User-centered content is content that meets the needs, goals, and preferences of your target audience. It helps you build trust, engagement, and loyalty with your readers, and ultimately drive conversions and revenue. But how can you create user-centered content that resonates with your audience and delivers value? Here are some tips to guide you.
The first step to creating user-centered content is to understand who your audience is, what they want, and how they behave. You can use various methods to research your audience, such as surveys, interviews, analytics, personas, and customer journey maps. These tools will help you identify your audience's pain points, motivations, expectations, and preferences, and segment them into different groups based on their characteristics and needs.
It is essential for content writers, especially when we are writing about our product, to step out of our realities. Using personas is valuable but can also be deceptive when personas are defined too broadly. Surveys and interviews are powerful but require resources that you might not have. You can still get insight into your customers' pain points by pooling data from different departments or touch points in your business. The helpdesk will have a list of the most common questions, and so will your community manager and other departments that work directly with your clients.
The next step is to define what you want to achieve with your content and how you will measure it. You should align your content goals with your business objectives and your audience's needs. For example, you may want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, educate customers, or drive sales. You should also establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that will help you track and evaluate your content's effectiveness and impact. For example, you may use metrics such as traffic, bounce rate, time on page, social shares, conversions, or retention.
Once you have a clear understanding of your audience and your goals, you need to decide what format and channel will best suit your content. You should consider the type of content that your audience prefers, the stage of the customer journey they are in, and the platform that they use. For example, you may use blog posts, ebooks, videos, podcasts, infographics, or webinars as different formats, and social media, email, website, or landing pages as different channels. You should also optimize your content for mobile devices, as more and more users access content on their smartphones and tablets.
The core of user-centered content is writing content that engages and provides value to your audience. You should use a clear, concise, and conversational tone that reflects your brand voice and personality. You should also use headings, subheadings, bullet points, images, and other visual elements to break up your content and make it easy to scan and read. You should also include a clear and compelling call to action (CTA) that guides your audience to the next step. Moreover, you should use keywords, meta tags, and other SEO techniques to improve your content's visibility and ranking on search engines.
The final step to creating user-centered content is to test and improve your content based on feedback and data. You should use tools such as A/B testing, heatmaps, user testing, and analytics to measure how your audience interacts with your content and what works and what doesn't. You should also solicit feedback from your audience through surveys, comments, reviews, or social media. Based on the insights you gather, you should make changes and adjustments to your content to make it more user-friendly, relevant, and effective.