Creating content that helps your customers self-solve

How to create content that attracts the right customers

Time’s in short supply these days and nobody wants theirs wasted. Audiences are fed up with irrelevant ads and social media fluff. Your potential clients are craving content that adds value to their lives, answers questions, and helps them take action to fulfil a particular need.

Here’s how to create it:

Buyer personas

If you don’t have a detailed idea of who your ideal customers are, your digital content creation will miss the mark. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer that’s based on market research, real data about your existing customers, and some educated guesswork to fill in the traits that make them tick.

Once you know who’s searching for your products and services, creating content that engages prospects at each stage of the buyer’s journey becomes less hit-or-miss and more ‘bullseye!’.

Engage prospects early with top-of-funnel content

To understand why top-of-funnel (TOF) content is so valuable, you need to know where it fits into the buyer’s journey, which can be broken down into three stages:

• The awareness stage (into which TOF content feeds) is when a person realises they have a problem.
• The consideration stage is where the person clarifies the problem enough to begin searching for potential solutions.
• In the decision stage, a lead hones in on a solution and reaches out to the service provider.  

First impressions last, so your top-of-funnel (TOF) content needs to be impactful and memorable. It’s your digital foot in the door — a way to entrench your services in the person’s mind before they’ve defined their problem and started to pinpoint potential solutions. 

For example:

Dave Butterworth is the Managing Director of a real estate agency in Bristol. However, if property sales continue to decline, he won’t be for much longer. In this scenario, the content creator is a vendor of a real estate-specific customer relationship management (CRM) platform that streamlines internal processes for higher property sales.

While Dave suspects that lack of digital transformation is the root cause of flagging sales and strained agents, he will search for answers until he’s validated or convinced otherwise. Dave’s interest is piqued by topics focused on ‘real estate agency growth’, and he’d probably click on the following headlines:

• Are outdated processes holding your real estate agency back?
• Simple tactics that generate huge results for real estate agencies
• Growth in the age of digital transformation: A how-to guide for MDs in 2020
• Is manual administration the reason your agents aren’t moving property?
  

The above messaging is not pushing any particular solution. Instead, it’s inviting Dave to come to his own conclusions.

Be the authority you want to see in the digital world 

When you address a customer with respect and the personal touch, they will love it and stick around on your site, share your blog posts on their social network sites, and consider you an expert in thought leadership. — Neil Patel

Think of how often you’ve asked a friend for advice and followed through on their recommendations. That’s the magic of brand advocacy at work in the real world.

Huffington Post defines quality content as informative, interesting, and relevant. Yes, it can be tempting to set your prose free in a maelstrom of flowery language and eloquently veneered descriptions — but honestly, is that what will be of most value to your reader? Probably not. 

Well-written, informative content adds value and answers questions, which creates brand authority and nurtures trust, increasing the likelihood of a lead becoming a customer.

Content creation thrives with collaboration

As a practitioner of the inbound marketing methodology, Huble Digital can help you craft content that engages leads at all stages of the buyer’s journey. As a full-service digital business consultancy, we understand the crucial role content creation plays in long-term business growth.