6 Things You Must Do to Leverage Content and Acquire Customers

Leveraging content in your overall marketing strategy is a key online tactic to attract and retain the right customers.

Any business, regardless of size and budget–can acquire customers with the right content. All you need is expertise and the right content strategy.

How to Leverage Content

1. Create relevant content. Without relevant content, nothing else on this list will work. Relevant content solves the problems of your target audience. Once you start solving problems, you become an authority in your industry. Once you become an authority in your industry, people seek your solutions–both free and paid solutions.
2. Make your content easy to navigate. There are a lot of websites that produce similar content to yours. If a website visitor becomes frustrated navigating your site, good-bye. Use tags, categories, and an easy-to-use navigation bar. Include a search bar to help customers with specific subjects.
3. Use your customer’s language. Keyword research will tell you what language your customers use when searching for content. There’s no magic keyword formula for ranking high in search engines, and if there were, Google would change it soon enough. Include keywords and keyword phrases naturally. Best practices include putting keywords in the URL, title, first paragraph, image descriptions, subheads, and meta descriptions–but only if it makes sense naturally. Google penalizes keyword stuffing.
4. Make shareable content and encourage sharing. When users share your content, they’re providing a testimonial to their friends and acquaintances that your are an authority and worth visiting. Shareable content includes content that informs, disproves a common theory, promotes a humanitarian cause, is nostalgic, and focuses on current events. Encourage your visitors to share content with social media sharing icons.
5. Use lead magnets to acquire email addresses. Help visitors qualify themselves as potential customers by offering additional free content in exchange for contact information. Lead magnets include e-books, webinars, free courses, and whatever else provides in-depth value for your target audience. If done correctly, your email list will contain the names and emails of highly qualified leads with whom you can continue to share valuable content.
6. Provide a call-to-action. Someone from your target audience comes to your site. They love what they see. They want more. It’s your job to help them get more by providing a call-to-action. What that call-to-action is depends on where customers are in your sales funnel. The call-to-action can be downloading a free e-book, clicking on another post, signing up for a webinar, or buying one of your products.

The key to getting customers to take action is giving them valuable content. Need help with create a cotent calendar? You can download a free one here.