How to create online content from scratch

Looking to create awesome online content for your brand, from scratch, but don’t know where to start?

Look no further!

Quality content allows your audience to build trust in your brand and to engage with you. It helps your audience relate to your business and helps them make buying decisions.

Let’s dive into our top tips to get you well on your content marketing way.

Know your ideal customer

You can’t target everyone. But you can market to everyone.

In a world where businesses have to compete for audience attention, the principal of creating your ideal customer is an absolute must!

Remember that your customer is a person. A person who has their own set of interests, hobbies and problems. When generating content, always keep this in mind. You’re marketing to people.

Consider these points when crafting your ideal customer:

1. Name
2. Age
3. Location
4. Likes & dislikes
5. Interests and hobbies
6. Possible problems they are facing

When you can identify this key information, you are better poised to market directly to people who fit into these categories. Your content will resonate with these people and you will gain more engagement with your brand.

Define your goal

Decide on where you want to go with your content. Doing this will make sure your precious time is invested wisely. With content marketing, there are various goals that could apply- some of them being:

• Lead generation
• Brand awareness
• Customer conversion
• Subscribers

Once you’ve set your goal you’ll be better equipped to decide which online channels would be best suited to your needs.

Get subscribers

Generate leads and you’ll generate sales. The most effective way of generating leads is by offering your audience something they want, in exchange for their details. Few people will part with their email address to subscribe to a newsletter, but many will happily sign up to download an e-book, short course or a cheat sheet.

Consider content upgrade. This is a bonus piece of information that elaborates on or complements the content the reader is already interested in. The bonus should be valuable and in context with the content you’re providing, you can ask for an email address, a social media share, a tweet or even a referral.

Know your sales cycle

This is super important. You will need to map out a simple sales cycle to ensure you deliver the right content at the right time.

Follow these steps and you’re a-for-away:

1. Consider what your ideal customer is looking for when they first come into contact with your business
2. Then think about what this same customer would need from you in the final stages of the sale
3. At each stage of their buying process, you will need to present them with different types of content to help move them to the next stage.

This cycle is best mapped out on a content segmentation grid, which allows you to plan and deliver relevant content at the right time.

Each stage of your ideal customer’s needs will take on a new ideal customer persona. This can easily be created before you populate your grid.

The last tip we have for you in our “How to create online content from scratch” is a really important one to remember-

Ensure all your content has CTAs

CTA (or call-to-action) is the part of your content, ad or web-page that encourages your audience to do something.

Examples of CTAs include “Try for Free” , “Learn More” and “Subscribe”. The call to action is what provides you with leads and allows you to build an organic database.

Need some help with CTAs? Read our free advice here.

With over 15 years’ marketing and sales experience, our team is ready  to answer your questions and offer you custom solutions that work for your business.