Sometimes, you do everything right. You’re providing content designed to educate your clients, to help them do what they need to do, and to increase your page rank.
And your results still suck.
You’re not getting enough search engine traffic.
You’re tracking no clicks from your social media posts.
People simply aren’t reading your stuff.
When that happens, it’s time to revamp your content marketing strategy.
Usually, when this happens, the problem isn’t necessarily your content. It’s your analysis of your customer demographic. You think they’re looking for one thing, when in reality, they need something completely different from you. The trick is to figure out what they need.
It can be difficult to precisely nail down the demographics of your client. There are several methods that you can use:
A survey is the most helpful. You’re getting a picture of your existing client from your current clients. The questions that you ask will differ depending on what field you in, and if you’re offering B2C or B2B products or services. The essential information that you’ll want to know are points like why they chose you over the competition (price point, better service, location), what made them buy your product or service in the first place, and what problem your product or service solved for them.
If I were conducting a survey of my copywriting clients, I would ask them the following questions:
- Why did you make the decision to hire a copywriter?
- How many copywriters did you look at before you made your final decision?
- How many copywriters did you meet with or interview before you hired me?
- What made you hire me instead of another copywriter that you met with?
- How can I better serve your copywriting needs?
- Do you anticipate having any other copywriting needs in the next six months?
- If yes, do you plan on hiring me to complete the copy, or hiring another copywriter?
I would also be curious about URLs for those I had done web copy for, or looking at the email flow that I had put together for them, or sales levels/corresponding marketing efforts of books that I had ghostwritten.
If surveys aren’t an option for you, then the project is a little harder. You’re going to have to collect some information based on your past sales. Again, the essentials don’t change, but also make a list of any other information that you want to collect. Then look at the last 100, or 1000, or the last year’s worth of clients. If the clients returned, note why. If they didn’t, look at that, too.
If I weren’t able to do a survey, I would pull my last 100 files of clients who are no longer clients and look at the following information:
For web copy clients
- Search engine ranking for the keyword terms I had written for them
- Website design
- Inbound links
For ebook clients
- Book ranking
- Ability to find the author on social media (a good measurement of their marketing efforts, which will impact the book ranking)
- Reviews
Collecting these pieces of information helps me to see if the content that I created for the clients is helping them to build their business. If it’s not, are there mitigating factors such as lack of inbound links or a bad website design? If there aren’t mitigating factors, then maybe I did a bad job for them.
Then I would pull the files of any clients who are still clients, and I would look at every aspect of that client I can find out. Are they bootstrapping or do they have investors? Did they hire me to write for them because of a lack of time, or a lack of writing skill? Am I the only one blogging for them, or do I fill a particular niche for them?
Having these pieces of information will help me to better create a picture of my current client. Once I have a better picture of her, I can make sure that the content on my site serves her better. If my content serves her better, then she’s more likely to choose me as her copywriter.
Putting together the same picture of your client will help you in a similar way.
Author of this article is Mark Clain , who is fond of writing articles for students, helping with essays. His texts are varied – some of them are technical, requiring in-depth instruction, others are educational on Studymoose.com.
