Key Messages
How To Use Content To Connect With Customers And Get Great Results
Content is the new black when it comes to marketing and achieving success in business.
Social media, blogs, and podcasts have become integral to how customers interact with businesses.
Companies now use things like followers, retweets, and amount of content shared as much as sales figures and brand recognition to measure success.
Understanding how to work with content is essential for any company looking for long-term growth and customer loyalty.
Content Rules by Ann Handley and C.C.
Chapman shows readers how to do just that by revealing what worked when golfer Charlie King used content during the recession of 2009 and how a Kodak executive engaged with their audience through content.
Scheduling content consistently allows companies to get the best possible results too!
So discover why content is the new black – because it’s faster, more interactive, and more trackable way of getting closer to your customers than ever before!
How To Attract Online Attention With Content That Appeals To Your Customers
Content is a great way for companies to engage customers.
It allows them to create stories and show customers that they care, while also building trust in the brand.
Companies can produce content such as blogs, videos, eBooks, and webinars that are tailored to their target audience and tell the true stories of real people in everyday life situations.
For example, P&G ran a series of “Welcome to Parenthood” videos on their website which showed new parents talking about potty training, changing diapers and preparing for nap time.
This gave potential customers an insight into what parenthood is really like – something they can relate to – rather than just selling products.
It’s also important to remember that content should always be seen as an extension of your brand; it creates the image consumers have when they think of your company, reinforces credibility and trustworthiness.
Even if you have a large customer base, producing online content allows you to foster one-on-one conversations with each individual customer at the same time.
Creating An Appealing Brand Identity For Your Facebook Posts To Reach Your Audience
Before you start creating and distributing content, it’s important to consider your brand’s unique voice, identify your audience and figure out what they need.
To do this effectively, you’ll want to ensure that you are communicating to customers as if they were a single individual.
When crafting messages, use a friendly, conversational tone with simple language that is relatable and easy to understand.
Avoid generic corporate jargon, as it may cause people to become disengaged.
Take Charlie King’s New Rules of Golf blog for example: he breaks down complex concepts in a way viewers can understand without intimidating them from exploring the sport further.
And also try not to overthink it – injecting humour or entertainment into your content will mesmerize all readers!
A great example of this being Cisco Systems’ videos featuring the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus singing songs about their routers!
Once you have your brand’s identity sorted out, focus on identifying who your audiences are by asking yourself questions related to potential customer groups such as age ranges and profession.
Use data-collection tools such as QuantCast.com or Google AdWords/Wordtracker which provide anonymous website traffic information and keywords related to your business – this will help you better visualize who these audiences are, enabling you to create content tailored towards them!
Using Content To Connect With Your Customers And Improve The Lives Of Others
When it comes to connecting with customers, gathering and sharing information through a variety of social media can be incredibly effective.
Start by setting up small platforms such as a blog, Facebook page, Twitter account, or LinkedIn group to help you reach out to your customers.
You can then use these outlets to create content and share ideas based on their responses.
For instance, you can shoot a video presentation of a company report, craft blog posts that address customer concerns or produce content tailored specifically for certain groups.
In addition, services like Eqentia, Lingospot or Loud3r can also be used for content curation as you search for real-time web-based information related to keywords you have set up.
Asking customers to provide user-generated content regarding how your product makes their lives better is another good approach.
Ford Motor Company is a good example of utilizing customer stories on their website—Ford Social—where one customer wrote an article on how the Mustang special edition car has impacted her life while raising money and awareness for breast cancer.
Make Content Sharing Easier By Prominently Featuring Social Media Buttons And Brainstorming Shareable Formats
When it comes to boosting your business with content, you want to get as many people as possible sharing your work.
To make this easier, be sure to prominently feature social-media share buttons on your website and blog.
Services like ShareThis.com provide a single button that can link to multiple social networks so it’s easy for others to share your posts.
Before you allow others to use or share your content though, ensure that it’s properly licensed and lay out the rules of how they’re allowed to use it – can other users change it or use it for commercial purposes? Then consider what formats will be easily embedded in other sites such as articles in PDF or PowerPoint format, or downloadable audio/video content.
Twitter is an excellent platform for sharing content in real-time; the micro posts (or tweets) allow for 140 characters max making regular updates easy and fast.
When writing catchy tweets, use superlatives, funny analogies and powerful statements – words that’ll grab attention but also succinctly explain what the post is about.
Once you’ve accumulated followers these subscribers receive all your latest tweets and can help promote them by re-tweetsing.
It’s a great way to boost engagement with new audiences too!
How An Editorial Calendar Can Help You Publish Content More Efficiently
Managing your content publishing strategy requires concrete steps, and one of the most important is setting up a systematic calendar.
This simplest form would be an editorial calendar, with personnel such as a Chief Content Officer (CCO) to manage it and keep track of what to write, review and post at various intervals.
This schedule can be broken down into daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly activites.
The daily activities might consist of updating Twitter and Facebook with news or responding to comments on your blog.
For example, Kinaxis has experienced tripled web-based sales leads in one year by adopting a content publishing system that includes Twitter, blogs and videos.
Meanwhile your weekly schedule might involve making short blog posts or how-to articles and updating the website.
As for monthly schedules, consider writing an in-depth article on a customer success story or building/sending newsletters; for the long term (quarterly) scheduled goals may involve publishing white papers as well as case studies or producing video series.
By setting up this systematic framework to produce content regularly throughout your platforms will enable you to better monitor it too.
But how do you continually produce new content when all other ideas have been exhausted? One way is to repackage existing content in other formats including different sizes and channels – such as turning an article into a podcasted interview, which can increase visibility across search engines with each piece appearing separately in results pages.
How To Improve Your Content’S Performance With Web-Based Tools
If you want to make sure that your content is getting the most attention, it’s important to set specific and measurable goals for yourself.
This means that you should not only track how many people are reading or watching your content, but also evaluate the performance of your content in relation to those numbers.
You can do this by setting goals like producing a video with 1,000 views in a month.
Or getting 10 bloggers to post positively about your company.
Another way to ensure that more people will find and engage with your content is by being smart about the keywords you use in it.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is basically a process which makes sure your site appears higher up in search results depending on the number of unique keywords used and other websites that have linked back to yours.
So if you use long tails keywords, which are compound phrases composed of individual words related to your product, you’ll increase visibility and engagement with audiences who might be looking for something like what you offer- especially if you write questions that answer some common problems or dilemmas people may face regarding them.
Metrics matter – make sure you’re setting specific and measurable goals but also include long tail keywords into your content as much as possible!
Creating B2B Content: Tips And Strategies To Keep Your Customers Engaged During The Buying Cycle
Content is key to successfully marketing your products and services, especially if you’re in the business of B2B commerce.
Business customers often have specific needs, so it’s essential to create content that will engage them and provide helpful information tailored to their needs.
A good strategy for producing B2B content is building a spreadsheet that maps out all potential questions and concerns from buyers within a purchasing committee.
Doing research, such as consulting with marketing data services like TechTarget, gives insight into how larger businesses go about making their decisions so that you can create relevant content for them.
In addition to addressing individual buyer’s concerns through personalized content, setting specific goals are essential to ensure customers make it through the purchase process.
This ensures that every piece of content produced by your company is geared towards achieving short-term objectives while staying true to the long-term business strategy.
Repackage existing material while keeping in mind the special needs of business customers; this may look like bundling customer success stories, webinars and other informational documents into a single kit.
By creating unique content that meets their specialized requirements, your company is sure to find success with its B2B customers!
Wrap Up
Content Rules, by Ann Handley and C.C.
Chapman, provides a roadmap for creating innovative and valuable content that outshines the competition.
The key message they share is that content should be engaging and centered around what resonates with your target audience.
To make this happen, the authors suggest always being listening to figure out the interests of your customer base in order to produce content that speaks specifically to them.
The actionable advice provided in Content Rules is simple yet powerful – don’t focus on closing deals but instead focus on staying ahead of the curve by using tools like Google Reader, Google Alerts and Search.Twitter.com in order to stay up-to-date on current trends and topics of discussion amongst customers.
Ultimately, this book proves how beneficial it can be for businesses when they create an engaging experience for their customers by producing relevant content about topics most important to them – an approach which will ultimately increase both trust and loyalty from customers in return!
