The phrase, “content is king,” isn’t hyperbole. A look at Alexa’s top sites, as of June 2014, reveals that nine of the top 10 websites are driven by content. There are five search engines, three social media sites, and Wikipedia. The lone holdout is Amazon, but even Amazon provides content through relevant product recommendations. The numbers say it all; you need to deliver content that matters –to matter at all. What the numbers don’t explain is how to write content that connects with your clients.
To highlight why relevant content matters so much, it’s helpful to consider what happens when content doesn’t connect. At the level of lead generation, if you’re unable to connect with your prospects, you don’t get the time of day. If the content in your sales letter or website doesn’t connect, you don’t get the customer and you miss out on an opportunity to grow.
Even worse, when you aren’t delivering content that customers connect with, you’re wasting time and resources. If you’re creating the content, you’ve lost time that didn’t go into your business. If you hired someone, you’ve spent money and wasted time hiring that person. With time and money as the scarcest resources in most businesses, you can’t afford to waste them.
So how do you go about developing compelling content? First and foremost, forget about your product and services for a second… Instead, consider the lives of the people in your market. You probably know a lot about, and face, many of the personal or professional problems they face.
Use your experiences to tell a story. Stories activate the emotional centers in the brain and let your readers empathize with thoughts like, “I know exactly what you’re talking about.” Discuss the obstacles that prevent them from solving a problem or reaching their goals. Many people know a problem exists, but don’t know what prevents them from resolving it.
But there is a trap in only telling stories, you only are stimulating one side of the brain. Compelling content is whole-brained, it’s both right and left brained. Both logical and creative. You can use processes, and cases studies in conjunction with images and stories.
Provide your readers with a functional solution to the problem they can do on their own. For example, if you’re discussing the difficulties of developing a business app, offer links to DIY tutorials and free or low-cost software to facilitate the process. After you’ve given the reader an emotional hook, identified obstacles and provided solutions, then deliver a call to action for your business. Everything up to the call to action engenders trust and makes readers far more likely to contact you.
Failing to deliver content that connects with your market is a one-way ticket to poor conversion and wasted resources. By giving your potential customers or current clients something they can relate to, identify obstacles and offer solutions, you build trust. Trust is essential for conversion.
If you’re struggling to develop content that connects, visit Directive Group. We loved to connect with you.
