Isn’t it amazing to be growing a business in the digital economy, that makes it easier than ever to use content to grow your business? Today you can put your content on the biggest online platforms—Google, iTunes, YouTube—to attract new prospects and get more customers? And you can do it all for FREE!
If you’re looking for new methods to attract more prospects and customers in order to grow your business, you’re in the right place! Read on.
Here’s the strategy to grow your business in a nutshell:
Create original content that helps your ideal customers solve urgent problems
Make your content easier to find for prospects by distributing it on the busiest online media platforms.
Why Content Creation is a Growth Strategy
Using content as a growth strategy is a huge opportunity because of the giant shift in customer behavior to using mobile devices. Customers now rely endlessly on their smartphones and tablets to do just about everything—banking, keeping up with friends, travel planning and finding restaurants, shopping, watching videos, listening to music and podcasts and you-name-it. Activities that we all had been doing on our computers since the rise of the Internet and online commerce, we now do on our mobile devices.
The fact that customers educate themselves and make buying decisions using their smartphones and tablets is the most compelling reason for you to implement a content strategy to grow your business.
Customers Search Constantly
The benefits for you of using the most popular social media and content distribution platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, iTunes, Amazon and Google Hangouts, is that you can get your content in front of your target prospects when they’re searching for stuff. Get your business discovered!
- Customers search for information, insights and entertainment a lot. According to Pew Research, 73% of the human race is engaged with social media. (Dec. 2013)
- In mid-2013 iTunes reported they had over one billion podcast subscribers.
- Nielsen estimates that YouTube reaches more US adults ages 18-34 than any cable network.
- Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube—that’s almost an hour for every person on Earth. Source: YouTube
- A study conducted by IDC for Facebook found that four out of five smartphone owners reach for it within 15 minutes of waking up. (March 2013)
Can you afford to not be findable, visible and shareable with your problem-solving articles, videos and white papers on your prospects’ mobile
devices?
So what do you need to do to take advantage of this smart business growth opportunity?
Create relevant, meaningful, compelling content that positions your business as one customers want to learn more about.
Do this by creating content that educates and draws ideal prospects to your website. Or, inspirational content that helps them achieve their highest goals.
4 Steps to Using Content to Grow Your Business
Let’s look at a four steps to help you implement content creation as your growth strategy:
- Answer the top problems of your specific ideal customers. Keep a vivid picture of your ideal customer in mind when creating content. Your ideal customer is the customer who gets the most value from your products and services.
- Create content that’s an alternative to what’s out there. Put your most original ideas for problem-solving into your content. Standout from the ordinary, run-of-the-mill webpages and blogs that everyone does in your industry.
- Don’t skimp on sharing. Pack your content full of your insider best practices, the latest ways to solve your customers’ top problems. Don’t simply publish the same information as your competitors do. Go further. Share big.
- Plan and schedule your content. Content used to attract prospective customers, like any other business initiative, needs a plan and a schedule.
Conclusion
It’s an excellent time to be growing a business by attracting new prospects because the big online brands like Google, YouTube, Amazon and LInkedIn don’t charge anything to put your content on their platforms.
Your prospects and customers are spending time on these big sites.You have the opportunity to standout by creating content that directly helps your ideal customers’ solve their most urgent problems.
By using the specifics of your ideal customers’ most urgent problems—and their likes, needs, values and preferences—you’ll create content that speaks directly to them. You’ll better explain how they can resolve their barriers and challenges.
This gives you the ability to put your unique content where your prospective customers can discover it, attract more prospects to your business and convert them to customers!