What should our content marketing be about?
Introduction
So it’s a dreary Monday morning, you’ve just rocked up at work, and you look at your list of tasks that you need to duly complete throughout the day ahead.
First thing on the list to do, the bosses have asked you to write a piece of content marketing for the company website, this is when you let out a deep sigh into your mornings coffee, as you know it’s not going to be a straightforward task- but here’s why you should turn that frown upside down my friend.
Every business, has a lot of people that have expertise on the products or services that you manufacture or sell, and guess what, often people need expertise when you are buying something.
So, yes, you’re a clever clogs, and now’s your time to show off a bit, show that you know your stuff. So, no its not about writing a thousand words, sending off to the marketing department for them to pick your masterpiece apart- no, that’s the wrong attitude, instead you know what is what, so make sure you use that knowledge to help the companies customers.
So if you match the two, and help your customers solve a problem that they might be having, whether that’s the benefits of purchasing a certain television, or explaining what goes into making your scented candles smell so blooming good, often customers will be over the moon you’ve helped them.
If you aim to answer these pressing questions your customers have, and always aim to be better than your competition, then hey presto you got it you could be improving your organic SEO, not such a drag is it?
First things first, what’s content marketing?
So, so many businesses think it’s just a written article that is added to the news section of your company website, and it’s a couple of hundred words and that’s it, yet anything could be further from the truth. Its not just written text, the same as a car is not just a vehicle of transport.
Sure, a car can just be a box on wheels, non inspiring, a lump of unreliable metal, just the same way content marketing can be 10,000 words that can send you to sleep, make you face-plant the keyboard and wake up several hours later with post-it stuck to your head, and a few missed calls.
But who wants to be like that?
No, you want to be the hyper car of cars, the best, the inspiring head turning automobile that when you jump into the driving seat, you feel good about yourself, so now translate that to written text?
That’s to say, aim to be the best, write stuff that’s interesting to your customers, don’t settle for being average, so if you take nothing else from reading this informative article, take this nugget of advice, make the work useful and interesting, and if its not, don’t publish it.
If its not quality, if its written work on par with the same vigour that rubbish car was built, well its going to act like a dead weight and pull the website down.
Instead it needs to be well written, and help your customers solve the problem
Why bother writing content marketing?
Well that’s not the attitude to take for a start!
We are only joking, we fully understand why a lot of businesses think why should they spend hours upon hours writing hundreds if not thousands of words of text, while drinking too much coffee during the process.
The simple answer is this, your website is not just about selling products or a service, because if it was then how would Google know rank a website? How would Google distinguish your business, that sells the same product as one million other companies?
Well, how it does it is by seeing how “relevant” your website is to the query, plus, how strong your companies ranking factors are.
Now don’t get bogged down by search engine ranking factors for just now, it will all get confusing, leave that to us here at Pack Digital, your rather brilliant seo agency in Bristol. Instead, if your writing the content marketing, well, just focus on writing the best answer you can to that question.
You need to stand out, as an expert in your field, to do this you need to answer questions that your customers commonly have.
But what are the advantages of improving a business’s organic SEO?
Well, it’s kind of like saying what are the benefits of feeling fitter and healthier through exercising better eating, it’s hard to say unless you go on that journey yourself.
And no, were not saying if you improve your SEO, you can get six-pack overnight, it doesn’t work like that obviously!
But what we are saying is this, as your business starts to gain traction and your company starts to move towards the first page of Google’s organic results, you can start to begin to get more visitors.
Now, obviously this does depend on how good the agency is you hire, but if you get more organic visitors, that are the right sort of shoppers, well this can help to increase sales. Yet, a word to the wise, the work must be quality, for this you often need a respected agency.
I haven’t got much spare time; can this work be completed ultra quickly?
No, most definitely not, this is the attitude that a lot of really low-quality SEO agencies take and businesses that think that’s the whole SEO process is a walk in the park, it’s not.
You often hear people thinking that SEO is so simple that they can do it themselves, yet then after a year or two down the line, they then still looking for an agency to help, that’s because seo is not simple.
Offering advice via your website, through content marketing for your customers, in a way which your customers will find helpful, well that’s not that easy.
Plus, when you think that there are well over 200 other SEO ranking factors as well, it’s safe to say that SEO is most certainly a complex area of marketing, that can’t be underestimated.
Why are you saying in needs to be written by an expert?
Okay, so this is a huge mistake that so many businesses make, that’s to say some businesses think that they can gets articles written for a few quid by a freelance copywriter, or that they can bash out 1000 words afterwork.
This again is the SEO work which is likely to damage your SEO and not enhance it, instead time needs to be spent on real high-quality work
Why should I even bother giving away free advice?
So, this is a question that we get asked a lot, especially by businesses to get paid by the hour to dispense advice, such as a solicitor, they often ask, why go to all this trouble to give away free advice?
Ultimately, to offer paid for advice by the hour, for example let’s say you’re a lawyer, you need people to first find your business online, that’s so they contact you, so to improve your organic seo, sometimes you need to give away free advice in the form content marketing.
So for example, lets say somebody is going through a divorce, there likely to research which company they want to go with, and this might mean that they read over 10 articles before they pick up the phone and say this is the business for me, so you can begin to see why free advice via content marketing is sometimes offered by some companies.
So a word to the wise, be careful you choose
If you pay a stupidly low price for SEO, well, guess what you often get what you pay for!
Now, we would like to think that a lot of business owners are worldly wise enough to know that if they pay say a few hundred pounds a month, then what can they really expect back in return, well not a huge amount!
Especially when on the first page you might be up against many multi-million-pound businesses with very large marketing budgets, so you have to be realistic, if you are going to throw your hat into the ring and take on the competition, you have to make sure you have a realistic marketing budget.
Why we think it’s worth partnering with a local agency
Now it’s all well and good picking an agency that’s in another country, but the whole point of organic SEO is that the agency must understand your business and what you offer, and sometimes this can’t be done over the phone.
Instead, it often happens naturally through meetings with the business, walking around say their warehouses, or even going out with them for a drink on social nights.
You can then start to get an idea of the culture within the company, where they want to take the business, where there currently positioned, and more about the products and the services that they offer.
Now don’t get us wrong, were not saying that after a few meetings, you’re going to become an expert about what that business can offer, what we are trying to get at is, you need to spend time with the business to understand the company some more, so can this really be achieved if you were to pick a marketing agency that is overseas? Possibly through a lot of travelling maybe.
The SEO process never really comes to a stop
This is a huge mistake many businesses make, they think that they can pick an agency, sky-rocket to the top, and then drop the agency.
However, it doesn’t work like this, instead you need to form a long-lasting relationship with a good quality SEO agency like ours, that’s because the competition is always aiming to improve their SEO to be stronger than yours, so you can be overtaken within a week.
Aim to be the very best
Who wants to be mediocre?
Let’s be honest we don’t go into business to be second rate, do we?
So, aim to be the best.