Create value-added content to get more customers

I recently went through all the projects I worked on in the past. One thing I noticed was the insufficient use of the blog/news area on the websites. Some of the websites had the latest post dating on the day the website was published. Some didn’t even have that. Only a small percentage had a decent number of trade show reports, press releases, notifications about new hires and so on. The bottom line, the majority of my previous clients were not aware of the power of content marketing and the importance of implementing it in their business strategy.

In today’s world of affordable design and development, the only thing that can make you stand out from the competition is an awesome content that adds value to your clients’ lives or answers their questions.

In the following section, you’ll find a small guide on how to discover and create content that will help you attract and engage customers, reach new audience, and ultimately, generate sales for your business.

How to target your audience?

Most websites, besides the products they sell, are filled with trade show reports, images of new offices or showrooms, and so on. All these things do contribute to establishing your prestige and authority but they should be kept to a minimum.

What your clients will find useful and what will attract them to you or make them remember you is content that solves their problems, answers their questions or simply entertains them.

How to come up with topics?

There are usual routes of coming up with content such as researching competition, search engine top results, keyword research tools and such. 

But besides those, there is one technique that’s very effective and simple. I am sure you get hundreds of inquiries from your current and potential customers. Keep a log of everything they ask of you. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, keep a notebook and ask your salesmen to log in every question that walk-in customers ask. Join Facebook groups, forums, and subreddits where people might be interested in what you have to offer, hang out and write down what they are interested in. If you do it right, these will be your blog post titles that will give you steady traffic from search engines in years to come.

How to come up with content?

• Find a person who is articulate and knowledgeable about topics that you want to cover.
• Interview them on camera. 
• Have them answer short and to the point.
•  If you can make the video look at least a bit professional, great. If not, it doesn’t matter. The goal here is to come up with content.

How to format acquired material into useful content?

Make short videos

If the video is presentable and decent enough, you can edit it, polish it up a bit and cut it up so each video answers one question. These videos can be adapted for each social media platforms and also embedded on your website. 

All social media channels will accept any video but you have to follow their guidelines or they will convert them into their preferred format which can significantly affect the quality.

Here is a short guide on video formats for each of the social media networks:

Best video formats for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

Make audio transcripts

Transcribing videos is a great way to easily repurpose your existing content. There’s a lot of options out there when you’re looking to transcribe speech to text, ranging from free transcription software to paid services.

Create blog posts

Audio content is a great resource to have and the right starting point, but you’ll still need to put some time and effort into creating a user-friendly blog post.

When to post and where?

List all social media and content distribution channels and do a research on the significance of each one for your particular industry. You need to have a reason why you are using that particular channel. 

For example, Instagram is very big on food. If you, for example, own a restaurant this the place where you want to be. If you are in the consulting or accounting business, you should concentrate on LinkedIn. 

It’s important that you create an achievable publishing schedule and to stick to it. The minimum is one time a week. Three times a week is perfect. Research competition and see what they are doing with their content. If somebody is in this game longer than you, chances are they have tested many techniques and they are doing things that work.

Repurpose blog posts

There are many ways to repurpose blog posts and drive traffic to the main article or your website home page:

• Take the most impactful snippets and use them as Facebook posts. Don’t forget to use photos to accompany them.
• Take photos from the blog posts and pin them on various boards on Pinterest.
• Search for questions that you already answered on Quora. Post your blog post and include the link to your site.
• Take the main points from your post and create an infographic.
• Create animated gifs with the summary from your posts.
• Create Instagram multi-image post with each image as a slide to summarize your post.
• Create a slide deck and share it on SlideShare.
• Create welcome emails and newsletters with snippets from the posts or lists of links that lead to your website.
• Bundle articles from similar topics and create e-books that can be downloaded from your website as PDFs in exchange for the email address.
• Take the main points from your post and create a checklist.

The ultimate goal is to attract visitors to your site

Facebook fans, Instagram followers, LinkedIn contacts are all great but your main goal is  to get the audience to your website. Your main metric should be the number of subscribers you have.

If somebody is willing to give you his email address, the chances are he might be interested in other things you have to offer. It also creates a channel of communication that is much more lasting than social media connections.