Know Your Buyer Personas
If you are a content writer, you should probably know that anything can be said in different ways, even if it’s about the same thing. It all depends on your audience, who are you writing for? What are you trying to tell them? How should you tell them that? To answer these questions, first you need to know your buyer personas well, really well. What kind of people are they? What do they like/dislike? What’s their education level? What language do they use, academic or slang? What are their pain points? How can you help them release the pressure? Do they like reading a lot or prefer visuals? Maybe they like videos, customer reviews or testimonials concerning your product/service? Etc. Find out as much information as you can about your buyer personas and you will see how much easier it will be to tailor your content specifically for them and speak their language.
Research Your Industry
After you get to know your buyer personas, do some research in your industry. What kind of content do your competitors create? Is it successful? What kind of content do the thought leaders of the industry publish? Find out who are their buyer personas and compare to yours. Are they similar? Do they have anything in common? Etc.
After you have answered all of these questions, you will get some kind of idea what kind of content do you need to create: short or long, informative or educative, visual or written. Now here is the key part, your content should always be unique to some extent. You can’t just write about the same thing as your competitors and hope that people will turn to you instead of them, especially if you have similar buyer personas. You have to offer your readers/viewers something more, a small bonus, a little useful tip, a bit deeper information about the topic, something from your own experience, etc. and the more, the better. This is important not only for your written content like articles, blogs and social media posts, but also for your website home page, content page, career page, your offers, everything has to be unique to some extent. You have to give your audience something more, something new, something engaging even if it’s just a tiny bit. Those tiny bits add up at the end of the day and create unique user experience and that is more valuable than great, educating, informational content alone.
Keyword Research
Great, educational, valuable and unique content can get high ranks in search engines if they get lots of engagement with people, but that might take a long time. Keyword research is a great way to reach your target audience in a small amount of time. Put in the effort to find some core long tail keywords based on your buyer personas and focus your content around them. Find keywords that are specific to your industry and buyer persona language, for example does your audience prefer whitepaper or e-book wording? Do they shorten words like all natural products/all nat products? etc. Dont get too far with these though, as search engines value correct grammar and spelling, so if you overcommit, you might do worse in the end.
Your content could be great, educating, inspiring and powerful, but it must be seen by people on order to be of value. Keywords might not be your top priority (Valuable and unique content IS!), but still need a lot of attention if you want to see results relatively quickly.
On a final note I would advise to never stop your research, be innovative and up to date. The deeper you dig, the more value you find. There is always room for improvement and testing. Test different kinds of content to find out which of them resonates with your target audience the most. Constantly refresh and update your content whenever there is a need to stay up date with the latest news and innovations in your industry. Remember, you make content for people, not machines or search engines, so deliver something that is in their best interests.
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