Content Marketing Strategy | 5 Hacks To Attract Clients With Content

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Are you using a content marketing strategy in your business to attract clients? If not, why not? But you’re not alone in this problem.

Astonishingly, fewer than 40% of B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy, and freelancers often neglect this invaluable resource.

So, let’s talk about having a content marketing strategy in your business.

Content marketing emerges as a potent strategy, allowing you to engage with your clientele whenever they face challenges. Beyond merely addressing their immediate issues, content empowers you to cultivate enduring relationships that trigger a cascading effect, drawing more clients towards you.

Merely creating a profile and hoping for an influx of clients is a futile endeavor. Avoid succumbing to the misconception that clients will naturally gravitate towards you; instead, employ this content marketing strategy.

This approach isn’t about attracting just any clientele; it’s about luring clients who recognize your true value and repeatedly enlist your services.

Definition of Content Marketing

Put content marketing definition into search engines and it’s defined as

a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.

As a freelancer you shoud be using content to create interest in your services and what you’ve got to say on your specialist topic.

Gary Vaynerchuk reaffirms this by stating that if you’re not putting out relevant content in relevant places – you don’t exist.

Is Content Marketing Dead?

Content is what feeds search engines and social media. Without content, there wouldn’t be blogs to read, memes to laugh at, or your daily motivational quote.

It’s only dead if your content marketing stratey isn’t on point.

When you’re strategy is on point it speaks to your target market, positions you as a thought leader, and converts into clients.

When you have clients then you have a freelance business which all started with that piece of content you created.

5 Hacks To Create A Content Marketing Strategy That Attracts Clients

What’s Your End Goal?

Before creating you need to think, what is it’s purpose. What purpose are you creating content?

Generally, the reason why we create content is to get a client. But you can’t just produce one piece of content that asks for a sale and expect to get clients.

Life would be so simple if it was that easy. In reality, create content that not only asks for the sale but nurtures the reationship and builds trust.

To build trust you need to understand the buyers journey and how content fits in with this. Each piece of content you create reflects a certain stage of the buyer journey.

These stages of the buyer journey include

  • Awareness of the problem
  • Tools to solve the problem
  • Comparions to decide which tool they need
  • Transactional that are content pieces reviewing tools or free trials

As you go through this content marketing strategy, keep going back to the buyer journey and place what content you should be creating at each stage.

Identify what your end goal of creating content is allows you to create content with purpose. When your content is purposeful then you are naturally creating a sales funnel that converts your content into clients.

Identify Problems That Are Keeping Your Clients Up At Night

Your clients are awake at night, Awake, stressed, and searching for an answer. An answer to their big problems they’re experiencing right now.

What would happen if you had that answer and that client saw it?

Would they start to trust you, get to know more about you, and want to work with you, or even send you referrals your way?

This is the power of producing content. To make an impact you need to be creating content that answers their initial problems.

Giving great content that answers those intial problems gets you on the buyers journey and positions you as a leader in your niche.

Using the HERO copywriting framework allows you to really zone in on who your ideal customer is, their pain points, and their dreams.

Identify The Type Of Content You Should Be Posting

Before you ever begin creating content, you need to plan what content to be posting. Well, really not just what to post but where you should be posting.

Each of the platforms out there have a different audience and reason to go on there. More importantly, your potential clients aren’t on every platform.

Clients may have some sort of presence on each one, but there will only be 1 or 2 that they’re active on.

Therefore, your first step is to identify which platform they use the most to consume their content. Do they prefer

  • Reading blog posts
  • Looking at pictures
  • Watching videos

When you know what content they prefer to consume, it starts to narrow. Narrow down where they’re likely hanging out.

After you’ve discovered where your potential clients hang out the most, it’s time to start planning your content. When you’re planning what content to post you need to do some research.

Research into your competitors and working out how you can create content that’s different from the rest.

How Is Your Content Different From The Rest?

Do a search (on search engines or social media) of the topic you want to create content for. What makes the top content stand out from the rest?

How could your content stand out? Will you speak to a specific audience?

What about the content itself. Will your content tone of voice be humorous or formal? Depending on who you ideal client is will dictate this for you.

Also think about buzz words and terminology they use. This will allow you to create content in your clients language.

Speak your clients language and they will align themselves with you and want to know more about you.

To do your research and create content that stands out, you need to do keyword research. Keyword research works for social media as well as search engines.

Without doing keyword research, you’ll not know what content you should be creating.

Use Keywords To Create Content

Create content that your clients are wanting right now. Not what they wanted last year, but the content they need right now that answers their problems.

Unless you’re a mind reader, you’ll never know what content to create unless you do keyword research.

Keyword research is researching search engines and social media for popular keywords related to your core topic.

When you discover a keyword that you want to create content for, you must remember the users intent when using that keyword in their search.

(This is when you need to go back to your buyers journey, the keyword you uncover will relate to a specific stage).

Create content that’s relevant to that keyword. When your content doesn’t use intent or relevancy to the keyword, your content just won’t rank at all.

Leaving your content marketing strategy thrown in the trash and having to start all over again. Until you figure out what content to post that’s relevant to the users intentions when using the keyword in their search.

To help you further understand the intent behind the keyword used. Google gives you a whole host of sub-keywords that help you understand the intent and create better content.

For example, you type into Google the keyword ‘how to do an seo audit’. You get these results.

But when you scroll down a bit, you find 3 -4 questions about seo audits.

These are questions to be answering in your content marketing strategy. When you answer these questions, the content you post becomes more relevant to the keyword being searched.

Content Ideas

If you need help getting ideas of what content you should be posting, there’s plenty of help out there.

Business owners are using the search bar auto fill for their content ideas. Type in one word onto Google, Pinterest, or YouTube and you’ll get plenty of suggestions being offered.

Take note of these suggestions as they are the keywords that your target market are typing in.

Then hit enter and you’ll see what content is ranking at the top. But when you use a keyword research tool, you can see what content your competitors are posting for that keyword, where they get their backlinks from, and the competition for that keyword.

Here’s the keyword research tool by SemRush we use for Freelancer Lifestyle.

Start using the keyword research tool, you’ll never be stuck for what content to post.

Filter the results by questions, volume, and cost per click (CPC).

Now you’ve got a ton of ideas for what content to create and post in your content marketing strategy, you need to make sure that your writing skills are on point.

Even if you’re doing a video, you need to create a script and these next points will help you to get views that converts into sales.

Related | Use These Instagram Hashtag Generators So You Reach More Customers

Writing Content That Converts

Whether your writing a blog post, caption for Instagram, an article for LinkedIn pulse, or creating a video for YouTube. You need your content to be compelling from start to finish.

Here’s 3 tried and tested methods of what to write in your content.

Storytelling

Marketers have used storytelling in their content for a long time and still continue to do so because it just works.

When you create a piece of content, consider what story you can tell that helps the consumer understand the content further.

It can be a personal story, something you learned as part of your freelancing business, or just a funny story that’ll capture the consumers imagination.

AIDA

AIDA is an acronym for attention, interest, desire, and action.

Copywriters have been using this in their marketing promotions for a long time and still do. Every bit of advertising you see uses AIDA.

To put AIDA into practice, you need to create an attention seeking headline. This headline can be at the top of the blog post or in a graphic.

You’ll have seen plenty of these attention seeking headlines where they tell you that you can start earning $1000 a day on Amazon with no experience.

These grab peoples attention and they get the click-through that they’re seeking. So they do work.

If you’re struggling to create catchy headlines, use a headline generator tool or look through the search results on similar content you want to post.

Headline generator tools give you plenty of ideas on what to put as your headline.

Persuasive Writing

Persuasive writing is used ultimately to sell and used a lot in social media captions.

3 different ways persuasive writing is used in content are

  • Risk-aversion
  • Scarcity
  • Future desires

Risk-aversion technique is used to help the consumer stop making the same mistakes and really just calling them out on the mistakes they’re making and the cost of the mistake.

Scarcity technique is a classic one used by copywriters to say that the offer being promoted is only available for a specific amount of time. Triggering an emotional response and for people to buy using their emotions only.

Consumers are stopped being able to rationalize the offer fearing not being able to get the product in time.

Future desires is a technique much loved by freelancers. This technique is helping clients to see what will happen if they solve their problem right now.

Freelancers are trying to solve their clients problems. Painting a picture of what life is like after working with you will get you more clients.

Conclusion

Completing your content marketing strategy you’ve got clients that actually will pay you. Pay you what you’re worth and will reuse you services time and time again. Freelancers need a content marketing strategy so that they build the know, like, and trust factor with their potential clients. Start mapping out your content strategy today, publish content that clients want to see, and become a thought-leader in your freelancing niche.

About Post Author

Alison Wolf

Helping you to build an online business so you have an extra stream of income or quit the day job. Don't forget to follow me on social media using the handle @heyalisonwolf