Drawing the customer in is key to growing any business. You can have the best product in the world, but if no one knows about it, it’s not going to sell. Whether it’s presenting industry insights, offering tips or adding a hint of humor, every agency professional has a go-to method for creating effective marketing content that grabs viewers’ attention.
To help broaden your spectrum of creative process solutions, 13 members of Forbes Agency Council discuss their best practices for creating content that attracts traffic and leads.
Members of Forbes Agency Council discuss their best practices for creating content that attracts traffic and leads.Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Stop Selling And Start Serving
Helping others is foundational to building a trusting relationship. We find that research-based content helping business owners understand problems they did not know existed (or how pervasive those problems are) is a great way to help others and leads to relationships that drive business. – Marcia Barnes, Valve+Meter Performance Marketing
2. Take A Brand-First Approach
We take a brand-first approach to content development, ensuring the right branding, messaging and strategy is in place before determining if humor or educational content will be effective. With a clear brand strategy in place, we attract targeted leads who are engaged and entertained. This experience results in qualified leads as opposed to a landing page with forms and conversion copy. – Taylor Bennett, MESH
3. Avoid Bloviation Fatigue
People these days are looking for straight-ahead, unvarnished honesty that is not (nor smacks of) self-promotion. A bit of self-promotion was tolerated in the past as long as the information imparted was somewhat useful, but one gets a lot more engagement and credit for removing that element from communications. That, and a little self-deprecation, go a long way. There is definitely bloviation fatigue. – Brian Sullivan, Sullivan Branding
4. Transform Headlines Into Key Search Phrases
Think beyond repeating the right keywords in an article or leveraging the best tags for a video. Optimize headlines for search by using the exact phrase people would enter into the search engine when making an inquiry about a specific topic. Then create multiple pieces of content on that topic and publish it with a second- or third-most searched phrase as a title. Hyper-specific titles get found! – Megan Groves, InterimCMO
5. Research Your Target Audience
Define your content goals and then do target audience research. What is trending? Conduct an audit of existing content and its historical performance. From there, synthesize data and key learnings to inform your content strategy, and then host a collaborative brainstorm with key stakeholders to hear unique points of view. Finalize which content assets to create per channel. – Joey Hodges, Demonstrate PR
6. Start With The Right Questions
We polled our sales, marketing and account services teams to figure out what the most frequent questions and the biggest challenges facing our clients and prospects were. We asked ourselves, “What are our clients going through that we could help them with?” These answers gave us a roadmap on the types of content we need to not only generate traffic, but help convert those leads into sales. – Dan Golden, Be Found Online
7. Don’t Ignore Inbound Methodology
We follow inbound methodology because it attracts the kind of customers we’re looking for and converts them into leads. We start with customer personas and create the kinds of content pieces they want as they move through the different stages of the buyer journey. That practice, and surrounding ourselves with color, art, music and light, inspires killer creativity! – Mary Ann O’Brien, OBI Creative
8. Build A Personal Connection Through Humor
Our best go-to practice is to understand the end customer’s pain and turn that into humor. This means understanding the customer so well that you can communicate at an “inside joke” level. This relays both a connection and an understanding of that customer’s needs. Wrapping that into a story drives the content home to help attract attention and leads. – A. Lee Judge, Content Monsta
9. Go Live With Video
People these days prefer to watch a video rather than reading off of a webpage, so visual content is a no-brainer. However, you should take it a step further and make live video posts. Nothing shows off your personality or is more genuine to your customers than live video. It gives them a behind-the-scenes feel and allows them to connect with you on an emotional level. That’s not a bad thing at all. – Jason Hall, FiveChannels Marketing
10. Don’t Create—Document
The best form of content is when you’re simply documenting what you are doing so people can see your product or service from the inside. It increases the know, like and trust factors, which leads to a higher conversion of new leads as well as creating advocates and loyalists. Therefore, simply document what’s going on via video, audio or still photos and post what will be of interest to your followers. – Tom La Vecchia, MBA, X Factor Media
11. Understand The Intention
If you start with a clear intention about why you are creating content and who it is for, the resulting piece is more effective. If your intention is qualified leads, identify the challenges your customers are facing and use your content to help resolve these challenges. Instead of talking about your product features, demonstrate you understand and provide solutions. – Korena Keys, KeyMedia Solutions
12. Pay Attention To And Experiment With Headlines
In some mediums, each word in the headline is worth $1000—how would you spend your money? Headlines have the ability to lock in your audience and make your content memorable. I wish I knew of an easy way to write the perfect headline, but I don’t think it exists. To create the best headline, one must understand their audience well then write many to come up with “the one.” – Ahmad Kareh, Twistlab Marketing
13. Focus On The Champion
Every sales opportunity needs a champion who will push through adversity to achieve a winning outcome. Content that arms the champion with the best possible arguments and reasons to do so will be the most effective at generating revenue. So my advice is to focus on the champion of a deal. What do they need? How can you help them win? – Randy Shattuck, The Shattuck Group
