1. Introduction:
Online service providers (therapists, website designers, nutritionists) and coaches (anything from parenting coaches to divorce coaches to business coaches) often need a content strategy to generate leads. Without a measurable plan, it can be difficult to know what content is effective in attracting new customers. This article will outline a process for creating content that results in more leads.
Creating content for your service business can be a daunting task. It’s important to have a strategy so you know what content is effective in attracting new customers. This article will outline a process for creating content that results in more leads.
2. Define Your Target Audience:
Before you can create effective content, you first need to understand your target audience–I like to call this your best client. Who are they? What are their needs and desires? What are they struggling with? Why are you uniquely qualified to help them? Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, you can begin creating content that speaks to them.
Understanding your best client is essential to creating effective content. You need to know who they are, what their needs and desires are, and what struggles they are facing. Once you have a clear understanding of your best client, you can begin creating content that speaks to them and resonates with them.
3. Research Keywords:
The next step is to research keywords that are relevant to your business. These keywords will help you to optimize your content for search engines, which will in turn help you to attract more leads. Even if your intended use for the content is on social media outside of search engine results, ensuring you’re using keywords your best client is thinking of in relation to their needs and desires will help you gain attention.
You’ll want to find keywords that are both popular and relevant to what you’re selling so that you can make the most of your content marketing strategy.
What problem will you be solving for your audience?
Ideally, your service or program solves a problem you know your audience has. By the same token, your content coaches and educates your audience through this problem as they begin to identify and address it. A sound content strategy supports people on both sides of your product: those who are still figuring out what their main challenges are (lead generating), and those who are already using your product to overcome these challenges (nurturing). Your content reinforces the solution you’re offering and helps you build credibility with your best client.
4. Create Engaging Content:
Once you know who your best client is and what keywords to use, you can begin creating engaging content. This content should be valuable to your best client and help them think differently about their problem or desire. It should also be visually appealing so that people will want to read it.
Service providers and coaches need to create engaging content when writing emails, posting on various social media platforms, and in their platform content (a video channel, podcast, or blog).
Are your followers engaging with your content?
In emails to your list, you’ll be noting click-through metrics and to a lesser degree, email opens. On social media, engaging with your content will look like likes, comments, and shares. On a podcast, you’ll pay attention to downloads and on a video channel, views. These are commonly referred to as vanity metrics because they are evidence of engagement, but they don’t necessarily result in leads for your business.
While many social media instructors preach about creating viral content, most creators realize it’s not the viral content that will create the most leads for your business. In fact, viral content often leads to the friend zone on social media: people you love to follow but have no intention of purchasing from. Engaging content goes beyond racking up likes and views.
Does your audience take the next step and connect with you?
Instead, we recommend creating content that gets your best client thinking differently about their problems and goals so that you naturally become part of the solution. This style of content may not result in as many vanity metrics but is more likely to become a lead generator for your business. Even so, paying attention to the engagement metrics can help you gauge how effective your content strategy is.
Is your content overcoming buying hurdles?
Have you built-in content that addresses the fears, anxieties, hurdles, and desires your best client will have around your service? This is what separates a content plan from a strategic, measurable content plan. Effective content creation means your content is doing some heavy lifting for you, even before your best client reaches out as an official lead in your business. The BE SEEN Method can help with this.
A common misconception around this part of effective content creation is creating content that does not challenge your audience. We refer to this as sugar-coating. While creating sweet content that brings in more viewers seems like a good idea as it gets more eyes on your service, it won’t result in more clients.
A better strategy is being bold with your messaging and building the know, like, and trust factor by showing up authentically. Being honest about how long it will take for your client to attain a result builds that trust. Glossing over the hard work will only result in misleading clients and killing that KLT factor you’ve been building with your content so far.
5. Measure the Effectiveness of Your Content:
Finally, it’s important to measure the effectiveness of your content creation efforts.
You’ve put a lot of effort into creating great content, but how do you know whether it’s working? Measurement is key to understanding the impact your content is having on your business. There are a number of different ways to measure content effectiveness, depending on your goals.
Some common content metrics include:
• Website traffic: This measures the number of people who visit your website as a result of your content.
• Social media shares and clicks: This measures how many people share and take action on your content on social media.
• Lead generation: This measures how many leads your content generates.
• Conversion rates: This measures how many people take action after reading your content, such as signing up for an opt-in or scheduling a discovery call–all the way to joining your next program.
Measuring the effectiveness of your content is an important part of creating a successful content strategy. By tracking the right metrics, you can see what content is working and what needs improvement.
Automating your content measurement
Authentic, automated marketing makes the entire content creation process easier for you as a creator–it helps you make better decisions next time you’re not sure what to create. As a business owner marketing online, knowing which content results in clicks, then leads, then bookings means you know which content you can repurpose in the future.
When you look at a series of emails from your last promotion and two have an open rate of around 20%, one has an open rate of 27%, and another email has an open rate of 15% you have a good process to revisit those emails for your next promotion. The high open rate email should be sent out again with minimal changes and the email with the low open rate will, at minimum, need a new subject line and likely some copy tweaking.
Content Measurement dashboards help you with effective content creation
But until you’ve automated your content measurement process, it’s not an easy process to gain all these metrics.
This is why I’m a huge proponent of creating a content measurement dashboard for your business. A content dashboard can include anything from how effective your various social media platforms are at generating leads to which (free) marketing promotions went on to paid programs or services.
Next time you’re asked to join a free summit, wouldn’t it be nice to look at your dashboard and see whether the last similar summit resulted in paying clients or just added unengaged users to your email list?
In another scenario, if you’re trying to decide when to launch your next program, seeing how engaged your audience is in the months or weeks leading up to the launch can help you define your tactics based on how warm or cold they are.
Not a program launcher? Perhaps you don’t participate in summits or giveaways? Maybe you even only service 8 clients a year and you’re struggling with how much content to even create? Imagine knowing how long each of your last clients was in your audience before they reached out to book you.
A content measurement dashboard can answer all these questions–and more.
Ready to create a measurable content plan? Find out more.
