Content Marketing tip: It’s all about them

If you want your content marketing to produce bankable results, it must connect with your prospective clients or customers.  This means your content needs to focus on them and their world.  It’s all about them!

Yes, you are a warm, wonderful human being, but I am going to let you into a secret:  Your marketplace / readers are a lot less interested in you, than they are in their own challenges and problems!

So, if you want your content marketing to engage with them and convert them into clients, customers or passionate advocates, you need to put the spotlight on them and their world.

• Show them how to solve their problems.
• Show them how to overcome their challenges.
• Show them how to benefit from opportunities.
• Show them where the opportunities are, if they can’t already see them.
• …and most of all, show them you are focusing on their world!

Read the blog posts and marketing pages of most websites, and you will usually see pages and pages of information all about the author and their business.  They provide what we call “the who and the why.”  Who they are and why you should buy from them.

Content marketing: Help and inform your readers

Now, if you look at the most popular blogs, you see something completely different.  You see pages and pages of information, which the author has written for the benefit of his or her readers.  Copyblogger, Seth Godin, Problogger, Lifehacker etc, ALL offer their readers key information designed to; help the reader, make the reader’s life easier, guide the reader and solve the reader’s problems.  They focus on providing great free content and then offer products and services aligned to their content.

So, their content marketing focuses on helping the reader for free, whilst offering paid-for products and services, designed to add value to their readers too,

Take a look at the sites I just mentioned and look at how they speak to their readers.  Look how they offer solutions to their readers.  Check out their tutorials and free guides.  All their focus is aimed at helping and informing their readers.  It’s all about the reader.  It’s also super-effective!

How reader focused is your site?  Are you focused on “the who and the why” or the needs, challenges and opportunities of your target readership?

Here’s a quick tip: If you think you are giving away waaaay too much free information to help your readers, in my experience you are probably on the right lines!