Tips to help you get your content marketing right

Are you really trying to attract visitors to stay on your web site, or are you just following what you think are the rules?

For a while now we have had this suspicion that people are using stronger and stronger perfumes to hide the fact that they don’t know what is going on rather than having a good shower and getting back to basics. Many others are so wedded to the altar of Google, they are simply missing the real marketing point: you create content to attract and engage visitors.

It's generally recognised that adding engaging content should be a key part of your brand and business strategy. But what does this actually mean? Recently we took on a client with an online shop who is obsessed with keywords and SEO that it took a while to get him to talk about his content and his site's relationship with its clients. Concerned about the decline in number of visits to the site, they demanded we "fix the SEO". How then to explain to this person that the world has changed, and that improving the metadata, or finding some new keywords was not in itself going to halt the decline.

Time, we said, to go back to marketing basics and start to engage with your customers directly.

That said, the owner's frustration is reasonable enough. These are decent people trying their damnedest to get their web site to pay for itself and to make a living from it. Unfortunately, like many similar operations, they have become victims of chasing Google's tail and neglected the needs of their customers. Watching them trying to fix things with Google was like watching a hamster on a wheel running faster and faster and getting nowhere all the driving themselves crazy at the lack of results.

What back to basics means for an online shop is thinking through every aspect from categories to products, from pictures to product descriptions. As we have explained, if it's not interesting to read, then you can hardly expect your site to keep growing. And if you don't talk to your customer and offer them what they want, they shouldn't be surprised if nobody comes back. It will also mean revisiting their blog and their offers to make sure they engage their clients properly.

We can express these rules more generally like this.

The rules of visitor engagement and content creation

• Take a hard look at your site and ask yourself why you are here and what you want to achieve.
• Know the key messages related to your business or brand and how you want to communicate with them.
• Just who is the visitor you want to attract and what do you want them to do when they arrive?
• Simplicity always works better than clutter.
• How will you design the site to engage the visitor when they do get there?
• Do you look the same as everyone else or, worse still, is your content scraped from other sites?
• Visitors like varied and interesting content.
• They also like to move naturally and easily from one item to another. Is your site easy to navigate?
• You want them to stay on your site for a reason, so make sure they can easily follow this logic through to the result you want - buying a product; generating a lead, or signing up for a newsletter, for example.
• A visitor who is not encouraged to "do something" when they come to you is wasted one.
• You want to build a long-term relationship with your visitors and to engage them. You want them to come back. So give them reasons to do so.
• The devil is in the detail. Every entry and piece of content you create, you should aim to make even better than the last one.
• What is your plan for content update? Pay attention to the needs of your business rather than "search" rules.

Page ranking v’s engagement

This is where the quandary starts. Businesses have to ask themselves if they want clients or they want page ranking. This might sound like a heresy. Surely everyone wants a good page ranking?

Sometimes, of course, they can mean the same thing, but let's think of how we might approach this by looking at another scenario.

Imagine yourself as an accountant. You and your team may be able to cope with a maximum of 350 clients per team member, so do you really want to be top of the page listings, or do you want to attract another 25 high value clients?

The point is that your strategy should reflect what you want to achieve. A targeted outgoing campaign to make 25 clients aware of what an accountancy firm has to offer and its key benefits might be a much more valuable use of a marketing spend, than a push to be top of the rankings for the key word "accountancy".

Not, of course, that there is a single answer: each business has its own criteria. If chasing page ranking is necessary, then of course you should do it, but it will never be true that it is the only one, or even always the right one.

As a side comment, you have to have some sympathy with small businesses that chase the rankings and thought they were following the rules. It's just that, so often, the ones they were following are obscure or not up to date. If it is hard enough for SEO professionals to track the changes, small businesses are often going to feel the fall-out even if they think they are doing the right thing.

Putting a content strategy to work

Let's say that you start to put your new content strategy in place. You aim to be original and fresh, but you don’t know how. Let’s consider some simple rules to help you:

• Create varied content. This can either be seasonal and timely content ( content that is relevant to the here and now or the time of year), or content that you aim to last and be relevant over time.
• Create targeted content – take time to understand and segment your clientele so you can aim specific content at them.
• Resist the temptation to direct content at your peers. Create it for your clients.
• Offer real value – something unique that they wont find anywhere else.
• Keyword rich content to improve SEO – be careful of overloading your content, but a careful consideration of title, H1, and keywords will improve your search rankings as well.
• Encourage engagement you can measure – for example, link content to a call to action to ensure the visitor stays longer on your site.
• Plan your content around events and times – the advice to treat each piece as a product or service launch is a good one as it will encourage you to look at adding images, video and infographics as well as written content.
• Keep it fresh and up to date.

We would love to hear from you with examples of great content creation, so let us know any examples you have come across.

If you found this article interesting, please recommend it to your friends. If you need help designing a content strategy for your business, then we would be happy to help you.