Grabbing the attention of users who will never convert is a nasty trick — whereas attracting the right audience gives everyone a treat. With a great content strategy, you can ensure that your efforts are never wasted on ghouls but help you find users who will remain customers long after Halloween.
1. Lure Them Into Your Web
To start, you need to know who your trick-or-treaters (customers) are and what they want. This is the only way to lure them into your web (in a non-creepy way) and keep them there. You need to define your target audience and figure out why they care about your products or services. If you lack this information, you could end up trolling the wrong users. There’s an even bigger risk to this than just wasted resources: you could also scare off perfect customers.
At a minimum, you need to know the basic demographics of your customers. This may include age, gender, occupation, income — the exact characteristics will depend on your offerings. You may also need to know location down to exact neighborhoods or it may be enough to know just the city or state.
You should also find out as much as you can about customers’ lifestyles, behaviors, and beliefs. Discover what hobbies, interests, or concerns they have in common.
You can gather this information by looking at analytics (especially from Facebook Insights and Google Analytics) as well as by asking customers.
Next, find out what brings customers to your products or services. An excellent way to figure this out is to track the customer journey. Look at what content customers are engaging with in the early stages. This will show you what problems they are coming to you to solve. Then, examine what finally pushes them to make a purchase. Finally, check out what content they enjoy after purchasing.
2. Give Hauntingly Good Solutions
Potential customers are looking to you to answer their questions and solve their problems. Make your blog the place to come for expert advice. The only way to do this is to provide advice that is shockingly better than the competition. There are a few ways do achieve this:
- Voice your opinions. As you’re never going to please everyone, it’s useless even to try. Plus, you’ll appear far more knowledgeable if you pick a side.
- Name your sources. Facts and statistics mean much more when you unmask where they originate from. Then, users can see that you are using reliable information to back up your argument.
- Talk about your own struggles. Content is no place for disguises. A human touch gives authority to your advice. Explain how you overcame your own demons to reach where you are today and what talk about the lessons you learned.
3. Trick and Treat
Great content provide a trick and a treat. The trick: users will want to share the content, enabling you to reach and thrill even more people. The treat: your audience won’t be able to get enough and will keep checking back for more.
Trick
To encourage shares, create content users will want their friends to see. You can do this through unique insights, a new take on an old issue, or even a gripping story (especially about an experience users can relate to). Then, make it easy to share the content by adding social share buttons to your blog. On social media, running the occasional competition to incentivize users to share content is also useful. However, use this tactic in moderation — you don’t want to scare followers away.
Treat
To keep users coming back for more, you need to keep thinking of fresh ideas. There are a few places to turn for inspiration:
- Consider your all-time favorite blog posts from other brands
- Ask other people in your company for ideas
- Find out what readers want to know
- Turn to Google to see what topics are trending
- Revisit an old blog post and update it with current information
4. Don’t Be a Ghost After You Have Their Attention
Your content marketing strategy mustn’t end once you have users’ attention. To truly succeed, you need to stay involved — even after leads have converted. Don’t just haunt the place: take an active role. Engage users by responding to their comments and by creating pieces of content that answers their questions.
You’ll likely find that you only need to ask and most people will say what they want, giving you ideas on how you can improve. Negative feedback may initially horrify you, but you can often learn great lessons from it.
5. Create A Zombie Apocalypse Through Multiple Channels
Your content may be spectacular, but it’s no good if you’re unable to get it in front of the right people. This means using a mix of different channels. Strategically select places where you know customers will be and swamp those channels.
To decide which channels are ripe for your zombie apocalypse, monitor customers’ activity. Analyze where your content is receiving the greatest engagement. If you are currently active on some channels that are receiving minimal engagement, consider if this is because customers are uninterested in interacting with your brand in these places or if you could fix the problem by adapting your content. Keep trying and testing new strategies to find out what works best.
Your content marketing strategy should leave a sweet taste in users’ mouths. This is only possible if you target the right audience in the right way. To do so, you need to know who your customers are and then bring them what they want, where they want it. Always keep in mind that your number one goal is to solve your audience’s problems.
