How Intent Can Be Your Secret Weapon as a Content Marketer
Let’s face it! Everyone can be a content creator today. There are ample free and easy-to-use content creation tools available today.
You can get free templates or software for creating just about any type of content you can think of, from text to audio and video content.
In a nutshell, it’s no longer about creating content.
Every Tom, Dick and Harry is doing it! However, very few people can create content that stands out.
This leads us to a very important question; how do you make outstanding content that can influence your target audience to take favorable action, i.e. buy something, subscribe, share or comment?
According to countless research studies, it all lies in intent. In simpler terms, you must understand what drives people to act on whatever type of content they come across, for you to become a brilliant content marketer.
In content marketing, the most important type of intent is buyer’s commercial intent.
What is Buyer’s Commercial Intent?
All content that has been produced for commercial reasons needs to be in line with the buyer’s intention. To determine a buyer’s commercial intention online, you must find the keywords used by actual buyers to find certain products and services online.
People who are ready to buy something online will use certain keywords, commonly referred to as buyer keywords. They include words like buy, coupon, deal, discount, shipping or review.
These types of keywords show an obvious intention to buy something.
Individuals who search online using such keywords aren’t just browsing the internet for no reason.
They are ready to buy something. Simply put, they have buyer’s commercial intent.
As a content marketer producing content for commercial reasons, you should focus on creating content that targets such people, since turning them into buyers is more likely.
For instance, a person searching for ”HP laptop discounts” on Google is already at least strongly considering buying an HP laptop.
They just need a good deal to make the actual purchase.
How Buyers Intent is used in SEO
Understanding commercial buyer’s intent and buyer keywords is the first step to becoming a great content marketer. You need to go further and understand how to use buyer intent with SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
SEO is all about ranking high on search engines.
To do this perfectly, you must consider keyword metrics like search volume and conversion rates. Ask yourself things like; how many people use the keyword ”HP laptop discounts” and buy HP laptops?
Using such keywords will ensure that you create content that matches buyers commercial intent perfectly, ranks highly on search engines and converts.
How to Apply Buyers Intent When Writing and Promoting Content
The main goal of any content marketer is to get attention. Most content marketers create content based on what they think their audience wants.
Although there is nothing fundamentally wrong with this approach, you need to dig deeper and understand people’s buying behavior.
There are five main phases everyone has to go through before buying anything online.
Understanding these phases is the key to creating perfect content.
The first phase is the need recognition phase, where your potential customer realizes they have a need or a problem (i.e. I need an HP laptop).
The second phase is the solution searching face. During this phase, your potential customer is looking for information online on products or services that are capable of solving their problem or meeting their needs.
The third phase is the evaluation phase. As the name suggests, your potential customer is busy evaluating different products and services after which they get into the fourth phase, and make a purchasing decision.
The last phase is known as the post-purchase evaluation phase.
During this phase, the buyer wonders if they made a good choice. They may decide to keep or return what they have bought based on their experience with the product or service.
When you know the intention of your potential customer during every phase, you can provide them with the exact kind of content they are looking for.
Publishing Buyer’s Intent-Driven Content in the Right Publications
Creating high-quality, buyer’s intent driven and SEO optimized content is good, but it’s not enough. Your content must be published with the right publications for it to reach its target audience immediately.
Publishing in the right publications ensures that the content gets in front of targeted audiences in record time. The content must, however, be high-quality for it to attract the attention of the best publishers.
You also need to choose the right publisher for you to reach your ideal audience.
Knowing the kind of readers a publisher serves will help you create content that helps those readers perfectly. You should consider factors like popular publisher content, subsections and social sharing metrics to be able to know the best kind of content to create for different publishers.
For instance, when trying to find a publisher for tech content, consider publishers like Huffpost, TechCrunch, and Gizmo since such publishers are popular and they have a wide audience of people who are already interested in technology and are therefore more willing to read your content and respond favorably.
Using Intent as a Content Marketer
Getting your content noticed today is a daunting task. You must break through all the noise caused by your competitors and still struggle to get a favorable response from your readers.
The best way to stand out is to consider the intentions of your target audience when they use certain keywords. Once you do this, you shouldn’t have a problem giving your target audience exactly what they are looking for at any given time.
Targeting buyer keywords is one of the best ways of ensuring your content converts. You also have to consider SEO to ensure searchers with an intention to buy, find you on Google easily.
Last but not least, your content needs to reach your target audience as fast as possible. With content user intent as your guiding principle, you will certainly have an edge as a content marketer.
Over to You
Do you have any thoughts on this subject? Anything questions to ask or experiences to share? Please comment, below.
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Ron Sela
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