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High Value Blogging

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Growth strategies and content marketing plans can sometimes be complex. Often you need a much simpler statement to help you focus on what really matters when you’re making day-to-day decisions. Here’s mine: I focus on giving my customers something they value and then look for more customers and give them something they value also.

content marketing needs direction

Does your content marketing lack direction?

Lori Greig via Compfight

OK, I know the above approach sounds a bit like those trite maxims, loved by business gurus, that you see littered all over Twitter. But focusing in this way helps to guide business development and provide a direction for content marketing.

If you’re lucky or talented enough to have invented a killer product or service, a marketing message should be simple to create.  If I’d invented a car that performs like a Ferrari and runs for a thousand miles on a litre of petrol, I wouldn’t need to think too hard about how I’m going to market it. For most of us it’s a bit more tricky.

Content marketing: focus on value

If you’re stuck for things to blog about, have a think about how you add value to your customers. Write some blog posts about how people can add value to their business or lives by using the things you provide.  So, if I were in the Customer Relationship Management systems business I would be illustrating, in a multitude of ways, how a structured approach to prospecting and communicating with potential clients works much better than an uncoordinated scatter-gun approach, without overtly saying ‘buy my CRM system’ (that’s called advertising).

Content marketing: focus on the future

Thinking about the customers you want to have in the future also helps give you a focus. It clearly makes sense to focus your content creation around the needs of the customers you want to have.

You might also want to centre your content creation around the products and services that you think will be your most profitable lines in the future, rather than now.  How much effort do you want to put into marketing lines that will show gradually decreasing margins?

So, if you want a focus to help you decide what content you should be creating and sharing, think about these 3 questions:

1. What do we do that our customers particularly value, why do they value it?

2. What sort of customers do we want to win, what will they value?

3. Which of our products or services do we most want to promote?

This may sound simple, and I make no apology for that. Working through the detail will still require serious thought. Compare this to the approach you often see, with people jumping onto a blogging and content marketing bandwagon without too much thought of what they want to get from all this activity, other than vague notions of increased profile or unspecified new business opportunities.

Other posts you might find interesting:

Don’t let content marketing suck up all your time.

How content marketing leads to sales

PS. If you want regular, well written content for your marketing activities have a look at my monthly budget plan options HERE

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The More Your Website Content Pleases You – the Less Effective it Could Be

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Who decides what goes in your website content? You? A select group of senior managers? Delegating the content to a small, focused group of decision makers is great for consistency and efficiency. And possibly the worst decision you could make.

Let me explain.

The purpose of your website is to communicate with the outside world. Write it to please yourself and you’re missing the point. Worse still, you’re probably missing countless sales opportunities too. The people who really understand what needs to be in your website content are your customers – and the staff who are dealing directly with them.

I was recently looking at the website of a company selling telephone and communications systems. The content was clear and gave all the information you could ever want on the capabilities and specifications of the systems they were selling. But I’m willing to bet that such things are not the main reasons why customers choose one service provider over another – particularly when there are dozens of providers who could meet their technical requirements.

Website content is for customers

I’m convinced that a bit of research with existing customers would yield a different story and a different message for the website content. If you understood the critical factors that made your customers choose you over a competitor – wouldn’t you want to emphasize those for anyone else that looks at your site?

And what about your sales team? Every sale - particularly solution sales like IT and  telecoms, will have some critical decision points during the process. Taking the time to analyse and document these before chasing the next sale provides a rich seam of persuasive website and marketing copy. How often does this happen? Yet a relatively simple debriefing process could be all it takes.

One argument for hiring a freelancer to write your web content is that they come to the project with no preconceived ideas about your business. It’s often easier for an external, impartial professional to get to the heart of why people really choose to do business with you.

Good marketing is specific

Say you were looking for an accountant to look after your tax returns. Most of them say ‘we save our clients money by ensuring they claim all their available allowances.’ Another says: ‘On average we save our clients £457 on their tax bill by identifying allowances they didn’t realise they could claim.’

The second is clearly more persuasive. The actual figure is irrelevant (but must be true, obviously). The fact that a specific figure can be quoted adds weight to the claim and differentiates you from the mass of companies making similar claims.

If your product or service saves customers money, find out how much they have saved and make sure you tell anyone else who might be considering doing business with you. Perhaps what you sell is more expensive than your competitors – people may still buy from you because you provide better overall value. If so, talk to your customers to understand fully what ‘value’ really means to them and build your website content around that message.

A final thought;  phone a couple of recent customers today (or get me to do it for you) and ask them to give a couple of specific reasons why they did business with you. The difference between what they tell you and the message that you are giving on your website is a measure of the opportunity you are missing.

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PPC Advertising: ‘Reports of my death are premature’.

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I found the following article on Social Media Today: The Death of Pay Per Click Advertising.

It’s well worth a read.  The most striking statistic was that only 18% of SMEs using Google Adwords actually recoup their expenditure.  No figures for larger businesses but presumably these are higher and not so newsworthy.

The article has lots of useful suggestions on how to make PPC work, which I won’t repeat here. I’m going to concentrate on more basic issues.

PPC advertising is about quality, not quantity

Of the 82% of SMEs not getting a return from PPC advertising, I wonder how many are doing it themselves rather than using a professional marketer or copywriter. Writing Adwords is superficially simple, writing ones that work is a skilled business, further complicated by the rules on characters. It’s like a modern version of Haiku.

I wonder how many of these SMEs have created an image of the shopper who is likely to become a purchaser, and then written an ad that appeals directly to that person; one that  excludes the merely curious. An attention-grabbing ad is valuable only if it grabs the attention of the right people. Getting clicks from people who are not likely to purchase just eats up your budget.

PPC – nobody knows everybody

How many of the unsuccessful SMEs did small-scale pilots using several versions of the ads to see which ones appeal to the right kind of customer? PPC is not an exact science; we know the words most likely to appeal, but none of us knows enough people to predict with absolute certainty how the mass of the population will respond. Test different versions and record what works best for future reference. And remember: it’s conversions, not clicks, that count.

The road to nowhere

Not just the title of an excellent song but, I suspect, also a description of some links from Adwords. I did a recent post on landing pages which gives advice on making these more effective  These need to be as scientific as the PPC ads. Is there a natural link to the ad, or will people think they’ve been misdirected to some mysterious place? Does the landing page pick up the sales process where the ad leaves off and lead to a natural call to action? Is it well written, using positive language and without spelling or obvious grammar errors? Finally, has it been tested before committing the whole PPC budget?

PPC is not dead and it can work very effectively. The key for SMEs is to think and act like  big companies (or their advertisingPPC Advertising agencies) in the way that you plan and write PPC campaigns. If any SMEs out there want help with this I would be delighted to hear from you. Just fill out the contact form on my blog.

I’d love to hear from anyone with anything to add to this discussion. Any common pitfalls or, better still, examples of SMEs doing this well would be great to share.

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