Your website is the center of all your marketing efforts, and if your website content is old and outdated, you need a content refresh to show search engines that you’re still relevant and customers that you’re still active.
Your goal with marketing tactics like PPC or social media ads is always to get someone to go to your website so they can become a lead or make a sale.
But it’s not the design of your website that pushes someone to make a decision on whether they’re going to take the action you want them to take.
It’s your content. Content is what converts visitors into customers. They read what’s on your website, and they make a purchase decision based on how persuasive your content is.
One of the big things they look for is credibility. Credibility is conveyed through the design of your website, but it’s also conveyed through the quality of the content.
If there are typos and errors, if the content is outdated, if the content doesn’t feel polished and professional, it feels less credible, which means customers are less likely to buy.
And you know what? Most content is like this.
Even content that feels polished can make a big mistake — not being customer-centric.
This means the content focuses on the business and not the customer. It talks about what’s great about the product and the business without telling the customer why the product is great for them or what it can do for them.
Let’s Face It — Most Website Content Sucks
Unfortunately, most content on most business websites just sucks.
It doesn’t do the heavy lifting that it’s supposed to do.
The goal for your website content is to convert visitors into leads and sales.
It needs to make the reader really want to click that button and take the next step. It’s hard to write, especially if you have no idea what you’re doing.
If you’re going to do this, you need a clear plan.
Creating a Content Plan Focused on the Customer
All content on your website should be focused on your customer.
This can be very difficult to do if you’re not thinking about it right from the beginning. It’s very common for people who are new to writing website content to focus the content on the business or product and not really think about the customer or their needs.
From the beginning, you need to plan your content out. This means thinking about what type of content your customer needs in the first place.
For example, you might want to make dedicated pages for each service rather than putting all services on a single page. You might want to include testimonials on the services page rather than giving them their own page. You definitely want to make it clear on each page what problem you solve — not just on the homepage.
You might have several pages devoted to some specific problems you solve for specific types of customers. You might even want to make entirely different websites for entirely different customer bases.
If you don’t plan this out in advance and just start writing, you’re likely to end up with a mishmash of content that confuses readers and keeps them from making a purchase. You’ll end up with content that’s disorganized and doesn’t provide a good user experience.
Creating Customer-Centric Content
Once you have a clear plan that puts customer needs and wants first, then you have to do the actual writing — and each sentence, again, needs to put customers first. We call this customer-centric language.
This means minimizing words like “we” and “us” (except on the About Us page, and even there you should be careful with it). This means saying “you” and “your” throughout. This means focusing on the benefits of the product (and not just the features).
This means acknowledging and discussing the problem(s) your customers have and making a clear connection from their problem to the solution you offer.
It requires more than a bit of sympathy, even if you don’t consider your customers to be “emotional” people. Sympathy just means being able to understand the needs and wants of other people. What bothers them? What are they afraid of? What would make them happy?
How can what you provide relieve their fears or make them happy?
Your customers don’t really care much about you or your business. Yes, you should have an About Us page that clearly states your background and your expertise, but even that content should be focused on how the customer benefits from your expertise.
From the big picture to the sentence level, your content needs to be planned out and take all these things into account.
Do you have a plan?
Ready to Plan Out Your Content?
Writing customer-centric content, and even just planning it out, is tough if you aren’t a trained writer.
It can be extremely difficult to try to figure out how to write content for a website when you’ve never done it before.
That’s why we offer content plans. We’ll create a detailed, actionable 6-month content plan you can use right away to plan out your website with content that converts, including what pages need to be rewritten, how to rewrite them, and what new content to create.
You can then take that plan to a writer, write it yourself, or have one of our writers do it for you.