Andriana BoyrikovaYour ideal customers are bombarded with content, so they create opinions about your business in the blink of an eye. If your content isn’t relevant and valuable to them and if it doesn’t answer their questions or meet their needs, they will be away before you know it, going right to your competitors. Here is what you might be doing wrong with your content and how to change it so that it doesn’t hurt your business reputation.
Do you know that in only one minute1:
- 1,598 blog posts are published on WordPress.
- 210 minion emails are sent.
- 350,000 tweets are sent on Tweeter.
- 65,000 Instagram photos and videos are shared.
- 240,000 photos are uploaded on Facebook.
- 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.
In only one minute. And you are trying to cut through the noise and get your message across to your prospects and customers.
Your content represents your business
Your business is founded on two major pillars: the product/service you provide and the business image you portray. While working hard to deliver excellent product/service is the best you can do to guarantee the success of your business, this isn’t enough.
For example, recently I tried to help a friend who had a fantastic idea for a product that didn’t exist on the market. However, he didn’t listen to my advice to get started with a content strategy: he rushed in getting customers with a not well-thought web copy and sporadic content he was posting on social media without a clear goal.
Little wonder, he couldn’t promote his product effectively enough to make people trust him and see the value in what he offered.
Do you compromise quality when it comes to your products/services, sales, finances or operations? No? Then why do you compromise on your content: the one thing that glues everything together?
1. Your content can build your reputation and customer trust
Building trust is crucial because consumers buy based on trust: 81% of consumers need to trust the brand to buy and B2B customers’ top priority is trusting relationships. When people read your content, they create an opinion of your business. If the content is relevant and valuable and answers their questions, they are more likely to see your recommendations as credible.
The more value you provide with your content to your prospects and customers, the easier it is to build trust with them. After all, you have given them something without asking for anything in return. When they are ready to buy, your business is already a trusted source at the front of their minds.
2. Your content can show your expertise in your field
Did you know that for most consumers independent experts are the most trusted sources of information, preceded only by family, friends, and consumer reviews? People want to know that they are dealing with experts who know the ins and outs of the industry.
By creating content you have the chance to demonstrate your expertise in your field. This can make your small business’s website and social media channels the go-to source for anyone looking for reliable knowledge in your niche. In the end, your prospects are much more inclined to purchase from you if you have demonstrated knowledge and expertise and provided them with the information they needed.
3. Your content can give you an edge over your competitors
Chances are, you aren’t the only business that does what you do. To survive in today’s crowded informational marketplace, you need to stand out. This is where your content comes into play.
Your audience is being targeted so heavily that they are becoming sick of it. Did you know that the average person encounters between 6,000 to 10,000 ads every single day? This over-targeting makes your ideal customers ever more mistrustful and fed up with content.
But what if your ideal customers are doing an online research about their challenges and find your content that provides them with relevant and helpful information? They will be much more inclined to remember you and, later, purchase from you than from your competitors who have been bombarding them with salesy and company-centric content.
Here is what you are doing wrong with your content
1. You have no content strategy
You need a solid, well-defined content strategy before you start creating any type of content. If you don’t have a strategy in place, you shouldn’t expect to be successful in the long run. Content strategy is the development, planning, creation, delivery and management of content. A content strategy entails defining:
- a clear Why and how to incorporate it across your content
- your buyer personas
- customer journey map
- content marketing objectives
- resources and capabilities assessment
- content creation process
- content calendar
- voice + tone
- distribution channels and amplification practices
- KPIs
- and more.
A content strategy will help you better understand your ideal customers and create content that is relevant to their needs and pain points; it will allow you (and your team) to stay organized and make consistent tactical content decisions at any time even when obstacles come up along the way (and they always do); and it will help you measure if your content has been successful.
2. You create all content yourself
While you might take great care creating all content for your business, chances are you aren’t a professional writer. Writing is a craft that professional writers exercise every day and hone with years. Besides, you need to keep your finger on the pulse of digital marketing and understand the nuts and bolts of SEO (search engine optimization), web copy, buyer personas, CTAs, and so much more.
What’s more, if you create all content yourself, eventually:
- you will run out of new ideas for what to write about that engages your customers or attracts new prospects
- you will start to hate the idea of writing yet another LinkedIn post or newsletter which will result in creating poor content or no content at all
- you will get overwhelmed with work and won’t have time to write articles, newsletters, or LinkedIn posts anymore.
3. You delegate content creation to others in your team
You delegate content creation to people in your team: human resources officers, administrative officers, designers, developers, or even interns. You are thinking, “Why hire a content writer when we can do that in-house?” Of course, you are trying to tighten up your budget and handle things internally whenever possible even if that means extending your employees’ working time by several hours a day.
But letting team members spend time creating content is problematic: this isn’t what you have hired them for.
If your administrative assistant spends two hours a day churning out content for LinkedIn posts or a newsletter, he has only 6 hours left for his actual tasks. The result is content that misses the mark (which hurts your business’s reputation) as your administrative assistant isn’t a professional writer while your administrative practices suffer too.
Even if you extend his working hours, this won’t make him a better writer. That way, you waste his time which he could have invested in what he excels at – and what you have hired him for – and you waste your money that you could have invested in a professional writer.
Here is how you can solve your content-related problems
I have said it before: not everyone can write well. Besides, you need to have the knowledge and skills to develop a solid content strategy (that you continually adjust and improve) and understand the latest digital marketing trends, buyer personas, SEO, CTAs, KPIs, and the list goes on. That’s why you need a professional content writer to take care of all that.
1. A professional writer saves you time, money, and a lot of stress
The more time you spend trying to create copy for your website, fiddling with your business blog, and churning out monthly newsletters, the less time you have to do the work that all your customers are paying you for. You are running a business and your knowledge and skills are valuable to the people you serve: this is what keeps your business going. The more successful you business gets, the more time you need to manage it.
Hiring a professional content writer is the only way to free up your time so that you can do what you do best while you rest assured that your content is in the hands of an expert.
2. A professional writer thinks through the lens of your business
Perhaps you have decided not to hire a professional content writer because you think she won’t be able to grasp what your business stands for. However, a professional writer – and I don’t mean those who you can hire for pennies through freelancing platforms or outsourcing agencies – doesn’t just show up for once, write, and the leave.
A professional content writer gets to know your ideal customers, business’s values, and unique selling points, incorporates them into a solid content strategy, and creates content in line with it. Above all, she speaks to your ideal customers in your own unique voice and gives them the information they need to keep coming back and get to trust your business.
3. A professional writer knows all the ins and outs of effective content
A professional writer is trained not only in writing but in everything that comes before and after it (areas you don’t even think about): research, buyer personas, human factor, readability, headlines, CTAs, medium, SEO and keywords, content management systems and other software programs needed for content creation, and more.
Additionally, a professional content writer has a solid grasp of spelling, grammar, and all those mundane issues that can make you look silly (for example, using it’s for its). Everyone occasionally makes a typo but if you don’t want emails or social media posts with typos that hurt your business image, you should rely on a content writer to take care of that.
What’s more, a professional writer can:
- help you document all your ideas
- keep your website and social media up to date
- create new content for your email newsletters or business blog
- decide what type of content works well in a blog post and what is better saved for an email
- help you with internal communications: draft business plans, questionnaires, surveys, etc.
Conclusion
In today’s digital world it is getting ever more difficult to cut through the noise and reach your ideal customers who are being bombarded with content by your competitors. This is why it is crucial that you consider what you are doing wrong:
- you have no content strategy
- you create all content yourself
- you delegate content creation to others in your team
and consider all the benefits of hiring a professional content:
- a professional content writer saves you time, money, and a lot of stress
- a professional content writer thinks through the lens of your business
- a professional writer knows all the ins and outs of effective content.
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I hope you have found these tips helpful. Which of these mistakes do you make? Let me know in a comment.
Featured image: Shutterstock.
References:
1. https://localiq.com/blog/what-happens-in-an-internet-minute-2021/; https://www.smartinsights.com/internet-marketing-statistics/happens-online-60-seconds/; https://optinmonster.com/blogging-statistics/
Do you need help with content creation? Email me and I would love to help you.
