30 07 2015
5 Easy steps in creating content that sells
1) Know your audience
Knowing your audience is critical before you start developing content. It is very easy to prepare the target profile simply by analyzing the market and the buying pattern. What is important is to understand their “Reason to buy” and their “Satisfaction level”. The insight you get out of this exercise is critical to provide content that says “This is it”.
2) Provide genuinely useful information
Having figured out who your customers are, where they live, what their current habits and need, you can now draw a plan to weave your communication around their interests simply by providing genuinely useful information that will read like “It is for me”.
Well written content, artfully produced has no meaning if the quality of content has no relevance to your client base.
Most product literature and service information are full of copy and visual that tend to attract audience attention by saying how good they are and what benefit they provide. These are manufacturer’s statements. They make good copy from manufacturer’s point of view. They won’t fly in today’s competitive scenario and they won’t make any difference to customer unless and until, the information provided is not “Look, how great we are”, but “Look, how useful we are”.
Provide solution from customer’s stand point. Engagement with your target comes by providing genuinely useful information which may not be directly related to your product, but are valuable information within the broad category of product and service.
3 Localize the content
The next important and the most ignored aspect of content creation is the cultural connection. Imagine a situation where you are doing the personal selling. You meet different kind of customers and you change your tone and style of presentation and the language to suit audience preference. You are localizing. You are culturally connecting. It comes naturally to you as you want to get into their wavelength and to “make-a-connect”.
Content that is localized in the language of the target population is more preferred and has better attention value due to local search terms used. Localization is the key in content marketing.
Why do we find many regional language newspapers thriving and growing along with English newspapers? It is not because all those who do not know English read news in their native language newspaper. Very often, they find a comfort level reading news and information in their language. They may not show off in front others due to their own perception of image they have for regional language newspapers. But they avidly read page by page and spend more hours reading their favourite newspaper in their mother tongue and read or rather scan English newspaper for their headline and some international news.
Localizing the content of your website, product information and service manuals in the language of your largest target audience and culturally connecting for different markets, is going to make the critical difference to-day’s web world and e-commerce.
4.Spread the message where it matters
English is not the preferred language for more than 40% of internet users. Only 27% of total internet users speak English as their native language. Growth of Non-English native speakers, browsing the net in their local language and searching for product and service information is phenomenal due to rise internet usage in developing countries including India. Use of internet in Japan, China, Korea, Germany, Russia and France is mostly in their language and English is poor second.
Spread your message by selecting those pages of your website which are useful for specific region by adopting and localizing the content and reap dividend from less cluttered environment. Spreading the message where it matters comes from further understanding the market, the competition and customer preference. Increase traffic to your website by localizing and by doing linguistic SEO
5. Be customer-centric
Apart from content having right information addressed to right people at the right place, it should be oriented to add value to the customer. In today’s digital world, customer is making his choice without being influenced by service provider’s promise. He does his research and makes a buying decision due to availability of internet for product and service information. 
Content marketing plays a vital role here to provide information that is credible, precise, knowledge giving and relationship building.
Customer centric content marketing is a challenge as it has to focus on customer need and marry it with what the company does and provides best.
Shakti Enterprise is a translation agency provides multilingual translation,content writing, transcription and audio visual services for all foreign and Indian languages.
Software localization: helping software companies improve the way they do business Let’s celebrate Independence the Indian way