Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote your business and it involves using valuable content to attract, educate, and engage your target audience.
Even though its primary purpose is education and providing prospective customers with helpful information, content marketing can also help promote more brand awareness and boost sales for your business.
In this guide, we are going to take you through five ways you can use content marketing to help your business make more sales. Read on to find out more.
Content that shows off your expertise will earn customers’ trust
In order to make more sales, you need to earn your customers’ trust. And one of the most effective ways to do this is by regularly publishing content that shows you’re an expert in your field.
But first you need to find out what kinds of topics your audience will appreciate you covering. One way to do this is by looking through the questions that people send to your customer service team, as this will give you some insight into the needs of your target audience.
You could also join social media forums like Reddit or Quora and then look out for discussions around topics in your niche. When you find them, you’ll be able to read through the conversations and pick out the areas where people need more information so you can create content to help them.
Now let’s take a look at some examples of expert content businesses have published so you can get some inspiration.
Bookyourdata is a company that helps their clients to build email lists that will support them in making more sales. And, to get the most out of the company’s tool, their customers need to know exactly who their target audience includes. So, the company has taken it upon itself to create a post that talks about the steps people should take to identify their target market.
The guide gives a step-by-step approach to how businesses can select their ideal audience before spending money on any other marketing activity. It’s a really valuable post and it does well in helping the company build more trust with prospective customers in their audience. Anyone who reads this guide and finds it useful might then be encouraged to purchase the company’s tool after seeing how much expertise they have in this area.
Also, take a look at how Reid Supply creates and publishes expert content about their industry. If you look through their site, you’ll see that they regularly write posts that educate readers about different tools and equipment used in the manufacturing industry.
These types of articles are great for showing the company’s expertise and how knowledgeable they are about the products their ideal customers are looking for. And, when people see that they know a lot about what’s going on in their field, they’ll be more likely to trust the company and buy its products or services.
One thing you can learn from this example is the importance of showing people that you have sound knowledge about your industry, and you can do this by creating well-detailed and comprehensive content on relevant topics in your field.
Our last example is from Looka, an online logo maker. The company makes it easy for businesses to create a brand logo in a matter of seconds and they also make it a point to publish helpful content about branding on their blog.
One of the posts they have is a guide to 35 logo color combinations that has been created to help inspire people’s logo designs. They know that many people might not even have an idea of the best colors that go together for their logo, so providing this post is a great way to help them get started.
Looking at this article, you can see that it shows the audience just how much of an expert Looka is in its industry and this can help them build trust with potential and current customers. If you also want to do something similar for your site, you’ll need to start creating helpful pieces of content for your audience. These can help to solve some of the pain points people are having, and it will also encourage them to consider using your paid services, as you’ll hook them by first providing value for free.
You can use content to help people make informed purchases
People will be more likely to make a purchase if they truly feel confident that they know what they’re investing in. So, you need to create content with the goal of ensuring your prospective customers have enough details to make informed purchases.
One of the types of content you can create to help with this are in-depth buying guides that provide helpful information to support your customers’ buying journeys. You could also create product demonstrations that give potential buyers a better look into the features of your products so they can make better purchasing decisions.
Another way to help your audience make informed purchases is by providing comparison pieces that allow them to compare different options so they can see if your products are going to suit their needs best.
For inspiration, we are going to study how some websites do this well.
Take Musician Authority, for example. Their website focuses on teaching beginners how to play musical instruments. And, since one of the instruments they focus on is the ukulele, they are bound to have people in their audience who need help with choosing the type of ukulele to buy.
So, to help them make this decision, the website has published a great comparison piece on the 12 best ukuleles to buy for beginners. They divide the options into soprano, tenor, and concert ukuleles, while also identifying the different sizes that people can buy. Instead of getting confused and making the wrong decision, this piece can provide their audience with the information they need to buy the right instrument.
FreshBooks also does something similar, but with a detailed guide that sheds more light on what cloud accounting software is. As a company that provides accounting software for businesses, they understand that some people might not know exactly what this kind of tool is or why they might need it.
So, in this guide, they talk about the reasons why businesses need to start web-based accounting, the benefits, and whether or not it is a safe practice. For people who don’t really know much about online accounting, this is a great post that can give them useful information that will guide their buying decisions. And it could possibly motivate them to start using the company’s accounting software.
When you want to create similar content for your website, make sure that you also provide answers to some of the burning questions that people in your target audience will have, as this will help remove any doubts they might have had about using your products or services. And one way to get access to these questions is by joining some of the social media forums mentioned earlier so you can gain insight into the real problems of your target audience.
Publishing case studies will show what you’re capable of
People who want to invest in your products or services will want to know that you already get great results for other clients. Case studies are ideal for this, as they allow you to outline your past customers’ problems and how you’ve been able to solve them.
To create and publish strong case studies that will help you make more sales, try to highlight the specific results you’ve achieved. You can even use figures or percentages if you have them, as these will give a concrete idea of the kinds of results you tend to get, which will encourage potential customers to get in touch with you.
You should also make your case studies easy to read and ensure to write them in clear stages. Start from the top, which can include past customers’ objectives and challenges, then outline the solutions your company offered and end with the results gotten from your efforts.
To give you a practical example, let’s study one of the case studies we have over at Loganix.
As a digital marketing company, we have a lot of different offerings like our SEO copywriting service. And, one way we show potential customers that we are capable of getting great results for them is by including a case study on our service pages. The case study follows a clear storyline and you’ll see that we’ve highlighted our client’s challenges, solutions offered and the results we were able to achieve from the project.
We use this case study to show future customers what we can do and it helps in getting more sales from people who would want similar results for their business. What you can learn from this is the importance of outlining which problems your previous clients were having and exactly how you addressed and fixed them. This will help you to earn the trust of people who are struggling with similar issues, and they’ll be far more likely to invest in your services.
Creating free but valuable resources will attract the right people
A huge part of making more sales simply involves attracting the right people to your website. And you can do that with free but valuable resources that will truly help people who might also be interested in your services.
To decide what resources you should create, you can use the same tactics we outlined for identifying useful content topics that your audience will appreciate. For example, you could simply take a look at the queries people are sending to your customer service team and you’ll be able to get some ideas about what they need help with.
Another helpful method for deciding what resources to create is by conducting keyword research. This involves choosing a specialist tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer or Ubersuggest and then inputting relevant words or phrases related to your work. When you’ve done this, you’ll get a list of search terms and queries that have been entered into search engines by the people in your target audience and, from this list, you should be able to identify the areas where your ideal customers are struggling so you can create resources to help them.
Now, let’s take a look at a company that knows how to create free but valuable resources that attract their ideal customers.
A great example is HubSpot, a company that provides marketing and sales software to help businesses attract new website visitors and convert leads into customers. On their website, you’ll find that they’ve created several marketing resources like ebooks, guides, and templates that do a great job of helping their audience to improve aspects of their businesses. And this is great because, after using these resources, when these leads are ready to pay for marketing software, they’ll be likely to think of HubSpot since the company already provided so much value for free.
Something you can learn from this example is how to diversify the format of your free resources. You could create ebooks, templates, or toolkits, but the important thing is that you make sure they’re relevant to your target audience and can provide good value that will encourage your leads to want to convert to customers.
Answering your audience’s questions will drive traffic to your site
Creating content that answers the questions of your target customers is a great way to drive more traffic to your website. But, to do this well, you need to find out which questions your audience are already asking. One way to do that is by conducting question keyword research, which we have spoken about earlier in this article. You could also find more questions on different social forums or by looking through the queries received by your customer service team.
When you have a list of queries, you’ll then need to decide which ones to answer for your customers. I recommend starting with the questions or problems that you can solve with your products or services. So, for instance, if you own a design tool and noticed that people on Reddit were asking about the best design tools to use in creating quality graphics, you could write a blog post to answer that question and recommend your product as a solution to the problem.
To give you some inspiration, let’s study some examples of websites that are already using this tactic well.
For instance, take a look at this post from RMIT Online. The online university offers a Master of Data Science Strategy & Leadership program and they know that there are people who are looking for more information concerning this program, as well as its career pathways.
They also know that there has been an influx of data science roles in the job market in recent years, so there is likely to be prospective students who might be wondering if it is already becoming a saturated field. So, to answer their questions, the university has published a helpful post that gives more insight into whether we are facing an oversupply of data scientists in the world.
The piece also covers important information about data scientists being in demand and how a degree in the area can really help to accelerate your career in the industry. It’s a very helpful article that answers a lot of relevant questions and it can help convince more prospective students to enrol for the program with RMIT Online.
Hootsuite also does something similar on their website. As a company that helps people manage their presence on social media, they do a great job of providing helpful information for their audience. Take, for instance, this post on how to use Instagram Reels for business in 2021.
By creating this kind of content, Hootsuite is already doing a good job of driving more traffic to its site while also educating the readers of this post who could decide to use the company’s products after seeing how knowledgeable they are about social media and how to use it effectively.
You can also use a similar strategy for your business by creating a how-to guide or article on how people can perform a particular task in your niche. And to get more sales for your business, you could even make use of your own product when illustrating so people can see it in action.
Summary
In this article, we’ve looked at some content marketing tactics that can help your business get more sales. As a recap, let’s list them out again:
- Create content that shows off your expertise to earn customers’ trust
- Use content to help people make informed decisions
- Publishing case studies to show what you’re capable of
- Creating free but valuable resources to attract the right people
- Answering your audience’s questions to drive traffic to your site.
If you can get started on these tips and stay consistent in implementing them, then you should be able to see good results from your efforts.
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Author bio & headshot:
Aaron Haynes is CEO and co-founder of Loganix. The company is an SEO fulfillment partner for digital marketing agencies and professionals, which provides the services businesses need to improve their online visibility and grow. If you liked this article, check out the Loganix blog, where you’ll find more SEO guides full of expert advice.
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