The entire purpose of effective content writing is to win over your customers. If your content writing isn’t winning over your customers, even if it is improving your search engine rankings and it is able to create some buzz on social media websites, it isn’t working for you. Your content writing is only effective if it can get you more customers on a consistent basis.
The content writing tips to win over your customers that I am listing in this post are not something extraordinary. They are common sense. These tips are applicable in every situation because they take care of the fundamentals of empathizing with your customers and solving their problems.
Why do you need to read about content writing tips to win over your customers?
Interesting question (patting my own back here). Many people actually want to read, and should read these content writing tips because although they are writing and publishing lots of content on their website and blog, they are not getting customers. Why is it so?
This is because many people want to use content writing without understanding its real meaning. They get confused.
You see, taking a shortcut is a natural human proclivity so it isn’t like, people are nasty. It just happens. Even if I didn’t know how important content writing is for winning over your customers I would do all sorts of silly things assuming that they are the right things to do.
In fact, so much junk content was being written to win the SEO game that Google had to come up with updates like Panda and Penguin to weed out content that was published solely to get better search engine rankings. Again, I’m pretty sure that most of the people indulging in such activities weren’t even aware that they were not right practices. Many were prompted by their the so-called “SEO experts”.
If you don’t follow these tips (the tips that I have listed here) then you run the risk of spending lots of time and money on a wasteful activity. No matter at what stage of content writing and content marketing you are, even if the harm is done, it can be undone.
Why content writing plays an important role in getting you more customers?
To be frank, there is a trust deficit on the Internet. Not everybody is out there to get your money, but many people are. Also, since there is practically no entry barrier when it comes to setting up shop on the Internet (you can do it practically free), there are many “businesses” that are not businesses.
One of the greatest reasons why you need content writing to get more customers is that advertising is growing less and less effective. As you must have experienced yourself, people don’t want to see ads – even you don’t want to see ads when you’re looking for information or when you are entertaining yourself. People even use ad blockers these days to make sure they don’t encounter ads.
Continuous content publishing, on the other hand, helps you establish relationships. This is because, effective content writing means providing solutions to people’s problems. When do you use the search engine? When you are looking for some information. Even when you want to buy something, even when you want to hire a service, you look for things in the form of a question, something like “is there a content writing service for my boutique?”.
Continuously writing and publishing content in today’s context means providing solutions to people’s problems. If you can consistently solve people’s problems (directly, or slightly indirectly, pertaining to your business) they begin to trust you, and when they trust you, they do business with you.
Also, there is lots of noise on the Internet and your important messages tend to get lost. People’s attention span has come down drastically. This means you have to constantly be in front of them. Your updates should constantly appear in front of them. There must be some way you remain on their radar. When they need something they should know that you provide that thing.
Tips for writing website content to win over your customers
Your website content should be all about helping your customers. The more you help them, the more you get them. A good example would be the Open Forum Blog maintained by American Express. The multinational financial service doesn’t use Open Forum to promote its business directly, but indirectly. The forum is full of useful information for business executives and managers. The information is so good that it can be used to build an entire business. This information and its usefulness generates goodwill for American Express. People who use this information to grow their businesses and careers, when they need financial services, whom do they choose? Of course American Express.
You may think that American Express is a very big company so it can afford to experiment with various forms of marketing. But this sort of success through content writing can also be achieved at a micro level. Just follow the tips below.
- Provide answers to people’s questions: Everybody has questions. There is a complete website dedicated to questions – Quora.com. If your prospective customer wants to improve his search engine rankings he will be probably looking for “how can I improve my search engine rankings?”. Provide this answer. Giving answers builds trust. It helps to solve people’s problems. When you solve people’s problems they like your content writing. When they like it, they appreciate it. When they appreciate it, they readily do business with you. This way you your business gets new customers.
- Focus on SEO content writing: On this webpage titled SEO article writing service I have written that there is no such thing as “SEO content” because every piece of well-written content is actually “SEO content”. Nonetheless, you have to take care of your SEO while writing content. Here are a few links that you may like to check out to improve your SEO content writing: 10 tips on how to write SEO content for your website; 5 content writing tips to improve SEO; and 5 ways to beat your competitors at SEO with content writing. Improving your SEO with effective and quality content writing is very essential to bring targeted traffic to your website.
- Write consistently and regularly: Content writing isn’t a one-time affair. Millions of webpages and blog posts are being crawled and indexed and, ranked, every day by just Google. You can easily imagine how much content is being published and how much content your content writing has to compete with. If you don’t do content writing regularly, you will be left behind by your competitors because many of them are doing content writing regularly. When you write content consistently and regularly you increase the probability of covering all your topics and also increasing your overall keyword density. Plus, Google likes to index fresh content regularly.
- Write longer blog posts and articles: Actually, this is a part of writing SEO content. Google and other search engines these days prefer blog posts and articles over 1000 words. To make things difficult for people who just want to spam search engine results without working hard. If you do some research you will notice that longer blog posts and articles rank higher compared to shorter ones. I would like to stress again that getting good rankings is very important because unless you get your prospective customers to your website, how are you going to make them do business with you? Although there are many other ways of getting your prospective customers to your website (PPC campaigns, for example) the most effective way of getting them over is through effective and passionate content writing.
- Talk about benefits and advantages instead of features: Your prospective customers couldn’t care less about how great your product is. What is in it for them? Is it going to solve their problem? Is it going to give them what they want? Is it going to make their life easier? If you want to win over your customers your content writing should focus on benefits and advantages of your product instead of cryptic features. You may like to read Online Copywriting: difference between features and benefits.
Here is another very important point that I missed: create realistic personas before writing your content.
Personas are the profiles of your ideal customers and clients. People will react to your content according to their mental state, their financial state, their age, where they live, what professions they are in, whether they have kids or not and sometimes, what gender they have. If you have a clearly-defined persona laid out in front of you, you can target your content writing in a better, effective manner.
These content writing insights to get more customers for your business are not all-encompassing. I may have missed out a few great tips. But these tips can give you a head start. These tips will stop you from taking a wrong direction.