You’ve built an attractive website, and you know you need content. You might feel pressed to speedily produce pages of prose and blog posts to fill those empty pages. But wait: consider carefully the types of content that will actually attract visitors to your site.

Here are five simple strategies for crafting your content.

1. Gain your reader’s trust.

In this era of super-savvy consumers, it’s all about trust.

Smart marketers today recognize that consumers are more educated and savvy than ever before. Any statement you make is instantly thrown before Google and compared to other, similar claims from industry competitors, while your reader seeks real, factual, unbiased information that can inform a purchasing decision.

If you can provide this useful information — uncoupled from the benefits of your own product or service — you will gain the reader’s trust as a credible expert in your field. Bam. You’re halfway to gaining a new customer.

Because once you are a trusted expert, your sales materials — FAQs, specifications, feature lists — carry more weight than those of your competitors whose primary marketing focus is advertising and transparently persuasive tactics.

2. Provide real value.

If the content you provide is relevant and useful, your viewers will share it and link to it because it has inherent value. Google rewards this behavior, so you move up in the search results.

For example, perhaps your expertise is green architecture. Provide a free whitepaper or report defining sustainable architecture: what is LEED certification, what types of materials are considered “green”, how might a building’s ventilation system be designed to be environmentally friendly?  Someone searching for information on green design might find your information so useful that she would share it with colleagues or friends.

This type of marketing strategy is an aspect of content marketing, and has been shown statistically to be effective in driving new visitors to your site. But wait…who the heck are those visitors, anyway?

3. Know your customer.

 

Don’t talk to an empty room.

The holy grail of copywriting: know thy audience. Spend time developing the persona of your customers — probably multiple personas. What problems do they have that you can solve?

If you sell mittens, write to cold hands; if you sell tech trinkets, write to your widget-user. Don’t create a complete feature list of all the stuff you do well.  Yawn.  Instead, understand your customer’s pain, and meet him there. With the solution.

4. Write intentionally, with focus.

Once you really know your customer, make sure every piece of content — every sentence, every image — pays for the space it takes up on the page.

It’s fun and easy to write about design strategies or industry trends or historic data or any other tidbit related to your business. Who isn’t fascinated by why and how you developed your widget? Your customer. Stay tightly focused on the problem you are solving for your customer —  on how your widget will improve his life, make his work easier, bring magic to his day.

5. Write it good.

Yes, I know that subhead should read “write it well,” but we can take some grammatical (not to mention colloquial) liberties here because we do mean good.

Bad writing is a turn-off and makes you appear an amateur. You’re in business because you’re an expert in your industry — because you’re selling something that is valuable, useful and desirable. Why wrap it in rags? And while your website visitors may not actually notice well-written copy, they will certainly notice prose with errors, and worse: boring prose or outdated topics.

Make the writing sing and soar and hit its target. Make it fun, tell a story, build empathy. Make it good.

I can help you develop, write or edit your content to ensure that is does what you want. You don’t have time to write material that doesn’t hit its target.

Contact me and let’s work together.