet-based calendar that lists major elements like the Title, Author, Synopsis, and Publish Date. If you want help getting started, Hubspot has a great free template on their site.
Keep the calendar up to date as you go, or throw it on the Cloud so everyone can edit it, so you'll always have a one-glance list of what content is in the pipeline, as well as what's been done before. Your calendar will keep you on-track in the months ahead, simplifying your content management problems significantly.
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Keep Optimizing.
Once you have your plans in place, keep optimizing as you go. Find new keyword combinations and pain point-related questions to try out within your blogs. Also, continue to add new and different kinds of content that your target buyers will find appealing. User feedback can be a big help in discovering what content is best.
Then, bring it full circle by continuing to update and refine those buyer personas as well. You can never know too much about your buyers and their habits.
And, of course, if you want more personalized advice, don't hesitate to let us know what your company needs to succeed!
