Understanding what customers want: Content that fuels their fire

Content marketing is all about creating or sharing interesting and useful content free of charge to customers or potential customers. It’s about having a conversation about a mutually interesting topic. But getting conversations going isn’t always easy if you aren’t sure what your customers want to talk about.

To be effective, your content needs to be closely related to the products and services that you sell without looking or sounding like a sales pitch. It needs to be interesting to draw them in. You need to answer their questions, offer solutions to their problems and show yourself as an expert in your field. But first, you need to know what they want.

What your customers want

You don’t need to be psychic to know what your customers are looking for, and guessing is a waste of time. To provide customers with the content they want, you need to know who they are. Ask yourself these three questions:

1. What do they look like? Literally how old are they, what gender, what ethnicity, what income bracket, what education level?
2. Why are they coming to you? What makes your customers seek you out? Not the simple answer, they need a haircut, but the underlying reason – they want to look better for a special occasion.
3. What are they looking for? What’s the best possible outcome your customers expect when coming to you? Knowing this will help drive your content.

Understanding the answers to these three questions will help you speak directly to your customers unique needs with the right language in a way that will resonate with them.

Pay attention to how your audience consumes information. Use Facebook Insights, web stats, Twitter stats, etc. Know which topics or keywords are working for you. If you don’t have enough data yet, check out what’s working for your competition and go from there.

Keep track of which topics are most popular with your audience. If you run a salon and you want to promote your hair products, but product posts don’t get any attention, you need to either stop talking about them or talk about them in a different way. Find the balance between what your customers want and what you want them to know.

It’s all about the content.

Answers

Your customers have burning questions about your business or products. They want to know which hair cut works best with their face shape. They want to know the best way to straighten curly hair.  Give them the answers before they have to ask. Answer the questions they may not even realize they needed the answers to.

Solutions

Your customers are looking to you for something. They want their hairstyle to make them feel special for the event they’re attending: you can give them that. Whatever need your product or service fulfills, show that solution through your content marketing.

Thought-leadership and expertise

Create content that showcases your expertise in your market, that shows you are a thought-leader in the industry. There is conversation about your product or service going on online; grab attention by joining that conversation. You need to be a part of the conversation, and it’s even better if you’re leading it.

Your content needs to add value for your customers or they won’t pay attention to it. To add value, you need to understand what they need and show them you understand and are willing to provide that. Giving answers and solutions and showcasing that you know your industry will give customers the confidence to do business with you. Your content needs to provide the fuel for their fire; something interesting they’ll want to gather around.