Creating content can have many benefits for your brand. When we talk about content this could be blog posts, whitepapers, videos, imagery, even quizzes. But the key element is that it is strategically driven to deliver your objectives. We’re not talking about just filling up the white space, but content that is created specifically to achieve agreed goals for your company.
Here are 7 ways that you can use content to benefit your business:
- Keep your website up to date
The website content that you created some years back may no longer be representative of the company that you are now. You should regularly review the main page content to ensure that it is current, and reflects not only where you are as a company but also what your customers are expecting to see to match their offline knowledge of you.
Whilst you don’t want to lose old content on blog posts due to the valuable links they might have created, regularly creating new content gives you the opportunity to keep your customers up to date with changes and developments so they can see you as you are now, not only as you were previously. You can go into old posts and update them, making it clear they have been edited for factual reasons, and this will ensure that the record is straight.
- Improve your search engine result position
Whilst the specifics of the Google algorithm are a closely guarded secret, it’s understood by many that the freshness of content plays an important role in page ranking. A blog on Moz.com states that ‘Websites that add new pages at a higher rate may earn a higher freshness score than sites that add content less frequently.’
Having a strategy for content creation takes the sting out of regular postings, by laying out what you are aiming to achieve and creating a calendar of ‘events’ you can dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend staring at a screen and wondering what the hell to write this week.
- Be found for target keywords
If you are introducing a new service or speciality, creating content which focuses on this not only educates the reader on your site, but allows for you to be found in search for this as well.
Reviewing your web analytics can show which target keywords are underperforming or where there are opportunities to grab traffic from what have previously been unsatisfactory web searches. We have previously gained traffic for clients by creating content around topics that reflect a changing business strategy – for example, to establish themselves as an expert provider of a niche service that customers were seeking information on but not finding onsite.
- Provide sharing opportunities on social media
Creating content provides opportunities to talk about it and thus drive people towards your site. Effective use of social media requires the input of your own content – there’s only so many cat pictures a customer wants to see. And how is that gaining their trust or explaining what you do?
Look at your analytics to see which channels are the most effective, or conduct some tests by posting appropriately in each one, and then you can focus your attention on that channel to really make good gains in followers, engagement and sharing.
- Reinforce your brand position
Writing your own thought-leadership content sets out clearly what you stand for and what’s important to you. This is essential in bringing your brand position to life and saving it from being just some points on a PowerPoint presentation.
These need to be customer-focused pieces, that tap into their needs, concerns or questions and shows how you meet them.
- Introduce your staff
People buy from people. Time and time again we see that articles which look at the team members get great engagement and lengthy read times. Introducing them to the people at the other end of the phone can make that first contact more simple, and help establish some common ground. Or just satisfy our inherent nosiness in other people’s lives!
Whatever the motivator, people-led content continues to be a great route.
- Find out more about your customers
The more content you create, the more you can learn about what interests your customers and how you can better serve them. Of course, this is reliant on you having the time to look at your analytics and delve into the data, but the information here can be incredibly useful.
We’ve used data to develop more topics, to find new valuable keywords, to find out when people want to receive information, what they like to share … and so much more. But of course, if you’re not creating, you won’t have access to ongoing data to benchmark against.
For us, the case is clear. Creating content that is valuable for your customer has benefits for your company as well. It’s a win, win.
If you’re struggling to create purposeful content, give us a shout – we’d love to help.