To be truly successful in business, it is not enough for you to offer a product or service that people are willing to pay for. After all, these days, most people can choose from multiple manufacturers and vendors to get what they want. To connect with your potential customers, you need to make them perceive that your particular product or service will change their lives for the better. And that’s where content marketing comes in.

Content marketing is about helping your customers to get to know your brand, and to perceive that the products or services associated with your brand will solve one or more of their problems. And when it comes to your online presence, there are three pillars of effective digital content creation that you need to enable you to effectively connect with your customers.

1. Audience

The first and most crucial step in creating effective digital content is to truly understand who your target audience is.  This process has two prongs. First, you have to know who your current customers are. This may be relatively easy to answer if you have a brick-and-mortar location. When you’ve met your customers face to face and have a personal relationship with them, you acquire a good feel for the general demographics involved: age, sex, income level, marital and family status, education level, outside interests, and so on.

The second part of the process is to ask yourself: Who are my potential customers? The fact is, even if you know your current customer base, you may be missing out on an audience that you are not targeting with your current marketing efforts. Who else can use your product or service that you have not yet captured?

When you know who your audience is as well as who it ought to be, you can begin the process of creating digital content that appeals to the audience you are targeting.

2. Creation

It should come as no surprise that one of the most important steps in the content marketing process is creating quality digital content. Once you have identified your audience, and, in particular, the particular problems they are encountering that your product or service can solve, your next step is to find out what appeals to and attracts that audience. Chances are, since you already know your product or service well, you can probably sense what resonates with them.

However, digital content creation has a second key aspect: not only do you have to create content that speaks to your audience, you also have to make sure your audience will actually see it.

Consequently, a serious digital marketing effort requires understanding how search engine algorithms work. In other words, you need to know why certain companies pop up at the top of the search engine results page when you type a random query into your search engine.

The fact is, quality digital content is not a “one and done” proposition. In order to move up and stay up in search engine rankings, you need to create good content consistently, and you need to keep current on what different search engines are looking for. Your website and your social media activity should reflect a dynamic positive interaction between you and your customers, so that search engines see that your brand is worthy of a higher ranking. The content you create should be optimized for search engines to find it, which means it is optimized for potential customers to find you.

3. Promotion

Once you generate content, you need to get it in front of the right audience. Should you be targeting professionals who are likely to be on LinkedIn? Should the young adults on TikTok be part of your customer base? In other words, you need to identify those digital outlets where your target audience can be found, and make sure your content is where your audience can find it. Then you can start cultivating your brand with customers who want what you sell.

In short, creating effective digital content means understanding your audience, creating high-quality and useful content for your audience, and promoting your brand through audience engagement.

If you don’t have the content marketing expertise or bandwidth in your company for creating effective digital content in-house, Blue Zone Marketing can help. Schedule a consultation with us today. This is our wheelhouse, and we can’t wait to get to know you and help you grow your business.

‍