From your business perspective, what is the objective of content writing? Why is it important to understand your customers to write effective, compelling content?
When you are writing content for your website or blog, you are communicating with your visitors – in the case of a business website, you are communicating with your present and prospective customers and clients.
Why do you communicate? Just for the heck of it? Just to keep them on your website? Just to improve your search engine rankings? Just to make them share your links on their social networking profiles?
These things are important, not the “heck of it” part, but the other parts like engaging people, improving search engine rankings, and encouraging people to share your links.
Ultimately, you want people to become your customers and clients. You want them to use your product or service. You want them to pay you, spend money on you. Why would they?
A good thing about the Internet from your point of view is, setting up business is very easy. Just like it is easy for you to set a business, it is also easier for others.
On the negative side, this gives rise to tough competition. In the mid-2000s I was among the very few content writers and I faced very low competition. For some years I got busy with something else and by the time I got my senses back, there were literally thousands of content writers and content writing companies competing with my business.
A good thing about the Internet from your customer’s point of view is, he or she has immediate access to tens, or even hundreds of businesses like you. He or she can compare you with others. He or she can also ask around their friends on Facebook.
When your competitors vie for the attention of your customers, when thousands of distractions keep your customers distracted, it is your content writing (or your content writer) that comes to your rescue.
5 Content Writing Tips to Win Over Your Customers
But content writing cannot deliver in vacuum.
Effective content writing requires you to properly understand your customers. Only then you will be able to create content people will relate to.
Unless they relate to your content, they are not going to do business with you.
This is a reality that you can accept now, at this very moment, or, you realize it later, when you have lost much business and your competitors are much ahead of you.
For your content writing to work, why is it important to understand your customers?
Whether you want to write engaging content to improve your conversion rate on your website or you want to improve your SEO, at the core of your content writing exists your understanding of your customers’ needs.
What does “understanding your customers’ needs” mean?
It means understanding what they are looking for, and then providing it through content writing.
People are looking for answers. Before they buy something, they want to go through as much information as possible. They want to read reviews. They want to get opinions from their friends. 81% shoppers do online research before buying.
Research means, they go from link to link, reading about the product or service they are about to purchase, as much as possible.
How much content does your customer need to read before doing business with you
What if all the information they are looking for is present on your website or blog? You can easily publish that information. This way, they won’t have to go anywhere else. When they find what they are looking for on your website, when they finally decide to go ahead with the purchase, they will purchase from your website.
How do you know what they’re looking for? How do you know what sort of questions they have in mind before buying your product or service? Do you have a list of questions they may search for? Do you know what are their concerns?
Do you know how to answer their “whys”, “hows”, “whens” and “whats”?
This, is why it is very important to understand your customers. You have to look at your business from their perspective. Don’t get swept away by the greatness of your product or service. Try to understand what your customers want.
What are the problems they are going through? How can your business solve their problem? How do you communicate to them that your business can solve their problem better than your competitors?
Before writing content, how to know what the customer is looking for?
Content writing is an ongoing process. It is not possible to know everything about your customers from the beginning itself. In fact, your content can help you in this regard.
But here are a few observations you can make to understand your customers better:
- Talk to people outside of your business: Talk to people who have nothing to do with your business. They don’t know anything about your product or service. But it would help if your product or service could help them in some way. Ask them what would stop them from doing business with you or what would encourage them to do business with you? What would be their concerns?
- Closely follow other blogs and websites in your niche: Lots of good content is published in almost every niche, almost every day. If possible, even join members-only communities (for which you may have to pay) to get the insights of people who have already created lots of content in your niche.
- Do keyword research, especially suggestions by Google: Search for keywords on Google. When you search on Google, in the end of the search results, you see other suggestions from Google. These are the search terms being used by people and you can use them to create content for your blog or website.
- Use Google Analytics: The Google Analytics data will be available to you after a few months of continuous content writing. The Analytics dashboard will be able to tell you what search terms are people using to find content on your website. By studying this data you can know whether your content writing approach is right or wrong.
- Get feedback: Getting feedback directly from your customers and clients is very easy these days. You can interact with your customers and clients on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and thousands of other platforms available these days. You can also encourage people to leave comments on your own website or blog.
- Create a comprehensive FAQs section: Creating an FAQs section is the best way of writing targeted content. Using your common sense, try to figure out what questions your customers and clients may have before deciding to do business with you. Address all these questions in your FAQ section.
Credible Content can help you understand your customers and clients and then write targeted content
As a team of professional content writers at Credible Content we can write content your audience is looking for. Randomly writing content to cover all your keywords and search terms doesn’t do you much good. Of course, optimizing your content is necessary, but you can do it even while creating targeted, well-meaning content that improves your conversion rate.
Our content writing service will help you get higher search engine rankings and improve your conversion rate.
