“Content is King”. When people, especially content and digital marketers, hear this statement, do they really know and understand its depth?
Be it audio, visual, audiovisual, or written content, do they really know the importance of not just content but quality content? It goes way beyond just putting words or pictures together. What you talk about and how you present it matters. The connection of the subject with your audience matters. Imagine consuming content (for example, an article or sales copy) on a subject that doesn’t apply to you. The quality of your content has the ability to make or break your brand.
What Do We Mean by ‘Content is King’?
Content is what attracts people and gets them involved, but one primary reason for creating content is that it connects you to your audience. However, if there is no connection with the target audience, you are pretty much beating the air. The content must grip, move, touch, inspire, excite and speak to the reader. Just like a web copy, marketing copy, or sales copy, the content must speak more about the customer than the brand.
Content marketing involves creating, sharing, and delivering consistent, relevant, and valuable content. This is aimed at keeping and engaging current customers while reaching out to new customers on a wider scale. It doesn’t just promote brand awareness but also establishes expertise and authority. It keeps your business in the heart of the customers whenever there is a need for your product or service. It is a strategic marketing approach that creates and distributes value.
Unique content drives profitability in the long run. This is why it is ‘King’. It speaks directly to the people. The contents that deliver the most result are the ones that are relevant, valuable, consistent, and speaks more about the people, their problems, and solutions to them. It opens up a conversation with your customers, which builds connection, trust, and loyalty.
Benefits of Content Marketing
Among many others, here are some of the benefits of content marketing:
- It promotes brand awareness and authority. Content marketing establishes you as an authority and a powerhouse in your business niche because, as expected, your contents are informative, engaging, and well-researched while spreading your news and name to new places and audiences.
- It builds trust, which later transforms loyalty. People only trust experts and pros, and the quality of your content is a sign that you are one. Customers will then trust you more, and over time, loyalty builds.
- It reaches the ‘special’ audience. There are customers that will scroll at the sight of an Ad. People are now paying to block Ads, but having great content helps you to reach these people who can turn out to become customers.
- It creates connections with prospective customers. Apart from speaking to the customer directly, talking about their needs, and providing a solution, the customers can also give you feedback through comments or emails. This makes it more personal and interactive.
What Makes Content ‘King’?
If you want to build an online presence, first, you must have content. Your content must be relevant and valuable to the people. It must really be something that people are interested in and gain from. To build an online audience, your content must drip quality. This is because only companies with the best content succeed online. Here are some reasons why content is King:
1. Content Builds Relationships with Customers:
Quality always wins in the long run. People always return to the ones with quality. When there is quality in your content, it will build the reputation of your brand. This will lead to more customers while the previous ones will be kept happy, which means a repetitive inflow of customers. This is what keeps companies in business.
You only keep customers by giving them what they like, need or value. From here, the relationship is built. The relationship then grows into trust, which grows into loyalty. These loyal customers will become brand advocates by giving positive reviews about your brand. Here are examples of content that helps boost relationships with customers:
- Educative video contents
- How-to guides
- Entertaining blog posts.
All of these are channeled at giving value to the audience. Serve your customers what they want. Focus on their needs, interests, and pain points. They will be sure to stick around.
2. Content Builds Trust:
People don’t like it when someone tries to sell something to them, which is why many use Adblockers on their mobile phones and computers. They don’t like to part with their money. If they need something, they would prefer to search for organic results on Google, YouTube, and other social media platforms. They might not completely trust you right away, but the fact that their question has been answered sets the ground for your business.
This gives you a much better chance than paid ads. Even the paid ad must use covert marketing content to connect with customers.
3. Content Put a Face to Your Brand:
Content allows you to express your brand’s personality. You can determine how your brand is perceived through your content. Quality contents position you as a quality and reliable brand. The customers’ perception of your brand can be created or changed into what you want it to be through content marketing.
4. Content Allows you to Work with Influencers:
Working with influencers is one way to skyrocket sales for your business. Influencers can take your business to people who have not even heard about it.
Influencers are known to have quite a large number of followers, some of which know about your business and just don’t fancy patronizing you, while others may have not heard about it. With these influencers endorsing your content, their followers are more likely to patronize you because someone important to them is promoting it.
5. Content is Cost-Effective:
One beautiful thing about content marketing is that it is cost-effective. It doesn’t cost as much as adverts. And the fact that it is cost-effective makes it sustainable.
The Importance of Writing Killer Content
Content is important because of the link it gives your customers to you and vice versa. Understanding customer behavior is key to an effective content marketing strategy. This was what Bill Gates knew that led him to the statement “Content is King”, and over the years, he has been proven right. People don’t care about what doesn’t concern or benefit them. People will not like anyone trying to sell something to them; they don’t like parting with their hard-earned money, this is where content marketing comes in. You will have a greater chance of making customers out of people when you give them value first.
Web copy is what greets potential customers when they click on the link to your website. It is a major part of a business’s online presence. It has a big hand in the overall success of the marketing strategies of a business. One primary importance of website content is that it positions you as an authority. It positions a website to be trustworthy. The more the quality of your content, the more value you’ll dish out. This increases your ranking on search engines, which will increase your visibility. Increased visibility means increased customers and sales. A quality website content does the following:
- It increases the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website.
- It makes you unique in your industry.
- Quality website content drives your message home effectively.
- It increases the time potential customers spend on your website because it engages them, leading to increased conversion rates.
- It will build trust in your business which will lead to loyalty.
- It will help you attract the right prospect/customer.
Writing a Killer Content
Here are steps to guide you into creating top-quality and effective website content or copy
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Be clear on what your company offers:
If you want to create an online presence, you must avoid beating about the bush. There are thousands of websites on the internet, and potential customers are exposed to much information. You have to set your business apart. Set your company apart, not just from the multitude of websites on the internet, but from your competitors.
Find your unique selling point and stand yourself out. What will your prospects gain from you? And what specific problem are you solving? There are many people offering something similar to yours, why should people come to you? Providing sincere answers to these kinds of questions will help you identify what stands you out from your competitors. People love uniqueness.
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Know your target audience:
You must know who your targeted audience is. You must be able to identify their needs, pain points, concerns, wants, goals, and everything that interests them. This is a must; else, you may lose them. Imagine yourself consuming content that has nothing to do with you. That is exactly how it is – you couldn’t care any less. It is either you don’t get any customers, or you get a few that are not interested in taking any action.
You must understand what your prospects think about your business, how it affects them, and their behavior towards your product/service. Only then can you create content that speaks directly to them.
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Track your previous contents and copies:
Track the progress of your previous website copies or contents. See if there is anything to change, and tweak if needed. There are various auditing tools, such as Aherfs and Screaming Frog. Uses these tools to check up on the performance of these contents – how they have been performing and how they are currently performing. Address the issues uncovered by these tools. Improve your search engine optimization functionality and use relevant keywords.
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Create contents and copies that are valuable:
Your content must be laden with values. Give your customers something to chew on. People will only come to a place where they have something to gain, and they only return to places from which they gained. You will definitely attract new customers with valuable content.
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Check the progress of your content or copy:
Check up on your content from time to time. Make sure it is still relevant to your audience. We live in a fast-changing world, so you must be up-to-date.
Check which content gets the most shares and likes, how long users stay on each page of your website, and your highest ranking website page. Also, know the website pages that get the most clicks. This is how you stay up-to-date.
Writing a Killer Sales or Marketing Copy
Writing a persuasive web copy, sales copy, or marketing copy differs from writing website content or article. Some things must be taken into account. They are as follows:
1. Do Your Research:
Writing a convincing copy is more about the work on the table than anything else. You must know your audience. You must understand the language they speak.
People will only listen when you understand their needs, confirm their suspicions, allays their fears and help throw stones at their enemies. You must do at least one of these in your copy. This is how deep and well you must understand your audience. It is on this basis that a powerful copy is written. Your copy must be written to give value first, identify a problem and provide a solution (what you are selling).
2. Use Attention Grabbing Headline:
This is the most important part of your entire copy. If you get this wrong, the body of your copy might be awesome, but you’ve messed it all up – the reader might not even go beyond the headline.
Your headline must sound great. It must be attention-grabbing. Your audience is exposed to a lot of information and feeds online, snap them out of routine! If they don’t read your headline, forget about them reading your copy. You have a few seconds to grab their attention. So, your headline must be written to make them read the next line, not sell to them.
3. Your ‘Hook’ is Very Important:
This is a promise you make after your headline that keeps your prospect reading. It is a hook made out of words. The number of people that will read your body copy will be less than the number of people that read your headline. So, to maximize the number of readers, you need a hook. use the right words that get them engaged and interested in reading the next paragraph.
4. Write a Compelling Body:
This is the part that will tell if you did your research well. Don’t just jump into selling to your reader; you’ll throw them off. Show the problem first, analyze it and then present your solution to the problem as a product or service. People will rather run away from pain than run to pleasure, so show the dangers of not solving this problem using your product.
5. Guarantee:
This is where you allay their fears, confirm their suspicions and throw stones at their enemies. You must do at least one of these in your copy. The good old fashion money-back guarantees always work. A money-back guarantee for 30 days, 60 days 90 days, as your business dictates.
6. Scarcity and Urgency:
Let there be some element of scarcity and urgency in your copy. This always drives up sales. ‘Promo’ and ‘Discount’ are also good ideas for getting them to pull out their credit cards. If the reader doesn’t get that sense of urgency and scarcity about your product after reading your copy, they are most likely not to take any action. It would just feel like a good read to them.
7. Testimonials:
When people are unsure what to do, they tend to look around to see what others are saying regarding the situation. This is where testimonials come in. Show reviews and satisfactory comments from customers who have patronized your products or services. Show as many as possible. Influencers come in handy at this point.
8. A Concise and Conspicuous Call-To-Action:
Let your call to action be as clear as possible. The reader must see it as easily and clearly as they can. It must also be inviting.
Tip: In order to make your copy more persuasive, use words like ‘you’. Don’t use words like ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘they’, and the like. These words tend to speak to everybody, and when you speak to everybody, you speak to nobody. ‘You’ is a more personal word.
Conclusion
Great content connects you to your audience. A killer copy helps you sell to them. A connection with your audience is created when they are fed with what they like, love and need. Your content must be value-laden. Content is what will set the ground for the copy. Valuable content will breed trust, and since they already trust you because of the original content you have been dishing out to them, they will definitely proceed to buy from you or refer you to someone.
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