Framework Branding

Unknown-4
Menu

Category: Content

The Importance of Audience Segmentation

Posted on by Christine

The Importance of Audience Segmentation in Marketing

Logic dictates that the larger your target audience, the more customers you will convert. After all, sales is a numbers game – the more people you pitch, the more product you sell. The issue with this logic lies in the pitch itself and the advantages of relationship building in content marketing.

Marketing messages lobbed at all females between the ages of 18 and 25 are not likely to land. Consumers are looking for a more personal experience. They want to develop a relationship with the brands they choose to do business with. Often the choice between one brand and another offering the same product is made based on the brand feel that resonates with the consumer.

Segmenting Your Audience

Within the demographic of females between the age of 18 and 25, there are many variations. Some of those women are still in school while others are beginning their career. Some ride public transportation to their favorite night spot, others ride their bikes to the public library. Some are planning their wedding, some are planning a vacation with their parents, some are pregnant with their first child.

To reach your target audience with marketing messages, you have to know who they are and where to find them. If you can speak to one segment of your female audience, the ones who ride public transportation for example, you can craft a message that will resonate with them. You can connect with that segment on a personal level; Each individual might believe you are speaking directly to her. Deliver that message in a bus stop or a subway station and your conversion rate doubles.

Benefits of Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation is the difference between marketing to thousands and connecting with 1% or reaching out to hundreds and resonating with 10%. As your conversion rate goes higher, your cost per lead or cost per customer goes down. Here are some clear benefits to marketing to a select target audience:

Reinforce customer-centered messaging
Potential customers want to hear about themselves. That’s what gets their attention and engages them with your brand. When you talk as if you know them, you know what their lives are like and why they need your services, they hear you. The more specific you get about defining your audience, the easier it is to craft messages that will make them feel like you are speaking directly to them and you understand who they are and what they need.

Lower acquisition costs
Your cost per customer will be lower because your sales cycle will be shorter. If it takes five touches for you to convert a customer, with a more targeted marketing approach you can reduce that to three touches. Think of your sales cycle like your production facility. Every time you have to move materials, each time a team member has to touch the product, it costs you more money. When you keep the number of touches down to a minimum, you eliminate wasted motions and increase efficiency, reducing your production costs. If your marketing messages go straight to making a direct connection with your audience, even if that audience is smaller, you will convert in fewer touches, reducing your cost per sale.

Highlights new opportunities
While you are slicing and dicing your audience into smaller, more specific segments, you may uncover a niche you hadn’t considered. Those females who ride public transportation could be a good example. While you are reviewing their demographics, you might discover that the bus riders live further out from the city center than the subway riders do. Maybe the subway riders are more likely to be renters while the bus riders tend to own single-family homes. Now you have an opportunity to craft a different message and maybe even add a new product or service specifically designed for those bus riders who come in from the suburbs.

The idea of audience segmentation suggests dividing your audience into smaller pieces, and that can sound counter-productive. After all, you want to make more sales, not fewer. Why would you pitch to a smaller audience? The bottom line on audience segmentation is that it protects your bottom line. Targeted marketing messages are going to convert at a higher rate than more general pitches. 

Understanding the Value of Content Marketing

Posted on by Christine

Understanding the Value of Content Marketing

Content marketing is the best way to improve sales in your online business. To begin with, you are reaching customers where they are, online, and where they can buy what you are selling. The other important aspect to content marketing is selling through not selling.

That’s right. Content marketing improves sales without trying to sell anything. It is like a stealth strategy that customers don’t see coming. People don’t want to be pitched at all day long. Instead, they long for meaningful engagement.

Content marketing engages customers and potential customers without the pressure to buy anything. It is like giving them free stuff before they make a purchase. You share valuable information and give them a sense of belonging to your brand’s tribe without asking for anything (much) in return.

The Value of Membership Content Marketing Delivers
You probably did not go into business to build a community and manage a social group. Ultimately, you have a product or service to sell, and that is how you sustain your business. Unless you operate a fitness club, you may not see the value of membership.

Think of it this way…a sale is a one-time event, but membership is long term. Members of your brand’s tribe, customers, raving fans of your company will bring more than the revenue from one sale.

They will be repeat customers, exponentially increasing the return on your investment to make them customers in the first place.

They will be brand ambassadors, spreading the name of your company everywhere they go.

They will recruit new customers who will also become raving fans and make multiple purchases.

They will be your market research team, giving valuable feedback on your products and services and suggesting new items to add to your line.

They will help you recruit rockstar employees as you grow your business.

It is almost impossible to calculate the value of a loyal customer base in dollars and cents. They are the secret sauce to brand development and business expansion.

Building that Customer Base for Your Brand
Traditional advertising techniques that focus on making a sale look for places where your target audience gathers. The idea is to go to those places, make your offer, and sales will happen. This sales model has limited value.

Content marketing turns this theory upside down. Instead of looking for places where your audience gathers, you are giving them a place to gather — your website. The key, of course, is getting them there.

People are attracted by the information you put out. The words you publish on your webpage draw them in. The goal is to offer so much value in information that your customers stick around. The longer they stay on your website, the more likely they are to buy.

Adding new content frequently keeps customers coming back. It gives them a reason to visit your website on a regular basis. That consistent content also improves your search ranking in Google, so more people can find your website.

Making an investment in content marketing can blow up your business over time. The results start slow, but once the momentum begins, it will grow exponentially. When your website traffic increases, so does your opportunity to generate leads directly from your own platform.

Learn More
Check out our Content Connection package in Quick Builds. Imagine where your business could be after six months of solid content marketing execution.

The Secret to Writing Viral Content

Posted on by Christine

The Secret to Writing Viral Content

Let’s face it, when you run a business, time is precious. There are a lot of tasks you need to complete in a day, and that doesn’t even take into consideration the time and energy required to create new ideas to grow your business and stay ahead of your competition.

A huge portion of your time is probably devoted to creating content for your website and feeding the social media machine. The thing about SEO is that it takes time and it goes on forever. Inching your way to the top of the search results takes persistence and a boatload of copy.

If you are going to put the time into writing content for your website, it would be good to know that thousands of people are reading it. Here are some secret strategies for writing content that goes viral:

Keep it short.
Believe it or not, most people will not spend a whole minute reading your business blog. Get to the point and make it easy to read. They may not make it to the end, but if your blog impresses readers, they are more likely to share.

Start with a pithy headline.
This is not the place for click-bait because that gets old, fast. Instead, give your readers something juicy and clever. Capture their attention by teasing the best nugget your blog has to offer. Creating a little suspense or intrigue is good as long as you follow it up with the resolution.

Be emotional.
Scary movies are popular despite the obvious negative emotions because people like to feel. When you grab them by the heart, they are drawn into your story. Use words that elicit emotion from your reader and they will fall in love with your brand and want to share your content.

Paint a picture.
Visuals are especially helpful in this digital age. Use your choice of words to paint a picture, and pair your blog with vivid imagery. The pictures will help you tell the story and engage your readers on an emotional level.

Give freely.
Think of your blog as a free gift to your customers. Give them all you have to offer in the form of knowledge and information. Show your love for your customers and do not hold back. They should leave your blog with at least one actionable idea. It is okay to remind readers to share your content and spread the love.

Play the odds.
The more content you post on your website, the more likely you are to end up with a viral blog. The math is similar to sales: the more calls you make, the more sales you’ll make. Some days content marketing might feel like a big black hole, but it is not. With more frequent posting you can get your website ranked in Google and send your blogs viral.

The secret is out, the more you blog the more unique visitors you can attract to your website. Use these secrets of viral content to breathe some new life into your content, and keep writing. If you want a little help to double your output, check out our content writing service.

Tackling the Content Marketing Mountain

Posted on by Christine

Tackling the Content Marketing Mountain

You did your research, so you understand the importance of adding fresh, relevant content to your website every week. Potential customers will not see your website or know about what your company has to offer unless you come up in Google search results. Content marketing is the best way to improve your website’s organic search ranking.

Now, you are stuck with the idea of making this happen. Creating content about your products and services is not that big a deal. The problem is that it takes time, one resource that is in short supply for a small business owner.

The minimum you can do to make an impact is 500 words once a week. This effort needs to go on for many, many weeks in a row. In fact, for the foreseeable future of your business, you need to post new content to your website every week.

Make a Schedule for Content Marketing
Just like organizing anything else in your business, content marketing starts with a schedule. This is how the pros do it. Decide what day each week you will publish a new blog post on your website. The day of the week matters less to your readers than it does to you.

Block out one full hour each week, at the same time on the same day, to post new content on your website. When you get a procedure in place, you can probably accomplish this task in less than an hour. You can use the remaining time to review your site and see if you need to make any other changes.

Your schedule also needs to include time to develop content ideas and create the content. We don’t suggest you do this all at once. Instead, schedule two separate times, one for brainstorming content ideas and the other for actually writing your blog posts.

Your brainstorming session can be short, maybe just 30 minutes. And it does not have to happen every week. You could come up with ideas for several new pieces of content marketing in one session, so maybe squeeze in one or two brainstorming sessions each month.

The content writing is what will be time-intensive. For this part you need a solid block of uninterrupted time to focus on your writing. Start by scheduling two hours. With practice, you may eventually be able to write a 500-word blog post in about an hour.

Follow Through
As a business owner, you already know that follow-through is one of the most important aspects of accomplishment. Planning is key, but without follow-through nothing really happens. Gaining visibility for your website in Google searches is essential to growing your business online, but it takes time and consistency.

Just like any other aspect of your business, you cannot miss a deadline. Each week you have to follow through on your content writing schedule. You must create and publish new and engaging content on your website consistently to see any results.

If the mountain of work involved in consistent content creation seems insurmountable with your other responsibilities in running your business, you may need professional help. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Many business owners do not write their own web content, although it appears as if they do. Check out our content writing subscription service. We’ll never tell!

Learn to Dribble or Craft Good Content – Your Choice

Posted on by Christine

Learn to Dribble or Craft Good Content - Your Choice

Writing is a skill like athleticism. You could be the fastest runner in the world, but not be able to dribble a basketball. A good athlete may be strong and well-coordinated, but he or she is not necessarily good at every type of sport.

Good writers, like accomplished athletes, practice regularly. If you were a good writer when you were in college, you may be out of practice by now. With proper instruction and practice, however, anyone can become a good writer. It is not dependent on raw talent or innate abilities.

In this age of technology, you do not even need the physical dexterity to hold a pencil in order to be a good writer. You could peck out some words on a keyboard and be brilliant! If you are writing haiku, a few syllables artfully arranged in three lines could make you a good writer.

Writing a haiku, however, is not a writing skill that will win you any awards for business writing. Are there awards for good business writing? Sure there are. They come in the form of more customers, better sales and higher revenue.

Eye the Goal: Grow Your Business
As a business owner, you probably realize that you can achieve anything as long as you know what the goal is. Working used to be a status symbol until accomplishment took its place. Figure out what you are trying to accomplish, and you are halfway there.

The goal of business writing is increased business, of course, but what does that look like? When it comes to content marketing, good writing entices, informs and entertains your audience. It makes them want to click on your offer, buy your product and return to visit your website often.

Good writing can keep your customer base engaged and create a feeling of community for them around your brand. It can solve the problems of the day and bring about world peace. Okay, maybe not that, but you get the picture.

Define the Audience: Get More Customers
Writing that appeals to women between the ages of 50 and 65 will not resonate with millennials of any gender. You may be able to engage an audience of camping enthusiasts on topics related to survival and outdoor exploration, but environmental allergy sufferers will not be interested in joining that discussion.

When it comes to writing, the demographics of your audience may be the most important determining factor. Millennials are not likely to connect with text that tells them to mind their P’s and Q’s or warns that loose lips sink ships. An older audience may be lost with suggestions to google it and check their newsfeed.

Before you begin writing, it is important to define your audience. Who are you talking to? Are they already customers of yours or are they part of a new market you are trying to attract? How old are they, and what are some of their hobbies?

Get to Work Building Marketing Content
When you know your goal and who you’re writing for, you are ready to begin. If writing fluency is an issue for you, just start writing anything that comes to mind. Imagine you are talking to one of your audience members, and write what you would say. You can always go back and edit your work later. It is easier to cross words out than make them up.

Here are some other things to keep in mind while you are developing written content for your website, social media and ad campaigns:

Take the customer’s perspective.
Instead of writing the information you want your customer to know, think about what he or she is looking for. Business owners make this mistake all the time. Their content or marketing copy is all about their qualifications, features of their products and services or other professional achievements that set them apart. They do not realize how irrelevant these details are to the customer.

We worked with one client who was updating their website content and wasn’t aware of this rule. On the About page, they detailed their business story from the beginning. This was a great idea, except they took it from the perspective of sales and revenue. In most businesses, customers are not interested in your revenue, they want to know what you will do for them.

Customers want to know that you understand their problems. When you write your website content from their perspective, instead of your own, they will connect with it. Even if you are describing the history of your business, the emphasis should be on what you did to help customers, and how you adapted your business over time to better meet customers’ needs.

Emote a little.
People are emotional creatures. Even the most stoic among us can be driven by emotions. Feelings, good and bad, are one thing that connect us to each other as human beings.

You want your blog writing to connect with website visitors, so put some emotion into it. It may not be professional to talk about your feelings, but you have to tap into emotions to connect with readers. Mostly, you want to write about their feelings, and keep it positive.

Use emotion-words to describe the customer experience with your company. When you write about your products or services, include the emotions that satisfied customers experience. Your readers will identify with positive emotions, and your writing will connect those emotions to your product and services.

Cut the fat.
Good for your heart; good for your content marketing. People are in a hurry — always! They are not going to spend a lot of time reading the text on your website. If you want to get a point across, you’ll have to make it fast.

The fastest way to convey written information is by making the best use of each word. The old adage in the writing industry goes like this: write tight. Eliminate words like good, nice, very, really, and other words you may think are descriptive. Instead choose delicious, comfortable, affordable, and other words that carry specific meaning and elicit emotion from your reader.

Keep your sentences and paragraphs short. If you are telling a narrative, only include the steps that are most important to the point of your story. Use contractions and other informal language to keep your tone conversational.

Outsourcing is Always an Option
Although you are a good writer, it may take a long time for you to develop good content for your website. Just like what you do for your customers, content writing is a specific skill. When you are trying to balance your time as a business owner, outsourcing certain tasks is essential. Check out our monthly content marketing package and compare the cost to the value of your time when it could be spent doing other things.

Creating Your Content Marketing Plan

Posted on by Christine

Creating Your Content Marketing Plan

Knowing you need to do content marketing is just the beginning of the next creative project in your business. You didn’t think you could manage another project right now, but trust us, you want to launch this one right away.

Content marketing is a fancy way of saying you are going to use content, copy, words to market your business. Now, marketing is different from selling, but you already knew that. Selling is a short term process: you make a call or offer a discount, the customer likes your offer and makes the purchase. 

Marketing is like playing the long game. You reach out to would-be clients, educate them about your brand, encourage them to connect. You let the world know what you do and why you should do it for them. You make connections for people between your services and their lives, their problems and your solutions.

Selling makes sales; marketing makes customers. Customers are worth more!

Scheduling is Important
You can’t market your business when you have time. If you wake up one morning with a great marketing idea, you can’t just implement it that day. There is a flow, a schedule, a cadence to marketing your business. You need to make a plan for content marketing.

For example, your next big project would provide excellent material for a blog or case study to promote your business’ capabilities. However, as you are wrapping up that project, you will be focused on your punch list items, getting the work done on schedule, and making the customer happy with those final details. You won’t have time to worry about scheduling blogs or social posts. The whole project might get finished and turned over to the owner with you even stopping to shoot some photos.

Content marketing moves the online world, but it happens slowly. Your content marketing needs a lot of lead time to show results. Get your schedule right and start now!

Week by Week
Creating content for your business can be overwhelming, so look at it one week at a time. When the long range outlook seems bleak, it’s time to focus on the day to day. Don’t worry about how to create 30 chunks of interesting and engaging content encompassing at least 15,000 words. Just concentrate on the 7 items for this week.

Break your content marketing down by week, and it will build itself. (Well, not really, but we want to say something encouraging.) Decide what the theme or topic will be for each week. That makes it easier to create marketing content each day. You can lay out your plan for the whole month at one time, and then execute day by day.

Duplication
Each piece of content you publish on your business blog needs to be unique to get the most SEO value. You can use the same content on various platforms, though. The content you write for your newsletter can later be posted to your website business blog. Excerpts of that content can be used as social media posts or even marketing copy for landing pages or lead magnets.

All of these uses for your content should be planned out in advance. Tracking them on a spreadsheet will make it easier to stay organized throughout the week. Certain topics can be scheduled in the weeks before a new product launch. Write those topics into the appropriate weeks on your marketing plan, so there is no last minute scrambling.

Once you have your marketing plan created, you’re going to need some help executing. Check out our Content Connection service for a pleasant alternative to staying up all night writing your own marketing content.

4 Content Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Posted on by Christine

4 Content Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right. This rule, of course, applies to everything in life, especially business. When it comes to business, everything you do costs time, money or both. Not doing it right means throwing away those precious resources.

When it comes to content marketing, you absolutely should be doing it! Avoid these mistakes to be sure you are doing it right.

Stolen Content
Plagiarism is a real crime. Think about how you would feel if someone stole your work product. That is not the worst part of stolen content, however. Only unique content has SEO value for your website, so stolen content is not getting your brand anywhere. Internet users are becoming more savvy, too. If they notice your content on other websites, you will lose some credibility. This is the opposite effect you want your website content to have on your customer base.

*Bonus tip: Just because you got your content honestly – you paid for it – doesn’t mean it is unique. There are unscrupulous content services out there. Watch out!

Piling Up Words
Yes, content marketing is about publishing a volume of words on a regular basis. If all you are doing is heaving a bunch of words out into the universe, however, you are making a big mistake. Incorporating keywords into your content is essential for SEO, but overdoing it will tip the scales against you. Plus, content marketing is an ideal opportunity to communicate with customers and potential customers. Shoveling a pile of words at them is not the way to exploit this situation.

*Bonus tip: Concentrate on communicating with your customers and delivering value with each blog and they will become raving fans of your business.

One Time Efforts
It takes time or money to create the volume of content you need to accomplish your content marketing goals. You are wasting those resources if you do not have a plan to repurpose that content. The same chunk of content can be used in your newsletter, on your blog and in social media posts. The internet is crowded with words, so you cannot expect everyone to see yours. Posting them in multiple places and at different times increases the reach of your content, and, therefore, the impact of your content marketing.

*Bonus tip: Keep track of where and when you post your content with a simple spreadsheet. It will make your content marketing efforts less chaotic. 

Poor Quality
The word “quality” has almost no meaning in this context. Poor quality content could mean anything from bad grammar to repetitive phraseology. It could even refer to content that does not make use of appropriate keywords to entice Google algorithms while it engages human readers. 

Content that is full of empty phrases, grammar and punctuation mistakes, or illogical or poorly expressed ideas is not helpful to your brand or business goals. Many business owners make the mistake of believing that any content is better than none. This is not true. Do not make the mistake of publishing content that makes your brand look bad. If you cannot create professional-caliber content, hire someone who can.

*Bonus tip: Hiring a professional writer is like getting a new hairdresser, check out samples of their work to be sure they are right for you.

It’s okay to make mistakes; you learn from them and move on. Learn from these mistakes that someone else already made and you’ll be moving ahead faster.

Content Creation: How the Pros Do It

Posted on by Christine

Content Creation: How the Pros Do It

Creating content is fun and easy — the first time. Let’s face it, you were dying to tell the world about your business. You wrote the daylights out of your first business blog post. That was the first week. Now you just can’t believe how much time and effort it takes to come up with at least 500 words of relevant copy every week.

Multiply your anxiety over your content marketing issues by one hundred and you have some idea what a professional content writer faces every day. There are two main differences, however. Professional writers live to write. It is our primary business and with constant practice, we write fluently, producing content at a much faster rate than the average person running a small business.

The other difference between you and a professional content writer is the approach. This process for tackling a 500 word blog post will make it quick and easy for you, just like a professional.

Brainstorm a topic.
This part can be fun. Once you get going, you’ll be surprised how many good topic ideas you can come up with in an hour. After one brainstorming session, you’ll be ready to write weekly business blogs for a couple months.

Break it down into sections.
You don’t want to set off to write 500 words all in one pass. Instead, break your topic down into sections. If your title suggests a list of some sort, like three tips for better baking, you are halfway there. Ideally, in a 500 word blog you want at least two subheadings. That means two separate sections in the body of your blog.

Say you’re writing a blog about how to plant your Spring garden. Break the how-to down into a couple distinct steps, maybe there are five. List them out for yourself to keep your writing organized. Another tactic for dividing your writing into smaller sections is to list tips, ideas, steps, or mistakes that are related to your topic.

Do the math.
This is one of those unexpected parts of a professional writing process. Yes, we do math, even though we don’t really like it. Start with 500, the number of words you want to have in your blog. Blogs shorter than that do not have good SEO value and may appear to short-change your customers on useful information.

You’re going to use at least 50 words for your introduction and 50 for your conclusion, so subtract those, first. Then, divide the remaining 400 words by the number of sections you defined. If you have three sections, your goal will be to write about 130 words in each section. With five sections, you only need about 80 words per section. (We don’t recommend trying to squeeze in any more than five sections in a 500 word post.)

Build out the list.
Now that you know approximately how many words you need to write in each section, your job is becoming more manageable. Go back to the list of section headings you made, and start writing one of them. All you want to do is describe that point in your list with at least the number of words you determined you need. If you need more words to fully explain your point, keep going, but don’t stop before you hit your word quota for that section.

Add intro and conclusion.
Once all of the sections are written out, you’re almost there. Now you just need to add a paragraph to the beginning of your blog, introducing your list and a concluding paragraph that wraps it all up. Keeping these two paragraphs to about 50 words will increase the readability of your blog.

And you’re done! Be sure to set the draft aside for at least an hour and then come back to proofread it. If you have someone else who can proofread your work before you publish it, that would be better. We tend to gloss over our own writing mistakes because the brain knows what we meant instead of reading the actual words on the screen. Even professional writers use an editor.

Want more help with your content marketing? Check out our content writing subscription service.

Content Creation Tips

Posted on by Christine

Where Do You Find The Time - Tips For Consistent Content Creation

A question we get from busy business owners all the time is, “As a business owner, how do I keep up with my blog writing when I have so many other tasks, and I am not much of a writer, anyway.”

A business owner’s struggle with drafting two blogs a week for his website feels like our approach to attending yoga class every week. We know it is important for our health, and it will take many consecutive weeks of yoga to see results. We even enjoy yoga once we get there, but we find a million excuses not to go this week.

Most people think of writing and blogging as a creative and almost recreational pursuit. With this mindset, you will never get it done. You have to think of it as part of your job as a business owner, like completing payroll or ordering supplies. You have a procedure you follow, and you do it at the same time every week.

Here are some professional tips to the non-professional writer for consistent blog content:

    •    Create a spreadsheet to keep track of your topics and related keywords. For each title, list up to five keyword phrases.  You can reuse keywords for different blogs, but you want to keep track of what you’re doing.

    •    Brainstorm topic ideas. This is not part of the writing process. Do the brainstorming separately, maybe when you are working on your marketing strategy for a new product launch. Add the new topic ideas to your spreadsheet, so you have them when you are ready to write.

    •    Add blogging to your schedule. Decide when you can fit writing into your schedule and be consistent. Plan to write for 30-60 minutes at a time. Beyond that your brain will get distracted, and you will not be using your time efficiently. It may take you several sessions to complete one blog, but that is okay. You will get better with practice.

    •    When you sit down to write, take a topic and the coordinated keywords off your spreadsheet. Focus on just one at a time. It is not necessary to write fluently from beginning to end. You can write down ideas in paragraphs, and then, rearrange the order of them to flow logically for the reader.

    •    Plan to work on each blog at least twice. The first time is just a rough draft. Let the draft sit and come back to it later in the week to re-read, edit and revise. Having some time between writing and editing will improve the quality of the final product.

Whenever possible, have someone else read your blog before you publish it. That person does not need to be a writing expert, just a fresh set of eyes that could spot typos and other mistakes.  See if you can find another business owner who writes his own blogs so you can help each other. Writing and editing are two skills that will improve with practice.

Creating Killer Content

Posted on by Christine

Creating Killer Content

A trendy motivational tip for business owners is to remember your “why.” When the days get long and the challenges mount, remembering why you started your business can give you the strength to power through.

The first step to creating killer content is remembering why. Content marketing is the best way to reach potential customers and turn current customers into raving fans. The goal of content marketing is to develop brand recognition, gain the confidence of potential customers and maintain a connection with your customer base.

Content marketing is what makes your website visible to potential customers and drives traffic from social media platforms and search engines. Killer content will attract visitors to your website, and hopefully keep them there long enough to make a purchase, eventually.

These five tips will help you create killer content that fulfills your marketing goals.

1. Start with an intriguing title.
Before you can attract new visitors to your website, you have to offer them something to click on to bring them there. The title is their first glimpse of what your website has to offer. Your title should make readers want to continue reading. It should convince them there is something they need to know and provide a little suspense or curiosity.

2. Deliver one nugget of value.
If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to hold your readers’ attention long enough to make one point. If you try to do more than that, you’ll lose them. People are in a hurry and not interested in settling into a long reading experience. Think of one piece of information you want to share and keep to the point.

3. Use white space to your advantage.
Similar to eating, we read with our eyes first and then our brain. A page of dense text is not at all appetizing. You need to mix in enough white space to make your content palatable. The reader may not have time to dig in, but you could entice him to graze. Break up text with subheadings and bulleted lists whenever possible.

4. Speak directly to your customers.
You know who your ideal customer is, or at least you should. Human beings crave connection. Belonging makes us comfortable. Make your customers feel as if they belong to your tribe. Your content marketing should reach your customers as if you were speaking directly to them. When you talk about your products and services, use the language your customers would use. Address their problems with your solutions because you know exactly what they’re going through.

5. Be consistent.
Most people don’t learn something the first time they encounter it. Repetition is an important educational tool, and the goal of your content marketing is to educate your client base and potential customers. Killer content will develop your credibility as long as your content is consistent. Keep sharing all you know about topics related to your brand; give your readers tremendous value with every blog, every week.

When you do follow these five tips, creating killer content, content that educates, intrigues and engages your customers, is easy.

If you need a jump start, consider outsourcing content creation to Framework Branding. We offer affordable monthly blog subscription services that can take the pain out of creating killer content every week.