How can I provide value to my audience?

Building trust with your audience is SUPER important in moving them along the marketing funnel, with the goal of eventually getting them to purchase. How can you build trust with your audience? With value – in the form of content marketing. This episode, we’re looking at how to do content marketing to provide value to your followers. Everyone seems to be doing content marketing these days, but so few people do it well. We’re going to look at how you can make your content stand out from all the clutter.

 

 

How can I provide value to my audience?

Why do you need to look at building trust and providing value to your audience?

One simple reason: to help them move along the funnel. How do you move them along the funnel? With content marketing.

The problem with content marketing is that it's become a bit of a buzzword and everyone seems to be doing it these days – but so few people do it well. There is a lot of clutter out there, so you need to be creating genuinely valuable content to stand out from the crowd. Otherwise, you're wasting your time.

But, don't let me scare you off.

I'm going to walk through how you can use content to provide genuine value to your audience. Providing value to your audience for free is a great way to build trust. If your free content is stuffed to the brim with value, then they know that your paid product or service will be exceptional – as long as you can deliver on it.

You also need to look at building connection with your audience.

How do you provide value to your audience?

You've got to improve your ideal customer or client's life in some way, shape or form. Sounds like a big task? Yeah, it sounds like it, but it's not really. You just need to solve a small problem for them, or bring them a step closer to solving it, or help make their life just a tiny little bit better or easier.

How do you know what to offer?

Find out what your customer or client really wants. For example, you're probably familiar with the name Henry Ford (the guy who invented the car). He knew how to read between the lines of what his audience said. When he asked people what they needed, they would have just said “I need a faster horse” – when in fact what they really wanted was to get from A to B quicker.

Once you know what your audience's struggles are, you can try and solve them. But, sometimes you do have to read a little bit between the lines because they often don't know what they want.

Even a 5% solution is better than nothing, depending on the size of the problem. It might not even be a problem that's related to your business, but it might be something that most of your target audience struggles with. For example, if you sell newborn baby clothes it's a fair guess that most of your target audience is struggling with sleep deprivation or adjusting to being a new parent.

Once you know what you're solving, how do you do it?

There are so many different ways to provide value these days, including (but definitely not limited to) blog posts, videos, social media posts and captions, ebooks, webinars, events live Q&As, podcasts, cheat sheets, checklists, email series, 5 day challenges, mini courses… and the list goes on!

The format will depend on your audience. If your audience are time poor professionals, arranging a 2-hour webinar in the middle of the workday probably isn't a smart move.

How do you know if you're providing too much value for free?

Once you know what you're solving, and in what format you're solving it, how do you make sure that you're not giving away the whole cow for free? How do you make sure that you're not eliminating the need for them to buy your product or service? Usually, you don't need to worry.

It might feel like you're giving away a lot for free, but that's a good thing. There is so much useless clutter on the Internet, that you can stand out by actually providing good, truly valuable content.

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