The importance of quality content cannot be overestimated in today’s online economy. Website content affects everything about your small business, from brand awareness to sales. To achieve your business objectives, you need to create content that resonates well with your audience. Apart from this, the content should be tailored to set your business as an authority in your niche. People buy from those that they trust, and being a trusted hub of information in your niche can greatly affect your profits positively.
Content comes in various forms including blog posts, eBooks, white paper, slideshows, videos among others. Creating effective content is not easy for any business, more so a small business. Without proper planning, you can get in a fix with creating content in two ways:
- In an attempt to produce content regularly, you may compromise on the quality of the content and therefore push away qualified leads.
- In an effort to create quality content, you may fail to produce content regularly and hence leave your audience hanging.
In either case, you will be losing prospective customers either because your content is not educative or it is not timely.
To generate leads on your website, you need a constant flow of quality content to attract and keep visitors engaged. Below is a quick guide that will help you create content that will improve your small business lead generation efforts.
1. Know your audience
You need to identify your audience to know what of kind of content will appeal to them. The more detailed you profile your audience, the higher the chances that you will understand their pains and thus create relevant content. Ask yourself the following:
- What do my prospects want?
- How can I help them?
The best way to understand your audience is to analyze your current web visitors and identify their personas. You can then create different content to appeal to the different personas.
2. Tie content to the buying cycle
Create content that will move your prospect down the sales funnel. The content should leads prospects from the initial interaction up to where a sale is closed. To determine the right content for every stage, define your buying cycle and progression milestones. For example, visitors stopping by your website for the first time may find articles useful. On the other hand, leads that are ready to buy may need whitepapers.
3. Create an editorial calendar
After setting your content creation objectives, the next step is to create an editorial calendar. The calendar should contain the subjects to cover, time to publish and the medium through which the content will be published.
A calendar will help you stay focused on your main business objective. Moreover, it will help you keep track of your progress towards achieving your goals and eliminate time wasted in daily or weekly planning of content creation.
4. Plan for trending content
In your editorial calendar, leave provisions for creation of trending content such as events in your industry. Identify events and trends in your industry over the period of your publishing and create content in line with them. Trending events offer you an opportunity to create fresh content that may deviate from the strategy but still work towards the main objective.
Great content is only effective when it reaches the intended audience. Therefore, it is important to distribute the content across all the platforms your prospects use. To get quality traffic to your website and generate leads that are ready to buy, you should maintain the quality and stream of your content. Therefore, use the above four tips to create your website content strategy.
Do you have any other tips to create better website content? If so, I’d love to hear what they are! Leave them in the comments section below.
