When it comes to growing your business and creating a strong relationship with your audience, producing unique, relatable content is what sets the best apart from the rest.
In today’s world, where every piece of information you need is just one click away, keeping your audience’s attention is one of the biggest challenges.
If you want to make your brand’s voice heard above all the online noise, you need to learn what not to do in order to ensure your marketing strategy takes your business to the next level.
You’re writing for search engines, not for your audience
Whether you already have an established brand in the self-development market, or you’re just trying to build your way up, you’re probably familiar with the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
When it comes to attracting customers, doing keyword research so your content would appear at the top of search engine rankings is essential. And while doing everything you possibly can to optimize your content to make Google like you should be a priority, you need to keep in mind that it’s equally important that your readers love you too.
Stuffing your content with keywords and forcing in too many of them won’t get you anywhere. If you want to build a long-term relationship with your audience, you need to deliver content that is trustworthy and relatable.
Just put yourself in the position of your audience. Would you rather trust a brand that creates interesting, high-quality content and offers solutions to your problems, or a company that delivers perfectly SEO-optimized content, without any deeper value?
Finding the sweet spot and posting content that is purposeful, but also well researched when it comes to SEO, will make your Google search results stand out while building a powerful connection with your readers.
You don’t know your audience
In the personal development market, it seems quite clear that the target audience would be people who are doing whatever it takes to become the absolute best version of themselves.
Although this is true, if you want to build a strong and recognizable brand, you’ll have to dig a little deeper and find out more about the behavior and interests of your target audience.
What is the age range of your audience?
What are their challenges, struggles?
What stage of life are they in?
How can your services or products help them out?
Why is it important to know the answer to these questions?
When you operate in a large market, you need to precisely know who are you talking to so you could adapt your content more efficiently.
Let’s say you’re creating content related to ways to improve one’s current life situation. You won’t use the same language, style, and tone when targeting young students and when talking to adults who are employed and have their own families. Each target group faces different challenges, so the approach also needs to be different.
The way you manage to deliver your positive messages to the audience primarily depends on how well you’re familiar with their habits, interests, desires, and problems.
Do the research and try to recognize what your customers are about. You can also use tools such as Google Analytics and Facebook Audience Insights to identify and understand your audience better. From that point on, you can target their interests and adapt the content to what your target audience is looking for. Your goal should be to become an expert in your field, not someone who randomly throws out content without specifically knowing what your audience needs.
You’re not delivering any value
This is one of the most common mistakes businesses tend to make when it comes to delivering content. The audience has an amazing ability to filter out promotional content. If all your content is aimed exclusively at sales, without offering any real value, you’ll quickly lose their trust and affection.
When developing a content marketing strategy, you need to keep in mind that it’s not about you. It’s about the people who are searching for unique and valuable information in an online ocean full of “salesy” websites.
This doesn’t mean you need to avoid offering your services or products to your potential customers. It just means you need to make sure that your audience gets value from you, something they can really use and apply in their lives.
This will help you gain their trust and make it easier to convert leads into sales.
You don’t pay attention to the importance of visual content
When it comes to building a powerful brand, the visual content is the one that will grab the audience’s attention, while the quality of your written words is what will keep them hooked.
Even if you’re offering outstanding, helpful, interesting information on your website and other platforms, you need to find a way to encourage readers to click on your content so they could get familiar with it.
Creating engaging textual content is only half the job. The other half is the visual identity of your created digital content. Compelling, high-quality images that grab attention, well-organized, easy-to-read content, and inviting headlines will make your business stand out.
If done right, your content strategy will skyrocket your business and put you in the position of a trustworthy expert in the personal development market. Make sure to avoid the most common mistakes listed in this article, keep a close eye on your audience’s needs and you’ll surely get there. No doubt about it!