How to Create Content Your Customers Will Love to Read

How to Create Content Your Customers Will Love to Read

Are you creating content but not seeing the expected results? Do you want to know if your content is effective? Are you just starting to build a new content marketing strategy?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may be wondering how to create content that your customers will not only read but love.

That’s a good question, and one that (in my opinion) marketers don’t ask enough. Is it possible to create content that your customers will actually enjoy reading, rather than just churning out content to check boxes or improve Google rankings? Will they even save and share?

We have good news: yes, it is possible.

For this you need to do a few things:  

• Clear objectives
• Gain insight into your audience
• Align with your buyer journey
• Visual effects and high shareability
• Process for monitoring performance results
• A plan to use insights to improve the content

In this article, we’ll cover all of the above so that when you’re done reading, you know exactly how to create content that will keep your customers coming back.

Quick delivery  

Tools like the SMART goal framework and buyer personas can help companies set goals and understand their target audience. 

Keyword research and SEO optimization are critical to creating content that is relevant to your customers.  

Aligning content with the buyer journey ensures customers receive the right content at the right time.  

Engagement with visual content has grown exponentially compared to plain text content.  

There are simple ways, like social share buttons, to make your content easier to share.  

Brands should frequently evaluate which content is currently the most successful to build more content that customers will love.

Why you need great content

Here’s the truth: Your customers are turning to search engines for information about your brand before they come directly to you.

Today, 81% of consumers say their brand research begins online, and 93% of their online experience begins with a search. Your content is often the first point of contact your customers have with your brand.

If they don’t like it? Well, they might look elsewhere.

The digital marketing space is also crowded. Content creation alone is not enough to get noticed or attract new customers. Your content needs to be well-written, well-designed, high-value and targeted to the right audience. It needs to meet the specific needs of your ideal client.

In other words: you need to know how to create content that your audience will love. In the next section, we’ll go through the specific steps you should take to do this right away.

How to create content your customers will love

Know your goals

You probably know what your overall business goals are, and that’s a great place to start. But do you know what you want to achieve with your content?

The problem is that every company has different content goals. Of course, there are some common goals—for example, higher Google rankings and more organic traffic should always be on your list.

But for some companies, other goals may be more important than others. For example, lead generation is a top priority for most B2-B companies.

For a B2C eCommerce company, driving direct sales through your website may be your top priority. For new startups, brand awareness may be the most important goal.

The key is to know what’s most important to your company so your content can align with those goals. To set detailed goals that hold you accountable and drive results, you can use the SMART goal framework.

Define your target audience

Who do you create content for? If you don’t know the answer to this question, most of your content is like shooting in the dark. You don’t know if it’s relevant.

There are several tried and tested frameworks you can use to define who your target customers and audience are. One you’ve probably heard of — and one of the most effective — is characters.

Customer or buyer personas give you insight into the needs, motivations, and goals of your target customers. Done right, they are great for developing content that is highly relevant and valuable to your audience, ultimately increasing your leads and sales.

Do keyword research

Are you very confident you know what your customers are searching for? If so, you’re not alone — it’s a trap many brands fall into.

No matter how well you know your customers, you can’t determine how their needs and behaviors translate into search terms without doing actual keyword research.

Trust me, when you start researching keywords related to your industry, company, and customers, you’ll be amazed at what you find.

While you may find words and phrases that you knew would come up, you’ll also find surprises you never thought possible. Surprises that create opportunities to develop new content that customers love.

Fortunately, keyword research is easier than ever. I recommend checking out Ahrefs and SEMRush’s free tools to understand what you’re already ranking for and discover new keywords that you can build into your strategy.

Here’s a quick demo of the SEMRush keyword research tool to give you an idea of ​​how it works:

Align content with the buyer’s journey

An important part of developing a strong content marketing strategy is understanding your buyer journey. This consistency is important when it comes to understanding how to create content that customers love.

Here’s why: At each stage of the buyer’s journey, potential customers are looking for different types of information. If you provide the wrong information, you could frustrate them, or worse, turn to other brands to find the solution they need.

Aligning your content with your buyer journey ensures that the right message is delivered to the right audience at the right time.

Not only does this make users more likely to like your content, but it also makes them more likely to take the next step and become paying customers!

Here’s a great example of detailed content and buyer journey alignment:

Make it visible

Visual content includes images, videos, infographics, and anything else that adds a visual component to your content. It increases content engagement on every channel, which is almost essential if you want to create content that your customers will love.

This is what we mean:  

Blog posts with images get 94% more views than those without images  

Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than text-only tweets  

This year, the average person is expected to spend 100 minutes per day watching video content

Visual content also just affects the way our human brains work. Up to 90% of the information transmitted to our brain is visual.

90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual.

It’s not difficult to add visuals to your content. Of course, some projects like longer infographics may require a design team. But in most cases, you can get images and videos from reputable online sources, or use free tools like Canva or iPhone cameras to create your own!

Make it shareable

People love to share content. Online conversations are taking place on every topic and industry in the world, and content is the tool people use to start or contribute to discussions. People also like to share engaging content for fun.

Buzzfeed is a great example of how creating fun, casual, shareable content can increase traffic and brand awareness. Their list articles are a staple of internet culture.

You can encourage sharing of your content by first covering topics they care about (but you already know) and then making it easy for them to share.

Two easy ways to achieve the latter are to use social share buttons on your blog posts and to share your blog posts on your own social media pages.

Build on what works

A quick tip: You don’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel to find new ways to create content your customers will love. Instead, monitor your success using Google Analytics, analytics dashboards on your CMS, or your data-driven process to measure content performance to determine what your customers like best.

Once you know that, figure out a way to keep creating this kind of content! If they like your infographics, then more infographics. If your client is responding to a topic or blogger, it’s time to create more content around that topic or from that person.

This process can also work oppositely. By monitoring your performance and evaluating your content metrics frequently, you can determine what’s working and what’s not. You can then make the right adjustments in real-time to keep your content strategy fresh and effective.