5 Ways to Create Content Your Customer Cares About

5 Ways to Create Content Your Customer Cares About

Everyone tells you content is king. Provide useful content and you will drive more traffic to your site. But what is useful content? More importantly, what do customers think useful content is? Maybe the best way to think about this is to decide what your customers care about and put that in your content. So, here are some ways you can try to make your content something they care about.

When you’ve got your content out there, you’d like to know how effective it is. A Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one way to measure how engaged your audience is. This is just a rating showing how likely your customers are to recommend you to others. Calculating it adds your promoters and subtracts your detractors to give you an overall score. You can use a nps plugin for WordPress to gather this information and display it. Then you can set goals for improving it. Try these tips and see how much they increase your score.

You Do You

 One difference between news articles and web content is the personal touch. News is impersonal, a reporting of what happened and perhaps what it meant, but not from the reporter’s point of view. Your content should be very different from that. It should be what you think, what you know, how you see things. It should be clear this is a person, an individual with opinions and feelings, who is writing this article. And the article is what you think about things. Readers are looking for a personal connection and that happens when there is a person on both sides, writer and reader.

Make it Move 

While written content is still critically important, visual media is highly valued by customers. Pictures tell a story and moving picture, video, do even more. Very short clips, 15 seconds or less, are great for hooking viewers and getting out a quick message. Depending on your audience, you could also work up longer videos and do in-depth interviews or tutorials. Find out what your audience wants and provide it. That’s a consistent rule throughout any content generation strategy.

Show Your Mistakes 

Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. Share your experience, and your mistakes with your customers. Teach through bad example. Save them from learning the hard way by showing how you learned the hard way. This will make you more human, more of a person, to them while still providing valuable information on what can go wrong and how to recover, as well as how to eventually do it right. Sure, they may have a laugh at your expense, but they will care about what happened to you.

Answer a Question 

Listen to your customers. They will ask you questions. Answer them. They are telling you exactly what they want to know, what they want to hear, so provide that. If you listen closely enough to your customers, you may never have to come up with content ideas on your own ever again. They will tell you what they want to see and hear and all you have to do is tell them. If a lot of people are asking for the same thing, do an in-depth article or video on it. If there are a series of related questions, answer them all in a single article one after the other. Review the comments on that article to see if there are requests for you to go into more detail. Just follow their lead and answer their questions. They are telling you what they care about.

Story/Testimonial 

You can deliver information in the form of a story. You can describe a case study of one of your other customers using your product or service. You can even let a customer write their own story and post that. It’s possible you will get enough of these that you don’t have to write your own articles as often, just post theirs. There might be so many you can’t post them all at once and you have to store them up and release them over a longer period. Your readers like hearing about how others are working with you and how the process goes. Let them hear it straight from your current customers. In fact, those current customers will probably want to post their story in other places, giving you additional free advertising in their circle of friends.

There are many other paths to create good, valuable, usable content. The key is listening to your audience to find out which path they prefer and provide that for them. Just as in every other aspect of your business, you are trying to make the customer happy by giving them what they want, whether that is great customer service, high quality products, professional service, or content they care about. Put your customer first so they will do the same for you.