It’s Only Marketing When It’s Marketing

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I talk to a lot of businesses about their marketing efforts. Many tell me about the various methods they are using: websites, email, social media and so on. Sometimes I find that what they are doing isn’t really marketing, but just ‘activity’. Here’s a few questions that you can use to review your own activity to see whether it is marketing and whether you are likely to get a return for the time and budget you put in.

Is all that marketing activity getting you anywhere?

What is marketing?

The first point to note is that marketing is not the same a selling. Marketing is a process of understanding what the market needs, developing products and services to meet those needs and then promoting them through a variety of channels, ideally backed by strong brand values and identity. Seth Godin puts it succinctly: ‘don’t try to find customers for your products – try to find products for your customers’.

The fundamental question for whatever flavour of marketing you do, is whether it is based around your customers and developed with their needs and interests at its core.

‘We have a website’

Virtually every business has a website. But what’s the focus of your content? Quite often the content is a description of what people do with the odd testimonial thrown in to gain credibility. What you have is an old fashioned product brochure on-line, rather than an effective on-line marketing tool.

Before you wrote your content, did you start with an analysis of your target audience, their challenges and their aspirations?
Do you have persuasive content?
Have you researched the terms that people would use to find a website like yours, and have you used these properly in the content so that you show up in real, relevant searches?
Do all of your pages have clear calls to action, or do you leave it up to your customers to work out what to do next?
Are you using analytics data to monitor how people find and interact with your content?

If the answer to any of these is ‘no’, then it isn’t really marketing.

‘We do social media’

Why would people follow you? And who do you need to follow?

Here are a few questions that will help you decide if you are doing social media marketing or just doing social media:

Do you have a core of good quality, relevant and useful content at the centre of your activity?
Do you have a clear understanding of the people or businesses you are trying to engage with?
Do you have a process for researching content from other people that your target audience would find interesting and useful?
Are you using your social media tools to engage in conversations and deepen your understanding of your customers’ needs and challenges?
Are you being generous with your retweets, comments and support for other people’s discussions?
Are you using LinkedIn to initiate stimulating and relevant conversations and to post helpful content – or are you just blasting the groups with crass sales messages?

There can be a cultural issue for some smaller business here but remember this: time spent on Twitter and on LinkedIn discussion groups is REAL WORK and not a way to fill a few minutes between meetings – but only if you have a focus.

‘We have a blog’

Most businesses grasp the potential of blogging; and a lot struggle with the practicalities. If your blogging has run out of steam or you’re struggling to get started, ask yourself these questions:

Do we have a publishing schedule identifying blog topics for at least the next 3 months and has somebody been given the time to write them?
Did we do an analysis of our target readers to fully understand the things they want to read about (can you see a theme developing here)?
Do we have anybody on the team who can write readable, interesting copy that provokes thought and stimulates interest.
Does your blog have all the basics in place: SEO, social sharing, email sign-up etc

‘We do email marketing’

Spam is in the eye of the beholder

Emails can be a powerful tool for getting targeted content and messages directly to relevant people. They can also be a fantastic way to annoy and alienate potential customers. Which one are you doing?

Are people happy to receive your emails? Did they sign up or confirm they wanted them? Or did you buy a list or scoop up a load of business cards from a networking event?
Do you offer people an easy way to unsubscribe, so that you know your messages are going to people who value them?
Do you have one mailing list, or have you divided it according to people’s area of interest and where they are along the buying process?
Are you predominantly sending emails with helpful content or is it just special offer after special offer?
If you are using emails to promote offers, events etc, are you linking to a carefully designed landing page to complete the transaction?

I’ve focused here on marketing that involves written content but you can apply the same basic principles to anything else you are doing. If you’re using video or photos, think through whether it’s the sort of thing your target customers will really value and don’t just post any old thing hoping it might go viral.

Hopefully these questions will help you decide whether all those things you are doing as marketing, really are marketing and will give you some ideas for how you can do things better.

Images: sualk61 via Compfight , screenpunk via Compfight , David Hegarty via Compfight

Richard Hussey

Want to know more about online and content marketing? Email me on richard@rshcopywriting.co.uk or call 01823 674167

Go Beyond Features and Benefits – Look for the Compelling Story

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Features and benefits are the staples of any basic sales training course. The ability to differentiate between what something is and the benefits that its features deliver to the user is an essential foundation of all sales and marketing. But really effective online marketing does more than this. Effective online marketing uses the power of storytelling to evoke emotion and create a strong desire.

How does your online marketing make people feel?

Here’s an example.

Neverfade ™ is a paint for external woodwork that is guaranteed to last 15 years without becoming dull, losing its colour or flaking off. It can be painted over bare wood, existing paintwork or woodstain. It costs £100 for a 1 litre tin. How would somebody sell that to me?

I might be sceptical about the claims. Some technical details about the formulation, how it uses the latest polymer science developed by NASA scientists and so on will help deal with those concerns. But it’s still £100 a tin!

OK then – some benefits.

You will only have to repaint my window frames after 15-20 years. In the long run this is going to save money as you might otherwise have to buy 3 or 4 loads of primer, undercoat and topcoat in that time. The product will be saving you time and money over that period.

OK I see the point. But this is all a long way off. And you want £100 per tin today. And actually I might need 2 tins!

Now tell me a story that invites me to think of how I prefer to spend my time; up a wobbly ladder sanding down window frames, covered with dust, cleaning paintbrushes and the mind-numbing boredom of painting. Or playing golf, watching Exeter Chiefs or having a day out with family and friends. Take my mind to a happier place and I’m likely to be hitting Google to see where I can buy this stuff.

This is a simple example to make the point. I’m sure you can think of plenty of ways that you can apply this logic to your marketing. Don’t just tell people about the benefits – help them to feel the benefits.

Website content

Now think about your website content. Many smaller business websites I look at focus on features. Some of the better ones are clear about benefits. But hardly any use content that is focused on how people will feel as a result of using the product or service. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that I rarely meet small businesses who are totally satisfied with the contribution that their online marketing makes to their business results.

Content marketing

The evolution of content marketing takes story telling in marketing to a new level – you have so many stories to tell and so many opportunities to tell them. Your content strategy should be based around the challenges, concerns and interests of your target customers and these should always be the starting point for blog posts and other content.

Resist the temptation to make a direct sales pitch with a systematic explanation of how your offer addresses the customer’s issues. Take one of those issues and build a story that shows somebody that things can be different. Offer helpful advice and valuable insights that deepen understanding and encourage people to look at their issues in a different way. Above all, put a bit of your heart and soul into the content. Show that you care about your customers’ issues and that you are caring and thoughtful about what you do.

People and businesses now spend significant amounts of time online researching potential purchases before they part with their cash. So the quality of your online marketing content is becoming more critical to the success of your business. If you want to make the most of this opportunity then you need to invest in content that moves beyond ‘features and benefits’ and engages your audience by evoking feelings and emotions.

Note: Neverfade is not available in the shops or on line, because I made it up.

Image: danorbit. via Compfight

Richard Hussey, RSH Copywriting

Find out how to use written content to build trust and build sales. Call me on 01823 674167.

Uses for an Old Blog Post – Get More Value from Business Blogging

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Writing a good blog post takes time and effort. Identifying a relevant message, framing it in a way that resonates with your audience, making it interesting and entertaining – this all needs work. What a shame then if you only ever use that post once. Here’s a few thoughts on how you can get more value from this hard work.

Nick Wheeler via Compfight

I’m assuming that you are already making full use of social media tools to distribute your content, and that you’ve identified the networks that the people you want to engage with are using. This is not an article about how you link your business blogging activity to social media, I want to focus on different ways that you can use the stock of content that you’ve built up.

Business blogging – don’t be a one-hit wonder

The simplest thing you can do is go back through your posts, find ones that are still relevant and repost them on your social media networks. You should be continuously growing your network of connections, online and through networking. You may also have found some new discussion groups on LinkedIn or Google+. If your post is a few months old there should be plenty of people new to your network who may have missed the content first time around – why deprive them of the experience?

Think before you re-post

Being in business should be a learning experience. We learn more about what our customers need and we continue to think of new ways to apply our expertise or products. New ways of doing things, new technology – all of these affect how we think about what we do. But our core purpose and the value we bring to our customers rarely changes at a fundamental level. Your older blog posts should continue to carry a strong and relevant message about the value you offer – but may need updating with a fresh insight. But you don’t have to start from scratch for every post. If you have good existing content go and ‘mine and refine.’

Email Marketing

Not all of your connections will be glued to social media networks 24/7. So it’s possible that they may miss your posts linking to your content. Include summaries of your blog articles in email marketing with links to the full content. If people have opted in to your email list it’s because they are interested in what you have to say.

Queries and follow-up

Sometimes your blog post can answer a question posed on social media forums. If your content is relevant, answer the question and provide a link. A word of caution though: make sure it IS relevant and it doesn’t look like you’re being opportunist or doing a bit of cheap link-building. Also, use blog posts to follow up conversations with people you meet at networking events. If you have built your content around things that matter to your target customers there should be plenty of opportunities to use it as part of your follow up.

Turn it into something else

People like to receive information in different ways. Think about whether your article can be turned into a presentation and posted on Slideshare. If you can find some engaging visuals, your blog post might form the basis of a video script. If you have a series of related, good quality articles you might have the basis of a valuable e-book, You can use the e-book as a way of getting more online contacts and email sign-ups to replenish your sales pipeline.

That’s just a few suggestions for getting more value from your business blogging. As always, these will only work if your content is well produced and based on the things your customers care about.

Richard Hussey

I’m a copywriter based in the South West. Call me on 01823 674167 or use the contact tab to find out how written content can boost your b2b marketing.

Questions to Ask Before You Write Your Website Content

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Website content matters. Possibly more than many businesses appreciate. It makes all the difference to whether anyone can find your site and to what they do when they get there. If you’re having a new site put together, refreshing your existing one, or perhaps wondering why your site isn’t delivering the results you expected, here are a few questions that could help.

Is your website content the weak link in your online marketing?

darwin Bell via Compfight

Who and When?

Two questions, but inextricably linked – and followed by a few others. If you are writing your own content, who’s going to do it? You? A member of your team? How much ‘spare time’ do they currently have? If they are fully occupied what are they (or you) going to stop doing in order to get the content written?

Why this matters: Any web designer will tell you their biggest frustration and the biggest cause of delay is waiting for content from their client. The record from conversations I’ve had with designers currently stands at 18 months (can anyone beat that?). I’ll leave you to work out the opportunity cost. Also, how effective is the content likely to be if it’s been ‘bashed out’ because the web designer is running out of patience?

How well do you understand SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation is increasingly intertwined with content, to the extent that you cannot have an effective optimisation strategy that doesn’t have content at its core. Writing intelligent and SEO friendly meta title and description tags is not easy. Integrating keywords into content in the most effective way, while still creating natural and easy-to-read copy requires skill. Is it reasonable to expect somebody who is taking a break from the day job to get this right?

Why this matters: Is there any point in having a website that nobody can find? Structure, usability and the reader experience are as important as selecting the right keywords in getting your site to rank well in Google. There’s no quick fix for this – despite what several emails in your inbox may be claiming.

Can you be objective about your business?

Your business may well be one of the big passions in your life. You are bound up in it and you are excited about your capabilities and your opportunities. Will a potential customer have quite the same perspective? Sure, they want to know that you care about what you do – but they really want to know what you are going to do for them. Standing back and seeing what matters from an outsider’s perspective is difficult.

Why this matters: Content that engages and persuades is the difference between ‘having a website’ and having a website that makes a positive contribution to your business growth. An external resource will inevitably see your business differently. This usually makes it easier to identify and emphasize the critical arguments that will persuade your target customers.

How confident are you in your ability?

However you choose to produce the content, your website is a significant investment. It’s not just the money that you pay for design and hosting, it’s also the time that your organisation has to put in to make it happen. Design matters; but even with the best design in the world your website will stand or fall on how easy it is to find – and how well it engages and persuades your target customers. Creating readable, engaging, persuasive and search-friendly content is quite an undertaking. Are you confident that you have the skills in-house to do all of that?

Why this matters: Writing is a bit like driving: people are reluctant to admit that somebody may be better at it than they are. But, while I can drive, I’m happy to acknowledge that Lewis Hamilton is a better driver than me (there, I’ve said it). Choosing to write your own content might be like Mercedes asking me to drive their F1 car – both likely to result in a big crash and disappointment!

Photo: Paco CT via Compfight

Richard Hussey, Owner, RSH Copywriting

I help smaller businesses market themselves effectively online through better website content, blogging and social media. Call me on 01823 674167 to find out how I can help you. I’m always happy to chat and explore opportunities without any pressure or expectation.

So What Exactly Is Persuasive Website Content?

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Website content needs to be persuasive. I know that sounds obvious – but is it really? How often do you read a website that really does a great job of persuading you to do something? And how many small business websites make a truly compelling case for their owners? So what is persuasive content and how can you go about creating it?

Is this your view of being persuasive?

mystuart via Compfight

Does your website content have a purpose?

Let’s start with the fundamentals. Do you know what it is you want people to do? This point applies to web pages, blog posts or any other piece of content you publish. If you’re not clear what you want people to do as a result of reading it, you can’t really be surprised when nothing happens. When you created your website, did you think through what action you wanted people to take after reading each page? Or did you just fill them all with information? The most basic part of being persuasive is being clear in your own mind about what you expect to happen.

Are YOU talking to ME?

To be persuaded people need to recognize that your content is targeted at them. Is your content built around their issues, challenges and aspirations? Are you painting verbal pictures that are familiar and using terminology they recognise? Will your target readers see immediately that the content of your web page is aimed at them? Start from the perspective of what people want and THEN explain how what you provide will help them get it. However clear the link appears to you, it may not be so obvious to a potential customer unless you explain it to them.

Take me to a better place

Persuasive website content takes people on a journey. Show them how they can get from where they are to where they want to be. Here’s a simple formula:

The vision: show me something I want and you’ve got my attention.
Understanding and empathy: remind me where I am so I can see you understand my needs, and remind me of all the reasons I need to have what you are offering. But don’t do this in a negative way (see below)
The journey: how your offer gets me from where I am to where I want to be.

Facts and stats

So, you are innovative and highly customer focused. Guess what – so is everyone else. Examples, facts and statistical evidence are convincing and persuasive, just saying you’re ‘the best’ doesn’t tell me anything. If you can quantify how much time or money you save your customers this is much more meaningful (and persuasive) than: ‘We help you drive down your costs’.

Never say never

People respond positively to positive words and positive mental images. If your content has a lot of sentences with words like ‘don’t’ and ‘never’ in them, see if you can rewrite them so that you talk about always doing the opposite. Focus on how good things could be rather than how rubbish they currently are.

‘Don’t show the wrinkles you propose to remove, but the face as it will appear. Your customers know all about the wrinkles.’ Claude Hopkins.

Get to the point

There are so many things you’d like to tell people; so many reasons why they should be doing business with you; and so many terrific things going on in your business. Find the things that matter most to your customers and focus on those. Once you’ve mapped out where your customers are (in a psychological sense) and identified ‘the better place’, take the shortest possible route to get them there. Be ruthless with your content – if it doesn’t help persuade somebody to do what you want then it shouldn’t be there. There’s nothing wrong with longer content, so long as it’s relevant and has a purpose. But be as concise and focused as possible.

elBidule via Compfight

Stop showing off

If you have a good story to tell and a genuinely persuasive argument, you don’t have to dress it up in fancy language. Are you shifting paradigms and being a game-changer? What are you really trying to say, and what impression do you really think you are creating? Straightforward language is easier to understand and just sounds more ‘honest’. If you have written a sentence for your website content that you couldn’t imagine yourself actually saying to somebody, you might want to reconsider.

What’s in it for me?

Here’s the question that visitors to your website will be asking. What benefit is there to me in reading this content and then following your call to action? If you have structured your content well and written it from the right perspective, with all the relevant facts and arguments, they shouldn’t need to spend too long working out the benefits and being persuaded to do what you intended.

Richard Hussey

I am a freelance B2B copywriter and content marketing specialist based in the South West. Call me on 01823 674167 to find out how I can help your business be more successful.

Want New Customers? Be Interested

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With any marketing (and content marketing in particular) keep one thought at the front of your mind: your audience has complete freedom over whether or not to engage with your content. If there’s no reason for them to read what you produce, and no benefit to them, they have plenty of other things to be doing.

Content marketing – how good are you at listening?

Kit via Compfight

So, how to be interesting? Step one – be interested.

People who talk a lot often think themselves very interesting – they have lots of useful insights they want to share with the world; and everybody else is, of course, hanging on their every word. Or so they think.

Genuinely interesting people spend as much time listening as they do talking. They take the trouble to understand who they are talking to, frame information according to their perspective and pitch it at the right level. If you want a non-marketing example think Professor Brian Cox.

If ‘content is king’ in online marketing, then being interesting is the power behind the throne. The purpose of content marketing is to publish useful content to build a following, get opt-ins to your email list and expand your influence and trust. Producing content that does all of this means working harder than ever to understand your customers: their interests, challenges and ambitions.

Using Social Media

Social media tools offer a great opportunity to deepen your understanding of your target customers. I read a lot of discussion threads related to online marketing. Sometimes this is to benefit from the insights of experts but often it is to see how non-specialists react to the content and the discussion. If I understand the aspects of content marketing that seem unclear or challenging then I have a much better chance of publishing things that people will want to read and will find valuable.

The same applies with networking. Interacting with other businesses helps you see the world through their eyes. It helps you configure your content and your offer in the way that adds maximum value. But this only works if you treat networking as an opportunity to learn rather than just to sell.

Is Your Business a Good Listener?

Now you might be thinking that businesses are always listening to their customers: ‘That’s how we make sure we are delivering what people need’. All I’ll say to that is hand dryers.

Not listening – possibly two examples in one picture.

D’oh Boy (Mark Holloway) via Compfight

For many years, if the makers of hand dryers had been interested in users’ experiences and views they would have found out that they were usually too slow, not effective and in many cases just didn’t do the job they were supposed to do. And then Dyson came along, invented something that worked and, magically, the companies who used to make crap hand dryers are now also able to make dryers that actually dry your hands. So maybe as businesses we are not as good at being interested as we like to think.

So, If you’re stuck for a subject for your next blog article or infographic, don’t ask around the office for inspiration, pick up the phone and talk to a customer, or go to a networking meeting.

How about you? Have you got any tips for finding inspiration for marketing content that you’d like to share?

Richard Hussey

I help smaller businesses achieve growth through engaging written content.

Find out more: content marketing services

Content Marketing – Finding the High Value Sweet Spot

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Effective content marketing needs a focus. With the right focus and sense of direction, finding suitable topics for blog articles, infograpics, videos, slideshares and so on should never be a challenge. The formula is relatively simple to understand. In fact here’s the simplest of diagrams to illustrate:

But, while the concept is simple, making it work still needs research, mental effort and planning.

The green circle above represents your side of the content marketing equation and the blue side represents the people you want to engage. You could call the bit in the middle ‘Value’. Put simply, what you have to offer only has value when it overlaps with what a potential customer needs. That’s the area where you need to focus your content.

Looking first at the ‘you’ side of the diagram, the products and services aspect is, in theory, the easiest bit to understand. It’s also the most common bit to misunderstand. Your services can be a context for your content, but shouldn’t be the subject.

Here’s an example to illustrate. One of my clients provides web-based software applications for a range of businesses. We never publish articles that just talk about how great their software is. We always focus on an issue or challenge that businesses face, these, of course, happen to be the sort of issues that their software is really good at overcoming. The primary objective is to get businesses to think a bit more deeply about how the processes and systems they use are affecting their business performance.

Knowledge and Experience

There’s a similar argument with both knowledge and experience. Your content is an opportunity to reinforce (subtly) that you have relevant knowledge and experience to address the things in the ‘customer’ circle above.

Of all the words in the green circle ‘beliefs’ is probably the most interesting. As a business, what do you care about? What makes you do what you do in the way you do it?

These last 3 elements: knowledge, experience and beliefs, are what will give your blog and other content a distinctive and engaging personality. This will make you stand out from all the other content that just passes on information without getting people to stop and think. Have a look here if you want to know more about business blogging with personality.

Content Marketing – Customer Needs

Apologies for not starting this article by focusing on the customer (won’t happen again, I promise), but I thought it was helpful to look at your side of the equation first on this occasion. Naturally, the starting point for your content strategy has to be the customers you want to win.

For all of us in business, the two most precious commodities are cash and time. Successful business people don’t part with either readily, and without getting something back. If you want people to spend some of their valuable time reading your content you have to be helping them with at least one of the words in the blue circle: objectives, needs, issues and challenges.

Your content strategy needs to be based on a thorough understanding of your target customers, what they want to achieve, what they are struggling with, and how what you do helps overcome those issues. You need to spend time researching, discussing and documenting this before you start producing content. Often, it’s helpful to include somebody external in this process to get a more objective view.

This analysis of customer needs and how your offer addresses them also pays off with the identification of relevant keywords for internet searches. Somebody looking for a particular solution ends up finding your excellently produced and highly relevant content through Google – think about that.

How Many Circles?

In reality most businesses will have a number of different types of customer they are targeting: different sectors, different sizes and so on. A more accurate diagram would have several customer circles and different areas where your services, knowledge and experience overlap. So you need to segment your targets in a meaningful way and carry out this analysis for each group.

This may seem a bit more effort than what you are currently doing but I can promise you it’s worth it. The prize on offer is the capability to publish content that people will actually want, value and engage with.

Richard Hussey, RSH Copywriting

I run a copywriting and content marketing business in South West England. Find out more about how I can help you win more customers: Content Marketing Services, Devon

Websites, Content and Social Media – the B2B Online Marketing Jigsaw

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There are many parts to your B2B online marketing jigsaw. And like any other jigsaw, if you look at one piece in isolation it can be hard to make sense of it. To know where it fits you need to have the bigger picture.

Online marketing – wondering where the pieces fit?

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This seems to be one of the commonest difficulties people have with online and content marketing; people will pick up a single piece, like blogging or Twitter, for example, and try to work out what they need to do with it, without understanding how it fits with their overall approach. So, let’s tip out your B2B online marketing jigsaw box and see what pieces we have.

Actually, before we tip out the pieces, we’d better have a good look at the lid. This is the picture we’re trying to construct. The purpose of marketing is to understand your market, to work out ways of providing what that market wants, and to promote your solutions. Too many companies focus their marketing, particularly their online marketing, almost exclusively on the third of these elements. The big picture of your B2B online marketing should take all of these into consideration.

Piece 1 – Your Website

For most businesses a website will be a central feature of their online marketing. There are plenty of options for getting this set up and the one you choose will depend on a number of factors:

Budget
Your IT skills
Your design skills

If you are setting up your business and need some ideas on how to get a website set up, have a look HERE.

However you set it up, your website will probably be the foundation of your online marketing. It is the one place where somebody can find all of your products and services, your business philosophy, your key marketing messages, testimonials and your contact details. Serious business customers will make a judgement about you based on how your website looks and what it says. The main priorities are to have content which connects with your audience and helps them find what they need.

There’s usually no problem with convincing a business that they need a website. It seems to be a standard feature of the business set up check-list. The biggest danger with the check-list state of mind is that a website can become mainly informational – without businesses thinking through the precise role that they want it to play in generating more sales.

Piece 2 – Your Blog

While the need for a website seems obvious, blogging in B2B online marketing can be more of a puzzle. Through blogging you are trying to demonstrate that you have something interesting to say about the things your customers care about. Through your blogging strategy you are seeking to build awareness of your capabilities and build trust in your organisation. With each post you are progressively building your profile as people who have the experience, understanding and skills to deliver the solutions your target customers are looking for.

B2B purchase decisions are rarely ‘spur of the moment’. Businesses take time to weigh up potential suppliers before deciding where to spend their money. Through skilful blogging, which isn’t trying to sell, you will be building relationships with potential customers well in advance of the purchase decision. You even have an opportunity to influence the customer’s decision about what it is they need. On the other hand, you could always just hope that your sales brochure turns up on their desk at exactly the right moment.

The secret is to write something that they will want to read – which means writing it from their perspective rather than yours.

Piece 3 – SEO and B2B Online Marketing

Understand your target market and understand the things they type into Google. Once you understand this you can include the most relevant keywords in your content to ensure it gets found by the people you want to find it. Another powerful reason for blogging is that you can create content optimised for a wider range of more specific searches than you could with just a brochure website. The purpose of B2B online marketing is to use the internet to reach a wider range of potential customers than you could through traditional marketing. Incorporating the most effective keywords into your content is essential – do you know what yours are?

Your web developer should help you with the SEO on your site and a copywriter certainly will when they produce the content. If you use WordPress for your blog and/or your website, install a good all-in-one SEO plug-in.

A Whole Load of Pieces Called Social Media

The nature of your business and the people you are trying to reach will determine the social media tools you use. LinkedIn is often the easiest to grasp in B2B as it seems a natural extension of face-to-face networking. I also recommend Twitter, which can be harder to grasp but very powerful when you get it right.

Whatever tools you use: Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+, etc etc, just remember the focus is on engagement, not on selling. Social media tools can help a wider range of people find your content. You can also use carefully curated content from other experts to demonstrate that you understand the needs of your audience. Social networks are also a great place to deepen your understanding of what the market needs.

And a Load of Other Pieces Called Content

I focused on blogging above but there are many content alternatives: video, slideshares, infographics, photos. The same rules apply though: it’s about building awareness, engagement and winning trust; it’s not about pumping out sales messages. You can also use specific pieces of content (eg white papers, e-books) to collect contact details that you can use in targeted email marketing: better to send your emails to people who have shown an interest rather than a list you bought somewhere.

So, if you’re struggling to understand how to get results from a particular aspect of content marketing, try looking at it in the context of the bigger picture: how you understand what your customers want and how you make them aware that you are the people they can trust to deliver the solution.

Richard Hussey

I’m a copywriter and content marketing specialist based in South West England. Call me on 01823 674167 to see how I can help you win more business. Click on the ‘Follow’ tab to have future posts delivered straight to your inbox.

See more: content marketing South West

Your First Website

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The first thing many businesses need is a website. There are loads of ways you can get this set up but, as you’ll probably live with it for a while, it’s better to think it through beforehand.

The option you choose will depend on a number of factors:

Budget
Your IT skills
Your design skills

There is no real substitute for a professionally designed and built website. If you can afford it, this route will give you something that looks distinctive, can be easily updated and will be reliable. It should also give you something that performs well in Google searches.

If money is very tight there are free options with, for example, Googlesites or WordPress.com, which will host a basic website that you put together with their templates. These require only a basic level of IT competence and are very easy to maintain.

A more flexible option is to look at WordPress.org. This gives you much more control over the appearance and functionality of your site and all you need to pay is around £50 per year for a hosting package, and possibly a bit more if you want to purchase a theme to make the appearance more individual. If you are reasonably confident using IT systems and don’t have much budget, this could be a good option. Several professional web-developers use WordPress, particularly for budget sites, so you’ll be in good company.

The advantage of WordPress.org hosted on your own domain is that all of the work you do to optimise your content for Google searches will benefit you directly rather than the host.

Another advantage of WordPress is that it is a blogging platform, giving you almost limitless opportunities to publish content to engage your audience.

Website Content

Unfortunately this is too often an afterthought – a mistake which could make all the money and time you invest in your site a complete waste. Effective website content engages your audience and makes a compelling case for your solution. It is also structured to make everything easy to find -whether through on-site navigation or Google searches. There is a skill involved in achieving this.

If you have a limited budget your website developer might not spend much time explaining the benefits of having professionally written content. This is a shame, as it could be the difference between a site that delivers results and one that doesn’t.

Hopefully you’ll find these pointers useful. Feel free to get in touch if you want a bit more guidance.

Where Now for SEO?

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Search Engine Optimisation – the art (or possibly science) of getting your website to rank as highly as possible in search engine results. What does this mean in the light of Google’s continuing updates to its ranking algorithms? Does it even still exist in the way that we previously understood? And can SEO specialists still add value to your business?

SEO rules are ‘work in progress’ – knowing which direction to head is a challenge

For a business that relies on search traffic these questions are all critical. And finding the right answers is not always easy. There’s plenty of expert advice – but it doesn’t always tell you the same thing.

SEO – The ‘Laid-Back’ Approach

At one end of the scale you have relaxed view that says: ‘don’t worry about it, just focus on writing engaging content that people want to read.’ Well, there’s no doubt that Google is increasingly focused on delivering the best and most useful content, but I think we still need to give it a bit of a hand.

First of all we need to make it as clear as possible what our site is about. Google will look for clues in the places it expects to find them: key search terms in your headings, close to the top of your web page and in the meta page titles and descriptions that sit in the HTML behind the scenes. If you don’t have a clear plan for using relevant terms in this way then you are making it much harder for Google to understand what your site is about, how to index it, and who it is most relevant to.

How Does SEO Look from Google’s Point of View?

Google is essentially a computer system that cannot read, interpret, and be informed or entertained by web content in the same way a human can. It will crawl your content and try to make sense of what it sees as best it can.

Similarly Google is not able to make a judgement about whether one piece of content is ‘better’ than another – although some informed commentators believe that it is getting smarter about spotting the characteristics of good quality content. What it can do is measure how people interact with your content.

Measuring Engagement

Engaging content that is relevant for your target audience means people stay longer on your page and are more likely to access other bits of your site. So, in the first instance, your key search terms need to make sure you are attracting the right kind of visitor. Hits from people who are not interested in the specific nature of what you do are not what you want as they will leave quickly (unhappy Google).

Additionally, Google effectively measures how interested people are in what you have to say by monitoring their behaviour on your site. If your content is poorly written or structured in a confusing way, you will harm your SEO – simply because people will leave quickly when they can’t find what they want.

Links: Good and Bad

Another thing Google can measure is the links that lead back to your site. Reasonably enough it takes the view that linking and sharing will only happen when the content is good enough. Sites that tried to abuse this principle by effectively buying links rather than investing in good quality content have been hit hard recently, so there is no short cut to be had here either.

Two other major factors are the freshness and originality of your content. Google is good at spotting content that has been stolen and doesn’t much like sites where the content never changes. So if your content creation strategy was to nick the best bits from competitors’ sites you might want to rethink that. And if you don’t have a schedule for refreshing your content, or better still a blog, that’s another urgent area to look at. If you’re not sure how to go about blogging have a look here.

So What About SEO Consultants?

It’s clear that SEO as it was promoted a few years ago – a collection of techniques and technical tricks to boost your ranking – no longer exists in quite the same way. But there is still a science behind it. A good and reputable SEO specialist will, for example, help you identify the keywords that will deliver the best return. Trying to compete for the most popular terms isn’t always fruitful if you have much bigger competitors, for example. What you want are the search terms that the people who are most likely to buy from you are actually using – you should have a reasonable insight into this but you may not know the whole story.

An SEO specialist will also have tools to analyse your site to make sure it is as Google-friendly as possible. Additionally they will be able to monitor how well you are ranking for your chosen terms and how this changes over time. So they still have significant expertise to contribute.

What they won’t be able to do, generally, is to tell you how to integrate your keywords into your content in a way that seems natural and which is engaging for your readers. They also won’t be able to tell you how your content needs to be written so that it focuses on your customers – their needs, issues and the things that really grab, and hold, their attention. You’ll possibly need a copywriter for all of that.

Richard Hussey, Founder RSH Copywriting, Devon

I help businesses get more sales through engaging content. Call me on 01823 674167 to see how I can help you. Copywriter Devon

Image: jphilipg via Compfight

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