How to get hundreds or thousands of people GENUINELY INTERESTED in your product and/or service offers

This is the biggest issue in brand, product or service marketing. The more quality and quantity interest you can generate for your business, product, or service, the more effective you can be in marketing and selling it.

I'm here to share with you the proven latest most effective way to generate genuine and profound interest for your products and services this year 2023.

Even you will agree that THIS IS NOT JUST ONE OF THOSE THINGS PEOPLE ARE THROWING AROUND THE INTERNET.

To start with, here's a story of an event that took place recently: I hosted a group of six business people in a local restaurant in early December 2022. We were talking about blending their work and family life to make one complement the other.

To my surprise, people kept drawing close one after the other from nearby tables. Some asked for permission to sit with us, which I granted. Others just stood up and listened.

That is what is meant by GENUINE INTEREST. If you are explaining a solution to a problem, and if you are doing so in a way that shows you know what you're saying, those who have the problem must PAY ATTENTION to you.

If you continue to make sense, they will continue to pay attention to you. You can then offer your product/service as a part of the solution after you've built enough trust.

When you do this well, at least 50 percent of your audience will buy from you to get their problems solved. It's that simple, but not so simple.

Information is power. What I've just described above is technically known as CONTENT MARKETING.

Here, I'm not going to bore you with technical terms though but I'm telling you what it's called so that we can easily relate the discussion here with the discussions in the wider context of the industry.

For instance, you need to know a bit of the content marketing statistics to understand how effective content marketing has become. You also need this to understand the unique content strategies I'm offering here.

So, here below are some content marketing statistics from 2022.

1. According to Ahrefs quoting Hubspot, 82% of surveyed marketers actively invested money in content marketing in 2022 with 69% of the number also investing substantial time in SEO content projects.

2. According to Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 71% of surveyed marketing professionals reported that content marketing became more important to their organisation in 2022.

3. According to Isoline, as of July 2022, content marketing cost 62% less than traditional advertising (on the average) but generated 3 times as many leads. Stats collated from this source also reveals that, for every $1 spent on content marketing, the ROI ranged between $22 and $42 depending on the channels and strategies involved.

Those are just a few statistics to show you that it's not just me saying it.

However, like every sector getting the spotlight, the content marketing landscape keeps changing at a breath-taking speed.

This is why it's good to stay creative and up-to-date about the content marketing strategy that works per time. Hence, the CMI source quoted earlier says that 73% of B2B content marketers surveyed have unique strategies and, out of this, 40% of those strategies are documented.

It's said that we are in an information economy. The few statistics above are to show you how seriously other businesses like yours are taking this subject AND HOW YOU SHOULD TOO.

If you want to succeed in content marketing - just like in any other field - you must do these two things:

1. Learn what successful people in the field are doing.

2. Creatively apply what you learned to your unique situation (not line-hook-and-sinker)

For example, a strategy that works for American businesses may not work for Nigerian businesses. That's why I'm using this opportunity to bring content marketing home with local examples and illustrations.

I'll also offer strategies I've discovered that works in Nigeria at the moment.

The truth is that what I'm doing right now and here is an instance of CONTENT MARKETING. I'm also applying a content strategy that will become gradually clearer to you if you continue to pay attention.

I'm going to make it as PRACTICAL as possible. You will see what I'm saying from what I'm doing.

WHAT CONTENT MARKETING IS NOT, AND THE HEART OF IT

Almost everyone may talk about this subject. But, I keep seeing those who are getting it terribly wrong.

To begin to correct the errors, let me tell you what content marketing IS NOT.

Content MARKETING is not about MANIPULATING people. Rather, the most successful content projects are deeply PROBLEM-FOCUSED and SOLUTION-ORIENTED.

Therefore, before you embark on a content marketing project, here are 4 MUST-DOs that I recommend:

1. Take time to identify real problem areas in your market. Don't imagine them. Rather, embark on real field-based research to have these problems on your finger tips.

2. Find out effective solutions to those problems - both those that are being offered by your competition and those you can discover by yourself.

3. Discover the most convenient ways to communicate these solutions to the right interest groups at the right time.

4. Decide the solution you can MONETIZE with your product/service offers without being manipulative.

Don't worry yet about how to go about this because we're also going to talk about it in this webinar.

One aim you must target while content-marketing is to build your BRAND REPUTATION. With increased brand reputation comes CUSTOMER LOYALTY.

It's why I personally believe that CUSTOMER RETENTION is far more important to any business than CUSTOMER ACQUISITION.

Seeing your content project (and your business itself) primarily as a service to your audience is one attitude that can help you to keep the customers you acquired. When you do, they will be the ones to recommend you in the long run.

This is one reason you must do all you can to avoid appearing (not to talk of being) manipulative in your content and business practices.

From my experience, I can firmly say that STRATEGY is almost EVERYTHING in CONTENT MARKETING.

It's not so much the content that makes the marketing project successful as it is the strategy behind it.

So, as we proceed, take note of the following 2 points regarding content strategizing:

1. A strategy that worked for someone else may not work for YOU.

2. A piece of content that failed woefully in the hands of a mediocre content strategist can become super-successful in the hands of a good strategist.

THE BASIC ELEMENTS OF GOOD CONTENT STRATEGIES

The basic elements of content strategies are - so to speak - the ingredients that must go into 'cooking' a successful content marketing project.

You will find a lot of things being offered online as "the basic elements of content strategies/marketing". They will get so many and so different that you may get confused by them.

But, for me, here are the basic elements in their simplest forms:

1. A clear-cut target audience
2. A value proposition
3. A clear goal for your brand
4. Metrics
5. Buyer personas
6. Diversity of content types and platforms
7. Distribution

You can remember them with AVG MPDD (ie. audience, value, goal, metrics, personas, diversity and distribution (of content).

Now, let's take them one after the other.

A CLEAR-CUT TARGET AUDIENCE

Before you start giving out your solution in your information, you should have a clear idea of the kind of people who have the problems you want to help solve. Those people are your TARGET AUDIENCE.

A VALUE PROPOSITION
What unique value do you have to offer to your target audience? In other words, how do you intend to help in solving their problems (or PAIN POINTS) better than anyone else? That's your value proposition.

A CLEAR GOAL FOR YOUR BRAND
If your value proposition is what you want your audience to gain from the content project, your goal is what you want to gain from it. For example, do you want to gain more social media followers? Or, do you want to build an email list? Or, just that you want to sell more of your products or service?

METRICS
Your content project should include a means of measuring your progress and getting particular information on the members of your audience. This will help you in a number of ways - such as in developing your buyer personas (next step).

BUYER PERSONAS
You started out with a target audience. However, after gathering metrics on the members of your audience, you will discover that they are people with different characteristics.

For instance, the members of your audience come from different age brackets, income levels, countries, professional and academic backgrounds, etc. Their kinds and levels of need will also differ.

This will make it necessary for you to visualize a number of different 'individuals' that your products and services (and therefore your content) are made for. These visualized 'individuals' are your buyer personas.

DIVERSITY OF CONTENT TYPES AND PLATFORMS
To be able to connect qualitatively with your different buyer personas and to spice up the interest levels in your content, you will have to develop your content in different kinds of media.

This may include blog posts, forum posts, third-party articles, email newsletters, ebooks, video, audio, graphics, etc BUT NOT IN ONE SWOOP. Rather, the variation will be best being need-based.

For example, I discovered that MOST NAIRALANDERS WILL NOT CLICK THROUGH TO A WEB PAGE OUTSIDE NAIRALAND UNLESS IT'S A WELL-KNOWN WEBSITE OR UNLESS THEIR NEED FOR THE INFORMATION IS EXTREMELY SERIOUS.

So, when you share a blog post from your website, you really need to deploy creative strategies to add value to them before you can get a significant (or even sizable) number of visits from Nairaland.

Also, video content is not half as much consumed in Nigeria as in the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia. It's mainly due to a lack of free WiFi and high cost of internet data in Nigeria.

This makes most netizens in Nigeria to fear for their data consumption. Hence, the relative low acceptance for video content.

CONTENT DISTRIBUTION OPTIONS

Lastly, for your content strategy to be successful, you must have a robust plan for its distribution.

You've created a great content. Now is the time to get it across to as many people who need it as possible. For this, you need to have decided on what content distribution options to use.

Some options include social media paid ads, PPC ads, social media groups, email lists, and more.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Now, before we continue, feel free to ask me questions and question my answers based on the much we've done.