Across the Marketing Industry there is a phrase that “Content is King”, with the advice being given to businesses of all sizes to engage with their customers, don’t talk at them but build a relationship with them – you need good, engaging content to achieve this. So, as a small business how do you go about doing this? Where do you start? How much time do you spend on this and what on earth do you say?
The starting point is to build your strategy, once you know where you are going, what you want to achieve and your focus, this will help give you an initial direction as to what to do next. There are then 5 key points to consider to writing great content:
- Tone of voice: how do you speak to your audience? What language do you use? This will not only vary by business but also age demographic, it would not be appropriate for example to talk in text speak to the older generation or if you were talking about legal matters as they would not respect your opinion, consider you trustworthy or perhaps understand what you are speaking about.
- Offers: Consider what offers are relevant to your audience, e.g.: will it be best to add value or will a discount work better for your business?
- Content: Where do you source engaging content? And how much? This is a little like how long is a piece of string, as once you have a topic this should then thread through all of your business promotion, website and marketing. Inspiration can strike from anywhere – articles on the radio, in newspapers, conversations with friends and family, industry updates for your business plus a whole host of other sources. Why not sign up for a few well chosen emails or Linked In groups?
- Timing: It can be time consuming to write content, so only plan on doing what you can reasonable achieve, set yourself a target to write a BLOG once a week, or month – depending upon your business. Remember consistent frequency is better than doing lots in one month but then nothing the next.
- Enjoy! Have fun writing about your business, industry and relevant topics.
So, why should we invest our precious time away from our business into developing engaging content? Well there are two main reasons, firstly to keep writing content for a BLOG, email or social media this is a way of keeping in touch with your target audience and giving something back to them, rather than just bombarding them with offers. The second key reason is to help with your natural search results from your website in Google. There are about 10 key ways to help with your Google search rankings and one of them is to show that your website content is constantly changing and moving, ideally your clients are then interacting with all the great things you are writing about.
If you need some help in writing copy or setting your strategy please get in touch! We look forward to hearing from you.
