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Five top takeaways from "Killer Web Content" by Gerry McGovern

Your business attracts potential customers online who are pursuing tasks that are truly important to them. When they arrive at your site, they want to find what they need as quickly as possible so they can complete the set of tasks that they have in mind.

According to content strategy guru, Gerry McGovern, your site will succeed or fail based on its ability to let your prospects complete their tasks quickly and completely. In his classic book, Killer Web Content, he offers a clear roadmap to delivering exactly what your customers need in the way that they need it.

If you haven’t read his book, order it immediately. It’s that good. He models his content commandments. He doesn’t waste your time and manages to deliver the goods concisely, compellingly and completely.

There’s plenty to take away from his masterful book but, until your copy arrives, here are five that I found most valuable for content marketers.

Top five Takeaways To Delivering Killer Content

1. Above all else, your website must be immediately useful to your visitors. They are not surfing aimlessly. They are on a mission to do something that is all about them. Your website must reflect a clear understanding of your customers and what they will be trying to do once they arrive.
2. Eliminate, or at least, minimize filler content. The vast majority of web content is never read by web visitors. As Gerry McGovern puts it, you need to replace filler with killer. Your content is not meant to make you feel good. Rather, its purpose is to let your visitors achieve their most important tasks.
3. Your website content should drive action. You want your visitors to take the next step toward the purchase of products and services. That may be signing up for an eNewsletter, downloading a white paper, contacting a sales rep or actually buying something. To make that happen, your website should teach your visitors something they didn’t know before they arrived.
4. Test. Test. And test again. Delivering the optimum combination of structure, design, and wording can make an exponential difference. As an example, McGovern discusses Aer Lingus which was floundering with a website that was all over the place. Their problem site and possibly their future was solved when they realized that delivering an overriding message, "Book a cheap flight now!" was what their passengers wanted to find. Once achieved, that made all the difference.
5. Selecting and emphasizing exactly the right “carewords” are critical to being discovered and to being essential to your prospects. Careword is a term that Gerry coined. It integrates the concept of caring for your customer with the omnipresent search term, keyword.  These are the words and phrases that reflect your customers vital concerns. They reflect what customers really care about and, thus, search for.
   Getting the care words right requires time, effort and some investment. But, it’s deceptively simple. You can apply the lessons from dozens of studies conducted by Gerry and his team with a simple exercise. Compile a list of 100 tasks, represented by carewords, that visitors might consider important. Ask groups of target customers to pick the five most important carewords.  If you can query 200 prospective customers, you will nail the top carewords precisely. Even smaller groups of 25 or 50 will consistently choose a very small number of critical care words.

The bottom line: When your customers come to your website, they are on a mission. Your job is to help them fulfill their mission, not your mission. As with so much of content marketing, that is much easier to say than to do.

However, if you buy Killer Web Content immediately, you will be surprised at your ability to transform your website so that your customers can perform their tasks quickly and, in the process, become your customers.

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