How Creating Great Content Leads to Customer Acquisition

You’ll hear a lot of people preach that you need to create great content in your content marketing strategy, you need to make it relevant, and you need to engage your users.

But why? How does this help with customer acquisition? Is it really that important? And how do you do all that?

It’s actually remarkably simple: potential customers are attracted to your great content. If they read your content, they’re now in your sales funnel – even it’s the very first step. You can mold your website and content from there to increase conversion rates, but that’s the basic step.

Fist, let’s talk about what content marketing is, and how it works.

All the Content That’s Fit to Share

Content marketing is mostly about creating great content and then sharing it. Hopefully, the content is interesting enough that you grow your following / community, while sticking to your brand message. At the very least, your content is a steady stream of covert advertising that is filtering through people’s social media streams.

Here’s a great infographic sharing 22 ways to create great content.

Content can be anything from an Instagram photo, a blog post, a Facebook status update, an article you share, or even just a short tweet about the day. It’s all content. The better the content, the larger the audience you’ll reach.

Spam Is Not Content Marketing

Just blasting out sales and business info is not great content. It’s an advertisement that is unwelcome. It won’t get shared, and won’t help your SEO. That’s not to say you can’t talk about your sales, you just need to be strategic about it, and do it less than you’re sharing other content.

Great content is the type that attracts your niche, and grows the community. For example, if you own a pet store, your content would be pet photos, how to articles for pets (grooming, training, etc.), cool pet tricks, local pet events, local pet issues, product reviews, and really anything related to pets – yes, including some sales-type info. Pet lovers also love a good sale on pet toys. Just not five times a day, every day. That’s an easy way to lose an audience.

You can venture off the path a little bit, but posting about a great pizza recipe, or the top destination to vacation, is off-topic. If you could relate them to pets, like top vacations spots that allow pets, or a pizza recipe for dogs, you’d be all set.

Here’s The Content Marketing Part

You know how people share content on Facebook and Twitter? If you’ve created great content for your brand, hopefully your content is the stuff being shared. That’s one of the goals.

After a short period of creating great content, and a few promoted posts, dog lovers will start following your channel and your blog as they enjoy the information. You’ve just tapped into your potential customer. Now, when you need to chat with them about a sale or cool promo you’re doing, you have an audience of potential customers directly in your niche.

The Above Graph, along with a lot more ROI information on content marketing is from Business2Community.com

This is residual, and ongoing. Once you’ve built that content, it’s going to generate leads for you.

Here’s how:

Get to the Customer Before They Decide to Buy

Great content doesn’t just pop up then die. It lives somewhere. Whether that’s on your site, or social media platform, it’s there. Unlike traditional advertising, where your ad is played or printed and then vanishes, content lives forever.

If you’ve written an article about “5 Tips for Grooming Dogs That Hate to Be Groomed”, chances are you’ll see a lot of residual traffic long after you’ve published. People use Google to find information on their pain points in life – in this case, their dog hates being groomed. They’re looking for a better solution. If you’ve done your SEO homework, they will find your article.

If your article is good, other sites will link back to it for their audience. Before long, you’ll have a whole network pointing back to you.

Congrats, you’ve just become the expert. You’ve become a source of valuable information to people regarding their pets.

These expert articles can be on anything. Here are some examples:

• Top 5 Pet Foods for Sensitive Stomachs
• A Dog Bath That All Dogs Will Love
• The Easy Way to Clip Your Budgie’s Wings
• 10 Cat Pictures Everyone Should See

This content is not only sharable at the start; it lives on your site to provide that expert advice that will attract new visitors via SEO.

As you create more great content, this will constantly multiply as the above graph shows.

Customer Acquisition Happens Naturally

Now that you’re the expert, you’re going to have a certain trust factor with the potential customer. This is that top-of-mind awareness that brands and businesses so highly covet. They’re already spending time online with you, why not in your store?

They’re learning all kinds of things from you – why shouldn’t products that you sell and services that you offer be some of them? Again, the key here is balance and positioning. No one likes spam.

Your brand will at the forefront as people absorb your entertaining and informative content. When the time comes to buy, you’ll be right there waiting with open arms.

Why Buy the Cow, When the Milk is Free?

The number one concern I hear is that if you’re telling people how to groom their dog, why would they use your dog grooming service (or similar argument in their niche).

Two reasons:

1. They’ll Buy Anyway: Just because people are looking for easier ways to groom their dog, doesn’t mean they won’t call you. In fact, I’d state that at the end of the article ? ?Don’t forget, the easiest way to groom your dog is to bring them in and have the professionals do it! Use this discount code?? ? The results will surprise you. You can only gain from this.
2. Residual Products: Just because they’re not grooming with you, doesn’t mean they won’t buy your products to help them with home grooming. Suggest products that will help them with it like shampoos, clippers, etc. If you’re absolutely sure the self-grooming owner isn’t going to use you in the first place, then what do you have to lose? After all, you’re the expert!

Being the expert has a lot of value and trust. All articles, even ones where you give away the milk, will add value to your brand and make you a trusted source.

You’ll find that most people hate milking the cow themselves anyway. That’s why you’re here.

Create great content, customers will come.

If you looking for ideas on how to create this great content, that’s where we can help. Get in touch and we’ll help you with your content marketing strategy and content development.