Content Marketing Blog mint

Content Marketing Blog

Stop Talking About You, And Focus On Your Audience

9 Ways To Ensure Your Content Builds Thought Leadership.
There is one mistake which keeps showing itself over and over again – on websites, in blog posts, on social media and in the real world. It can be quite a difficult nut to crack because it is inherently tied in to human nature. BUT break the habit we must in order to succeed online!

So right here, right now, stop talking about you! Instead, focus on your target audience and your content marketing will help establish thought leadership. Even better, it will deliver the right results.

  1. Find the balance between providing important information about you for your audience (such as location, product descriptions, expertise) and demonstrating clearly how your products/services/company will benefit your soon-to-be customers.
  2. Whether it is your business, how good you are at your job, how great your products are, how long you have been providing the service, how big your new building is, or the latest technology you have adopted, the majority of this is ego-boosting. It is however, of little value to your audience. (Unless they are planning to buy you out or go head to head in competition with you!)
  3. Be the expert in understanding precisely what your leads and prospects want. What will trigger the decision to follow up with a call to your sales team? What benefits are they seeking and can you deliver? What job are they trying to complete that can be done more easily, quickly, cost-effectively, efficiently with your product or your help?
  4. Offer comparisons of your products with others so that your potential customers can see what they get if they give you their money. What issues can your product overcome that others cannot? What features does your product or service  have, and why have you designed those features?
  5. Show that you understand clearly what problems your customer is trying to deal with and that you have considered them when setting up your solutions.
  6. Explain the benefits of this product or service. Offer added value with free tutorials, shared wisdom, opportunities to learn more, such as with webinars or events. Assign a mentor if the product or service is complex.  Give them the name and contact details of an account manager.  Make every encounter with your company personal and useful, finding answers where perhaps the prospective customer did not even know yet that there was a question to be asked. 
  7. Dig deeply into, and understand, your audience.  Provide information and insights that go beyond the call of duty and help lead them into the world of your expertise and experience. Educate them, even if they then do not commit to purchase. Listen, carefully, even when rejected as the supplier, because it may be there is a hidden niche for your business that you were unaware of, a feature you could add, an additional service you could offer.
  8. Take a look at your website with a fresh view to the content being all about the customer. Does it answer What's In It For Me? (WIIFM) from their point of view, or have you been too busy relating what's happening with you and your business? What about their business? Ask satisfied customers for feedback – critical and constructive – so that you can improve the experience for the future. Share contactable testimonials so that prospects can discover for themselves the benefits you can bring to a business. “Mr T from Ottawa...” is not a valid testimonial – give name, job title and company, with permission, of course.
  9. And most importantly,…GIVE and keep giving. Share what you have learnt, encourage people to become as good as you are, with secrets, tips and tricks, lessons learned, case studies, and examples of best practice.

Respect for you as an expert and for your company will grow if you prove that you are one of the best in the business. This will happen simply because you listen and care about your customers, and are willing to help them to achieve their desired outcomes.

For more advice on content marketing and how to establish thought leadership online, call MintCopy at 888-646-8003 or send us an email.

Share


Recent Posts

Sheetal Pinto - 3/16/2023 00:00

Content Marketing Best Practices that Garner Attention

Remember the movie, “Field of Dreams”? It made popular the phrase, “If you build it, he will come”. Shoeless Joe and other baseball legends may have magically appeared on a cornfield-turned-baseball diamond. However, when it comes to content marketing, your audience will need more than a field of dreams to attract their attention. If you’re trying to get more traffic to your website, don’t wait for your local SEO efforts to direct your audience. Give them a hand with these proven content strategies.

Sheetal Pinto - 3/2/2023 06:00

How to Use a Pillar Page to Improve your Content Quality

Consider the dictionary meaning of ‘pillar’ – “a firm, upright support for a superstructure”, also defined as “a fundamental precept”. Your content marketing campaign is your ‘superstructure’ that requires a ‘firm, upright support’. That’s the key function of content pillar pages. Without these essential supports, your ‘content superstructure’ will neither stand strong, nor will it attract the right attention.

Sheetal Pinto - 2/23/2023 06:00

Two Proven Ways to Organize Products with Similar Keywords

In business, cannibalization typically refers to a loss of sales. A company introduces a new product that displaces sales of an older, usually more outdated, product. Instead of having an increase in sales, the market growth remains stable. What does this mean in the world of SEO and content marketing? Keyword cannibalization occurs when two products have similar keywords or phrases and confuses the search engines about which page is right for which query. Instead of competing with other businesses for search traffic, you’re competing with your own web pages. Here’s why keyword cannibalization is bad for business and how you can overcome it.

Sheetal Pinto - 2/9/2023 06:00

How to Optimize your Content for a Global Audience

The global market is much smaller than it once was.  Statista reports over 5 billion internet users globally, or about 63.1% of the population. Reaching out to a broader market can help your business grow, but it’s not as simple as updating your website in a new language and simply hoping your audience finds you through search.

Sheetal Pinto - 1/26/2023 06:00

How to Build a Functional Content Marketing Funnel

Most people don’t wake up and think, “oh, today is the day I buy my new mattress,” unless they’ve researched different brands and checked pricing at different stores. Modern customers often take their time with major (and even minor) purchases. Using that information about today’s shoppers can help you design a content marketing map, or funnel, that guides the customer to your product.

Sheetal Pinto - 1/12/2023 15:49

Draw Insights from Your Competitors' Success 

According to Ahrefs, organic search drives over 53.3% of global traffic. Creating an SEO strategy is key to increasing your reach through search. As you’re setting new SEO goals for 2023, it may be useful to analyze what is working for your competitors. Also look at what they’re missing, to build that effectively into your own SEO strategy.

Sheetal Pinto - 12/15/2022 15:14

5 Proven Ways to Improve your Website Ranking

The rules of SEO can often feel elusive, as if SEO is a great big experiment in which the parameters keep changing. Search engines keep updating the algorithm. User behavior is evolving and adapting to circumstances, all the time. You don’t have any control over how pages rank, or do you? Google will never share how it determines SEO ranking. Customers change how they search and shop. We may not fully understand the complexity of search engine algorithms, but we can test different elements of a webpage to see how customers and search engines respond to your content marketing strategies. It’s called split testing.

Sheetal Pinto - 11/24/2022 16:42

Good today and gone tomorrow! That is the way of trends in the world of SEO and content marketing. What may generate interest right now can fall out of favor due to the ever-changing search engine algorithms. What can you do to ensure that you’re up to date? One useful method is to utilize Google Trends to find useful metrics that help you stay relevant. To make your way to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), it’s important to use a variety of proven methods to create quality content. Read below to learn how Google Trends can help you gain insight on popular trends, seasonality, regional demands, and your competitors.

Sheetal Pinto - 11/10/2022 06:00

Revitalize, Refine, Repurpose

The Pareto principle is also known as the 80/20 rule. About 80% of your best results will come from 20% of your efforts. When you apply that to a creative endeavour like content marketing, you might be undervaluing some of your content creative efforts. It can be expensive to create content, from scheduling videographers, photographers, models, or even having quality copywriters write a blog post. Chances are that you have some valuable content that can be recycled or repurposed with a little elbow grease.

Sheetal Pinto - 10/27/2022 06:00

How to Create Content that Ranks Higher on the SERPs

With every Google update, there’s always some concern about page rankings. The most recent update, “helpful content,” is part of Google’s ongoing efforts to make sure that users get quality content in search results. If you’ve been using SEO best practices and providing content that is relevant and useful, you shouldn’t lose page rankings. It’s always a good idea to check your content marketing strategy and make sure it aligns with Google’s algorithm updates.