Web Content Writer Guide to Building Killer Content

Your probably have heard this a thousand times but any effective web content writer will constantly focus on two things:

Buyer persona – who are your targeted buyers. Please do not say everyone. Wrong answer! Who are your ideal customers and prospects? What are their biggest concerns, needs, and interests? Where can you reach them – on search engines, social media, or blogs – and what kinds of content do they prefer? These questions will help you develop buyer personas.

Start developing personas by researching your existing customer base to identify the most common buyers for your products and services. You may have several different types of buyers, so give each one a detailed description, including name, job title or role, industry or company info, and demographic info.

For example, a community bank’s biggest customers may include small business owners and mothers managing the bank accounts for a family of four. In this case, the bank’s marketers might name these personas “business owner Bob” and “Mary, the busy mom,” and extrapolate

details about their responsibilities, the typical size of their business or household income, what geographic region they’re in, and so on. Based on those profiles, you can outline the pains, needs, and challenges of each persona by asking yourself several important

questions such as:

• What are the problems customers are trying to solve?
• What does he or she need most?
• What information are they searching for?

Identify your buying cycle – Content plays a critical role in every stage of web content writing

process, from generating awareness about your company to helping convert leads into customers. But the types of content you should use to achieve each of those goals are often very different from each other, which means you need to ensure that you’re creating content for every stage of the buying cycle:

• AWARENESS – The prospect gets acquainted with your brand or realizes they have a need for your product/service.
• Consideration – The prospect identifies the problem and researches potential solutions, including your product or service.
• Decision – The prospect examines the options and begins narrowing the list of vendors.

Analyzing the path that prospects take on the journey to becoming a customer is a great way to get insights about the needs and challenges of your target audience. Using a marketing platform, or analytics, can highlight which search terms brought prospects to your site, how long they stayed on your site, which pieces of content they viewed, and which forms they’ve filled out. Such lead intelligence will help a web content writer make better decisions when identifying the characteristics of your ideal customers and ways to nurture your new prospects.

Map your content – Next, identify the types of content and channels that work best for each

stage of the buying cycle. Of course, your prospects may engage with certain channels throughout the entire buying process, such as reading blog posts or following your brand on social media besides specific web pages and web based call-to-actions. However, marketing studies have shown that certain types of content play particularly important roles at specific stages of the decision-making process.