How do you attract people to your website through content marketing? Listen to what is important to your audience.

Listening to customer needs and wants will give you ideas about what content you need to produce for your audience.

You can listen in a number of ways:

1. Monitor your customer service department for frequently asked questions. As the customer service department develops answers, you can re-purpose that content for your website. Text, help centers, or videos can all answer questions and attract more people to your site through content that solves problems. A customer at Exaiminer.com asked their social collaboration tool vendor, grouphub.com, if GroupHub.com provides an online survey tool as part of their services. Currently, GroupHub.com does not, but that did not stop the customer support team from taking the question and creating a FAQ answer that features a third party survey tool. GroupHub.com’s answer is a great example of a strategy of focusing on helping the customer and by doing that you will provide useful relevant content that establishes your company as a responsible brand.

2. Monitor what’s being discussed by your customers out in the community. With the advent of the web, ordinary people now have the ability to create content that discusses your products and brand. Listen to what people write and record about your products and brand. You can choose to respond where customers ask questions and discuss, or follow up with content that provides answers back on your own website.

Dell monitors its community, and as a result the company is able to respond and provide content and links to existing content that solves customer problems. Check out this Dell post on the topic of driver updates for the Latitude.

3. Create places for customers to give feedback about products and your brand. Dell does this with their online forums and IdeaStorm website. The IdeaStorm website is a voter popularity website that encourages customers to contribute ideas and suggestions, which are then voted upon by the rest of the community. Dell responds with feedback and if the ideas can be implemented.

By focusing on content that answers questions and solves problems, companies are much more likely to have answers to customer questions as they arise, plus content that’s available to attract customers when they have generic questions about the industry.

John Cass is the Author of Strategies and Tools for Blogging, and the blog PR Communications.