9 ways to grow your audience with organic content that converts

Watch the webinar or keep reading the following summary for more details, and don't miss the opportunity to bring your content strategy to the next level. Sean covered these nine best practices under three phases:

• Get closer to your customers

• Leverage organic search for growth

• Ensure that more of your content converts

Get closer to your customers

1️. Build a deep understanding of your audience: how deeply do you understand your audience? Do you know their habits, needs, problems, and preferred content format? If the answer is 'no' to any of these, it's time to rethink your strategy. 

Understanding your customers and empathizing with their needs is key. Collaborate with your product marketing team, tap into internal resources, and study your target personas to gain a deeper understanding of what your customers want to achieve.

2️. Speak to your target customers: don't overlook the obvious. Regularly communicating with your customers reduces assumptions, allowing you to build qualitative data into your strategy. 

Regular customer research initiatives, like interviews and surveys, help you understand their needs better, which drives more conversions.

3️. Engage in cross-functional collaboration: collaboration within your organization is enlighting when looking for customer insights. 

Speak to your product marketing team, growth marketing team, sales, and product squads to identify pain points and 'aha' moments within your product. Build a meeting schedule for checkpoints and maintain consistent visibility.

Leverage organic search for growth

4. Be clever with your keyword research: power your organic growth with customer-first keyword research. It's not about driving meaningless traffic—it's about focusing on the volume that matters to your customers. 

Use customer discovery activities like calls and internal meetings to identify search query activities, then conduct keyword research. Don’t be afraid to go after queries that tools say have no volume.

Recently, our team at Hotjar took a risk. Despite low volume according to keyword tools, we discovered a niche interest from our customer insights. We went after it, and now these pages drive high-value visits and even got noticed by Meta's lead product designer! 5. Learn when and when not to rely on competitor insights: while competitor insights are important, don't obsess over them. Balance is key. 

Pursue unique ideas based on customer research—even if no one else is doing it. Customers remember content that stands out.

6. Be creative with your SERP targeting: build a repeatable, full-funnel cluster model, so you can design content around the journey of your potential customers to increase the time they spend on your website and improve conversions. 

Consider how you can successfully capture different search intent types within the same cluster. By helping users level up their knowledge of a specific topic, you also indirectly help them better understand how your product helps them achieve their goals. 

Ensure more of your content converts

7. Power your strategy with historical data: in the data-driven world of content creation, the effective use of historical data is key. But you need to avoid pitfalls such as poor reporting or vanity metrics, and instead focus on qualitative insights that allow you to simultaneously serve your customers and business needs.

Embrace a healthy blend of demand gen and demand cap content powered by your data insights. As you do this, remember that not every piece you create will directly lead to a conversion. The bigger picture is about nurturing customers through each stage of the funnel.

8. Infuse qualitative insights into your data analysis: build a true picture of what your customers need. Use tools like heatmaps, recordings, and on-site surveys to better understand how your users interact with your content. 

Also, commit to learning more about what motivates your customers via the content they read by conducting regular research and user interviews.

9. Get to know your product or website intimately: this knowledge helps you identify customer pain points and content creation opportunities. To truly empathize with your customers, you need to use your product, which lets you see where your users might be struggling, so you can address it in your content.

Also, stay on top of product updates and new releases. Without this insight, you risk a lack of accuracy and poor positioning within your content.

Building a customer-centric content growth strategy

A successful content strategy is rooted in a deep understanding of the customer journey, data-driven insights, qualitative feedback, and a thorough knowledge of your product. It's about combining customer needs with your business objectives for a win-win outcome.

Don't underestimate the power of revisiting and optimizing your existing content. It's a quick win that can drive faster results. Combining fresh customer insights with historical content leads to powerful, impactful optimizations. In the end, it’s knowing your audience, delivering quality content, and understanding how to measure and scale what works that drives growth over time.

About the guest speaker

Sean Potter has been with Hotjar for over two and a half years on a constant and successful mission of driving growth through organic search. His roots are in journalism, with a stint at The BBC, and eight years of agency experience. Sean is originally from the UK’s Sheffield, a city known for its creative talent––Arctic Monkeys, Sean Bean, and the oldest soccer club in the world! Content creation can be overwhelming with endless factors—distribution, format, data, audience, and targeting. But fear not! Sean is here to guide you through the noise and help focus your efforts on delivering value to your audiences.