Are you an IT service provider who wants to improve your business by understanding the ins and outs of content marketing? There’s no better time to learn about content marketing than now.
To succeed in your content marketing, you must have a well-laid strategy. You need to use high-quality content in your marketing efforts.
Content marketing helps you:
- Build brand awareness, loyalty, and trust
- Improve your relationship and connect with your target audience
- Increase conversions and generate leads
Your customers want services that relate to them, solve their problems, and can engage with. You’re missing a lot if you can’t make them feel understood.
Here’s everything you need to know to make your content marketing efforts successful as an IT service provider.
Know and Understand Your Audience
Understanding your audience is a core pillar in content marketing. This makes it possible to market efficiently and effectively. Knowing your audience helps you tailor marketing for them. It will be impossible to market services to customers you know nothing about.
To understand your audience, you must know who they are, their needs and desires, and the language that appeals to them. What else would make you happy more than knowing your services solve your audience’s needs and frustrations?
Understanding your audience means what you write relates to them. Here’s where to get information about your audience:
- Use Google Analytics to learn more about your customers. It will help obtain demographic details about your audience and their interests.
- Look at social media analytics to understand when your followers are most engaged with your channels
- Check on website performance to know the best and worst-performing content
- Engaging with social media audiences to understand what they want to see, as well as their comments and replies, both positive and negative, will help grow and attract more audiences.
Customers want a relevant and painless experience in your brand. They will choose the information that solves their business challenges. They like interesting content that is easy to read and understand, relate, and engage with.
Your customers aren’t tech-savvy, you’re their IT service providers, and you don’t have to use complex IT jargon they may not understand. Look, make it easy for them to understand. Make your audience feel understood. Strive to use words that are easy to comprehend and understand. This will, in return, elevate their experience and knowledge, which will translate into increased usage and sales.
Creating an emotional connection with your IT customers will increase sales and keep them coming for more. This gives you more chances of being noticed and increases your brand’s reach. The best way to connect with them is to ask what they think of your products and services.
Create a Brand Voice and Regular Quality Content Your Audience is Looking For
Having a brand voice and creating consistent quality content that your prospects are looking for is very important. This helps establish a brand voice and build trust with your audience. It gives them every reason to trust you as their source of information.
Having a brand voice and creating consistent quality content for your IT prospects helps you to:
- Establish credibility in your industry
- Connect with your audience
- Showcase your brand personality and set yourself apart from the competition
- Drive more consistent traffic to your website.
There’s a lot of content online. Customers won’t waste a second on poorly created content that doesn’t add value. They will search for content, sift low-quality one, and stick to the one that offers value.
Creating consistent quality content for your IT services should be a priority. This helps build trust with your audience. It’s the only way to get the content marketing results you want. They may not be immediate, but they will eventually pay off if you align your content with your target audience’s needs and brand voice.
To create a strong brand voice:
- Determine your primary and secondary target audience
- Develop your brand purpose, develop a strategy, and document everything
- Know your competitors
- Audit your current voice and create a brand identity
- Review and adapt
Knowing where your audience exists is very important in establishing yourself as a brand and developing your brand voice. If you’re a young lifestyle brand, Instagram is your best hang. If you station yourself as a B2B company, nothing should come to your mind other than LinkedIn. With your brand striving to offer exceptional customer service and feedback, Twitter is the best fit for you.
Provide Informational Content that Will Help Your Audience Make a Purchase Decision
Your customers want information that will help them solve their problems. Solve their problems, and they will always come back for your services. Who doesn’t like services that solve their problems?
How to know what your audience wants:
- Monitor audience feedback, comments, and engagements
- Review your current data and analytics
- Experiment with content and updates on your products and services
- Conduct surveys
There’s a lot of information on the web; statistics reveal that 7.5 million blog posts are published daily. Your audience will only go for informational content that solves their problems. They want a brand they can trust, which you’ll gain when you offer them value, and value is content that they can relate to.
You should never forget that your end goal is for your audience to make a purchase. Your clients don’t want to be sold to. They want to know whether your services solve their problems. Align your content with your goals. This will always help you to be a step ahead of your competitors.
“Blogging is less about sending a controlled, contrived sales message and more about engaging in honest, open communication.”
IT services may not be easy to understand and process, but make it a painless experience for your customers by providing a variety of content like white papers, E-books, case studies, and blog posts.
The content should always be appealing and easy to engage with; don’t fix yourself to one source of information. The more content you offer in different content types, the more likely your audience will understand the technical jargon and find a reason to buy from your products.
As a marketer, never forget that readers want visually appealing content, making products attractive and easy to use. Focussing on product design is as important as marketing in this era. No one is willing to purchase unappealing, complicated products to understand and use. Poor product design might lead to bad reviews and ratings, affecting your traffic and sales.
Over to You Now
You need to remember that your audience are human beings with feelings. They want to feel understood; they want content that is tailored for them, they want a brand they can trust, and if they understand your products and services, they will honestly buy from you. If you don’t, you’ll have them running to your competitors.