Like Moths to a Flame

Approach content development strategically, and your website
will begin to deliver the quality of leads that evolve into loyal customers.

By Andrea Hill

Pursuing high-quality leads can boost your margins in the near term and strengthen customer loyalty and brand value for the long-term. So, what can you do to win over better leads? It starts with improving your content development.

Many businesses use the typical content development approach: Write a bunch of articles (blog anyone?), post on their website, and hope someone reads them.

Instead, you should take a strategic content development approach: 

1. Map your customer journey, from discovery of your products and brand
through customer loyalty.

2. Identify everything your prospects are doing at each stage: What they
are looking for, how and where do they look for it, and what are their
pain points and frustrations?

3. Develop a list of content to create that will support the customer journey at each stage. What content will best answer questions, build trust,
and solve pain points? 

4. Now decide the format (article, infographic, video, animation, audio,
etc.) for each type of content. Offering a variety of formats allows you
to tailor content for optimal comprehension and accommodates the
diverse learning styles and preferences of your website visitors.

The final step is to consider how to best stage the content on your website…and I do mean stage. Just as a physical stage contributes to the meaning and experience of a play, your website organization and structure should contribute to the meaning and experience of buying your goods and services. 

Look at your website through the eyes of a buyer. What are they looking for and how can your website do a better job of delivering it? Should you provide a chatbot that guides web visitors to content based on their answers to questions? Should your homepage emulate a typical customer journey, with links to content that will help your prospects dig deeper? 
Approach content development strategically, and your website will begin to deliver the quality of leads that evolve into loyal customers.