How To Create The Perfect Content For Your Customers
Many companies, especially those providing B2B services, have blogs that are aimed at publishing informative content to bring in new leads. And they will also have a writing team that generates hundreds of articles a month optimized for providing more information about their products and services.
But most of the businesses face a big issue – even after they publish good quality articles, very few of them generate any leads. In fact, some of the articles may never generate a single lead in their entire lifetime. So, where does the problem lie? The answer is simple – the content they generate does not fit in with the interests of their potential customer.
When a product is to be designed, manufactured, and launched, a company will always do a market study to identify its potential customer, and then structure the product so that it matches with the expectations of this group of customers. Whether it be Apple with their iPhone line of smartphones, Sony with their PlayStations, or any other company for that matter.
Unfortunately, most companies that create content for their blogs fail to do an extensive market study. They base their marketing on assumptions, and don’t spend quality time on figuring out the innate needs of their potential customer.
Instead, the business might just look at trends in their industry, and publish articles on that topic. Or, publish articles based on their business processes and practices, which are far from the interests or concerns of the prospect customer. This is a practice that returns extremely low return on investment for their content efforts.
How To Create The Perfect Content For Your Customers
If you run a B2B company and want to create content that resonates with the interests of your potential customers, making them likelier to pay for your product or service, follow the steps below.
1. Collect Data about Customers
The first thing to do is to collect information about your existing customers. And for this, you need data pertaining to three areas:
How much do customers pay for your product or service?
How often does a customer purchase your product or service?
How long does it take for them to buy your new product or service?
So, ask your sales and account staff to cooperate and deliver a report consisting of the above details.
2. Analyze The Collected Data
Once the data is collected, you need to analyze it to find out the qualities of your ideal customers. Look through their purchases and rank them based on who spends the most. Then, a second ranking has to be created based on how often they purchase your product.
Finally, a third rank should identify customers based on how fast they buy your new products once they are launched.
You can now analyze the structured data. The ideal customer will be the one who is ranked highest in all the three criteria, which means that they will be your highest spending customers, who will purchase your products the most number of times, and are also enthusiastic about buying all your newest products.
3. Find Qualities of The Ideal Customer
When you have found out who your best customers are, you should look into what similar qualities and attributes they share. Are they small-sized or medium-sized businesses? Do they sell physical products or online services?
Are they a one-time sales or subscription-based operation? Do they operate regionally, statewide, nationally or internationally? What is their annual turnover? You must have the answers to all such questions and more.
4. Create Content Based On The Ideal Customer Profiles
Once you find out the similarities shared by your top tiered customers, you will then be able to write better content targeted at such type of potential customers. For example, you may find out that most of your best customers are medium business operations that sell online services on a subscription model, operating at a national level.
After understanding the profile, you can write topics like “Best Ways To Maximize Subscription Revenues” or “8 Things Medium Sized Businesses Must Do To Boost Sales Of Their Online Services”.
You will thus be able to avoid writing “What Exporters Must Know About Freight Charges” and such topics since the target market for this topic, the exporters, are not at all your top paying customers. As such, it would be a waste for you to focus on creating non-responsive content for such type of markets.
Tips For Creating Better Customer Focused Content
In addition to using the above technique to create content that suits your ideal customer, the following two tips can also help you generate more leads from the articles.
1. Provide Actionable Knowledge
Be sure that the content you publish provides the readers with information that they can put into action and benefit from. That alone will create a good impression about your company.
For example, if you have identified that most of your customers are small-size businesses, then you may think of publishing an article titled ‘8 Ways To Pay Lower Taxes On Your Revenues For Small Business Operations.’ This is a sufficiently good topic.
But can any of the eight ways you mention be actually implemented by the small enterprises? If so, do you provide a clear path showing them how to implement the methods? Make sure you do so.
Because if a reader acts as you suggested, and they end up paying lesser taxes, then they are going to be mighty impressed with your free and genuinely-helpful advice, which increases trust and makes them more likelier to be your customer.
Image by Aleks Dorohovich via Unsplash
2. Stress On Relationships
As far as possible, you should also remember to highlight your relationships with clients in the blogs. A good way to do it will be to include them in as case studies on how you helped them solve a specific problem.
For example, if you are an energy optimization service and are publishing an article titled ‘How To Reduce The Energy Consumption Of Your Office’, then be sure to detail a case where you helped a specific company reduce its energy usage, mentioning the processes involved and the subsequent amount of savings. This will present your company as an organization that has the potential and skill to solve real world problems.
So, try to implement the customer-focused content strategy discussed here, and you will see a massive shift in how topics are chosen for your company blog.
While earlier, your writing team may have chosen a topic just because it matched with the industry you operate in, now they will focus on writing content that matches perfectly with the qualities of your best customers, thereby improving the chance of turning potential readers into new leads.