The most effective way of grabbing your customers attention online

The modern day marketing has evolved far from what it used to look like when we only knew traditional marketing as the only means of reaching out to clients. In the present era we know that content is king because search engines, digital marketers, businesses and online communities are fascinated by online content.

Content marketing can grab your customer€™s attention because it uses highly visual, humorous and engaging medium to attract the customers and gives valuable information that guides them through a buyer€™s journey, from mere awareness to the point of sale.

Here are obvious reasons why use of structured content is more capable of grabbing your customer€™s attention; through content marketing brands experience growth online, recruit prospects, increase revenue, increase conversions and enhance customer relationships.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is, according to Digital Marketing Institute: a process of creating, sharing and publishing content online with the aim of increasing brand awareness, build reputation and affinity.

Why is content marketing so effective at grabbing your customer€™s attention online?

Modern marketing campaigns use content marketing instead of just selling (using sales copy) right away since their primary goal is to sell in any case. The strategy is in the science behind content marketing; it depends on channels which are targeted, the type of audience and their interests as well as the level of computer literacy plays a big role. Now we can already see that we cannot have a one size fit all type of approach in this case.

In order to deploy a powerful content marketing campaign that will surely grab your customers attentions online, I have listed five steps that you can follow to successfully do so:

1. Create a buyer persona

Creating a buyer persona will help you understand your customer and your potential customer better. This process makes it easier for you to tailor your content, messaging, and tone€“ as well as product development and services to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.

2. Use research to develop content topics

Research is required before you can start developing content for your target audience. At this stage you should first establish a list of about five key words, then lookup on search trends, this is to determine how much search volumes there are on major search engines to validate if there is really adequate interest on those keywords or not.

The last step of the research phase is to perform social listening, to learn from your customer€™s insights. They share, engage and voice out their views on topics that are of interest to them. This could be a great way to know exactly what they are interested in.

3. Choose content formats

Choosing content formats will be determined by the expertise you have, availability of funds for procurement of creation software and time to develop the actual content. The formats will also be determined by the channels that you have chosen to publish your content. Typical content formats are white paper, e-books, podcasts, info-graphics, video info-graphics, pictures, articles, webinars and so forth.

4. Create a content calendar

Content calendar is an essential part of the content marketing strategy, since it helps you strategize on what to post, where to post, who will post and how often. It’s like you time table that we call an editorial calendar.

5. Segment your content

Segmentation is when you group your audience according to their group interests, demographics and online behavior. For instance, young men and young women. Performing segmentation will help you avoid wastage, you will make sure that content is 100% targeted to your specific target audience, avoid irrelevant messaging through reaching the wrong audience and lastly you can twig the messaging without tempering with the master brand.

Conclusion

In conclusion content marketing is the most effective way of driving traffic to your website, it is very effective when used as a pull strategy on social media platforms and other external platforms to lead customers to a landing page on your website, which should obviously have a clear call to action. In order to ensure that you succeed in content marketing, your content must be relevant, personalized, educational, address needs and interests, include explicit call to action and demonstrate you are the solutions.