How to Create Content that Resonates with Your Audience

Standing out in a world inundated with content marketing is no simple task. It takes a lot of effort and skill to artfully tell your company’s story in an engaging way. As you sell your business’ solution to a given problem, you must walk a fine tightrope between an overt sales pitch and a captivating story.

So, how do you create content that positions your brand as an authority and resonates with your audience? It starts with your company blog, which often acts as the flagship for your content messaging. Below, we’ll discuss steps you should be taking to ensure that your story sticks.   

How to Create Content that Resonates with Your Audience

Your blog is a weapon in your arsenal that, when used correctly, is your most effective means of impacting prospective and loyal customers alike. Per Forbes:

Blog posts can influence a consumer to buy your products or services without inherently persuading them that they need it. By informing your customers about the problems your company solves and creating stories that are authentic in nature, you can provide consumers value without going over the top to sell your audience on your products and services.

Knowing this, it’s crucial that you devote the energy and thought necessary to create engaging content. If done correctly, once it’s written, that content can keep selling your message and will expand your reach without you having to do anything else. That said, it’s not your only source of speaking to the audience. It’s crucial that you’re taking advantage of other means to reach them, such as:

• Social media
• Influencers
• Testimonials
• Advertorials
• eBooks
• Videos
• White papers

Regardless of whatever avenue you’re using to reach customers, whether a blog or social media, it’s essential that you apply the advice below in order to create content that truly resonates.  

Know Your Audience 

This should be obvious, but you’d be amazed by how many businesses fail to fully understand who their optimal customer is and what makes them tick. Although there are some products and services that are universal and for everyone, the best messaging speaks to one individual and their specific issues, pain points, or wants and needs. Content that is written generically for nameless, faceless users will fall flat. 

If you haven’t already, it’s crucial that you create detailed buyer personas that paint a very clear picture of who exactly you’re selling to. These are created through market research and insights gathered from actual customers, whether by survey, interview, or data. These will touch on details such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Financial situation 
• Location 
• Pain points
• Identifiers
• Background
• Career
• Family

This allows you to gain a better understanding of what pitch does or doesn’t sell since content that convinces one prospective client might turn off another. It lets you understand their background, demographics, and communication preferences. For example, messaging intended for a middle-aged, successful man will likely bore a teenage girl. John Scheer, CEO of the branding agency Herman-Scheer writes: 

By giving you this full view and intimate understanding of the person you’ve created, buyer personas will also help you define common problems or pain points your customer’s experience, which, in turn, prepares you to effectively present them with your solution as well as how it can seamlessly integrate into their lives.

Doing research lets you discover what customers want, how they’re talking, and what causes them to engage. 

Connect on a Human Level

Once you have a fully-fleshed picture of who you’re targeting, you can position content to create an emotional connection by writing what that customer wants to read. Start by treating content as branding, rather than sales. 

There are dozens of ways you can create content that touches the reader, whether through pathos, logos, humor, or simply demonstrating that you see they have a problem and want to help them fix it. To build this emotional bond, take the following steps:

• Pair your idea or message with an emotion.
• Provide enough emotion for your story stick. 
• Talk about how the product helped your customer overcome a serious hurdle.
• Utilize style and formatting to create a memorable aesthetic.  

Rethink Your Engagement Based Strategy 

These days, a brand’s ability to create an interactive relationship with their customer is one of the most powerful content tools available to them, particularly via social media. To master this, it’s crucial that you’re employing an engagement strategy that involves producing plenty of short, digestible, and sharable pieces of content. Such videos are a fantastic means of stoking cold traffic or appealing to loyal customers.   

According to Diego Abba, CEO of Italist Inc: 

The traditional strategy on video branding is sequential. This strategy needs to be changed as it is still often based on a one-way communication flow that has to be a two-way channel. Furthermore, the objective is to have promoters, not just loyal customers.  Engagement is the objective and videos are great tools to create engagement.With that in mind, video content you’ll want to mix in includes:

• Animated Videos – Animation lets you tell a story uniquely that would be impossible through live-action. It gives you a fun and visually appealing way to break down concepts or tell stories. 
• Brand Videos – These are your opportunities to introduce yourself to potential customers. It’s your chance to tell your story, share your core values, and address the pain points that your good or service is fixing. 
• Product Review Videos – Give you the chance to demonstrate how your good or service works, and the ability to highlight unique features.  
• Testimonials – Let your satisfied customers sell the product on your behalf. We tend to believe the words of other people, particularly if they’re not being paid by the brand to rave about how much they love it. 
• Tutorial Videos – Educational videos that teach viewers about the industry or the product or service itself. It can either be short tips or complete product overviews. 
• Vlogs – Give you the chance to devote more time to a topic without worrying about keeping the information short and snappy.  

Make a Blog You Would Want to Read

As you go about creating an identity surrounding your blog there are steps you can take to ensure that the content resonates with your audience. These include:

• Focus the blog – Similarly to your messaging, it’s important that your blog is written to a specific subject or theme. That becomes its identity and your readers will know what type of content to expect whenever they return. It is far more credible and authentic when your blog focuses on one general thing rather than covering a wide breadth of topics. 
• Establish your authority – Ideally, consumers will be coming back to your blog because you’ve successfully established your authority as an expert or worthy voice in your field. You do this by not only providing informative and engaging content, but also leveraging past experiences and successes. 
• Always provide value – Your goal should be to have your audience not only taking something away from their read, but to stir them towards an action, whether that be sharing, commenting, or going further down the sales funnel. You do so by giving them content that informs, engages, and brings them something new. This should include solid sources, studies, and expert opinions to bolster your message.  
• Ditch the overt sales pitch – Most blog content shouldn’t seem salesy, at least until the end. Therefore, avoid phrases and jargon that give the notion that you’re attempting to sell something. Instead, focus on telling a story.  

Visuals are Important

While the words you write are of significant importance, it’s crucial that you also create content that is visually appealing, particularly for the reader with a limited attention span. Ideally, you want to break up the text by adding visuals to really make the content pop or to highlight key points. You can do this by including:

• Infographics – Easily digestible visuals that highlight a statistic or key point of the piece. Even if your reader doesn’t have time to read the whole piece, they can quickly scan and see those important metrics. 
• Videos – If you have a complex side topic, or a subject matter that could be discussed in further depth, videos let you tell a story, provide an explanation, or emphasize your point. 
• Photos – Work to break up written content and also convey your story without needing to say a thing.  

Make it Sharable 

Remember, the goal of content that resonates is to have the audience not only read but respond. Ideally, your reader finishes and then decides they want to share it with others. When this happens, they become a brand ambassador on your behalf. So, be sure to have share buttons incorporated on the page, so they can post it to social media. 

Creating Resonating Content

If you want to create content that resonates, the first step you must take is knowing your audience. From there, you can target them by producing content that is informative, readable, provides value, and is visually appealing. 

When you check those boxes, you position your content to succeed. 

Sources:

• Forbes. 15 Tips for Creating Marketing Content That Resonates with Customers. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/03/15/15-tips-for-creating-marketing-content-the-resonates-with-customers/#72ef37f66332
• Entrepreneur. Creating Content that Resonates with Your Audience. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/332943
• Inc. How to Create Great Content. A Step-by-Step Guide to Content Marketing. https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/how-to-create-great-content-a-step-by-step-guide-to-content-marketing-that-delivers-real-results.html

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Article From: "Jillian Frager"   Read full article

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