Content strategy allows you to achieve business goals by laying out an actionable plan of how to develop, market and maintain content which goes on your site. There are a number of things worth thinking about when you are sitting down to start a new project, and hopefully this article summarises some content tips which can help your website really grow.

Ensure Content Keeps Evolving

Many businesses wrongly approach designers or developers with the age old cry of ‘I need a website‘, a war cry many of you will be all too familiar with. The more naive of customers will undoubtedly be treating their website as a box ticking exercise that requires little or no work once its done. As many of you will know, a good website is an evolving relationship between business and consumer, and it’s important that your content management system allows for that. A good content strategist will ensure that old content gets removed or updated, and new content takes pride of place.

Lead with Content not Design

A great designer not only makes things look good with asthetics, but understands that they can’t design until they know what information they need to portray. A great design will never make up for substandard content.

If your content isn’t attracting links, by definition, it isn’t great. That’s simply the way the web works today. It therefore makes sense to place equal if not more importance on content, including the planning of it prior to starting any web project. Social media explorer have some great questions to coax the information out of your clients, or indeed to ask yourself.

Branding Strategy – Identify your Tone & Voice

Even before you start to develop your content, and think about what your audience really wants, you should think about the tone that your business takes with it’s customers. Are you a friendly brand that needs to keep things light and fluffy? Or do you need to maintain the professional corporate image that your existing marketing material has taken? I absolutely love the advice the guys from Innocent Smoothies give on this, a brand that I personally admire a great deal.

Define Key Themes and Subtopics

At the outset you should ascertain what the primary topics and key themes are to concentrate on. Mind mapping different areas of your business (see some of the mind mapping and prototyping tools that are available for that) is a great way to get to grips with the areas that your content should address. When you have brainstormed all the different services, products, problems, and facets of your business, you can move on to logically categorising them. This can then form a good starting point for navigational categories for a blog or website.

With not everyone thinking in the same way, it makes sense to use keyword research to make sure that you are calling a spade a spade. There are a variety of seo keyword tools available online free of charge to really drill down and examine what areas are going to get you the best results.

Make it evergreen

Evergreen content stays relevant long after it has been written. You should be thinking about what sort of articles will stand the test of time, attract links and build your site as an authority. Evergreen content takes time to create, but will form a good starting point for the rest of the content. There are a number of ways to do this.

If there are a handful of key concepts in your industry, you may for example, want to provide definitions for them, and serve as a reference piece for other bloggers and websites. I’ve done this before successfully with my seo glossary in the past.

Other things you may want to look at include. How to articles – these are often bookmarked for reference, which can have a exponential effect on your traffic. List articles which are easily digested by visitors. Technical articles which teach your visitors something new. Or just plain old resources and freebies.

Align content with business goals

1) Will it generate links and contribute to ongoing SEO efforts? Has it been architected with the properties of great linkbait? Will my audience read, share or link to it? Will they care?

2) Does this content relate closely to my business? Will this increase my authority as a trustworthy business in the sector? Will it drive direct or indirect sales?

3) Is this only relevant to internal staff? Should it perhaps be an intranet article instead? Does this article exist elsewhere online? Is there a duplicate content issue with it that needs addressed?

Think Sideways

Thinking sideways essential involves knowing what is hot out there, and using that information as a springboard for your content. One of the things I’ve learned in my short time as a blogger, is that chasing news isn’t a fun task. Whilst breaking news is beneficial, it isn’t easy – especially with other more established blogs sitting in Silicon Valley day in day out hunting out stories. What you can do however, and a part of my own strategy, is to think sideways.

Microsoft announce migration from Live Spaces to WordPress – write a guide, not a news article.

Google announce real time results – tell your visitors how to track it in Google Analytics – while others cover the news.

Both these articles filled holes in topics with practical articles that were receiving attention at the time, and both received a good flow of traffic.

Article by : Webdistortion, 2010

There are many small and medium businesses (SMEs) that are really getting their heads around pull marketing. They may not demonstrate the polish of the big brands, but are experimenting with online techniques to bring in new business in a way that larger companies sometimes struggle with.

The explanation for this comes from the inherent challenges SMEs face, combined with the special perspective they often have on their sector. SMEs don’t have budgets that stretch very far with traditional push marketing, but they do have expertise in a niche sector that they can share. And as small business owners and directors are often in direct contact with customers on a regular basis, they naturally know the right tone of voice to use. When you look at it like that you realise that SMEs are very well placed to embrace pull marketing, as long as they take the time to establish a good web presence, generate content and engage with the outside world.

I think the real keys to successful pull marketing are to be generous and authentic. That is, be generous with the information you share and in the way you deal with people, and be authentic by being genuine – honest, human and not too corporate or ‘salesy’. SMEs are generally pretty good at this, they’re close to their customers and are not hamstrung by corporate marketing police so can be responsive and understand the right tone to use.

I would argue that pull marketing actually could lead to smaller companies experimenting with push techniques which they would have previously avoided. My theory goes like this. Many smaller companies simply do not have the budget for traditional marketing methods, or they are sceptical of such things. However, pull marketing is something they can get their heads around more easily; most business owners engage in social media on a personal level and those skills can be transferred easily for the benefit of their business. And it is perceived as cheap – though the real cost is in time, something that SMEs often have in favour of budget. So, after experimenting with a blog, Twitter and some whitepapers on their website, for example, the business owner then may have the confidence to progress to more traditional forms of marketing, tied in to their online activity – which is the smart way to do it anyway. Bigger brands could learn from this example.

Of course, not all SMEs are brilliant at pull marketing. And of course big companies have many advantages. One of these is in having the resources to refine the pull marketing process. Small companies really struggle at being good at each stage of the marketing process – online or offline. The owner manager or marketing manager of a small business will often focus on areas they feel comfortable with or can afford. Whereas larger companies can engage in the kind of refinement that is going to distinguish good pull marketing from bad as time goes by. Larger companies have the capacity to integrate search, digital marketing, CRM, analytics and web design. But perhaps it is sheer scale of the big brand marketing machine that allows smaller business to connect online in a more empathic way with their audience.

Article by : Daryl Willcox (iMedia Connection, 2010)

Embracing product reviews

Social media empowers consumers to make product reviews on their own blogs, tumblelogs, or on third party review sites. Smart retailers are embracing this trend and offering product reviews from happy (and unhappy) reviews from their customer base on their own website, as well as embracing and encouraging reviews elsewhere.

If you aren’t currently doing this you are missing out for a number of reasons. Firstly, customer reviews offer you an easy and cost effect way to grow organically by providing additional user generated content to the search engines. Secondly, product reviews offer an additional feedback tool to learn why someone purchased, or perhaps why they wouldn’t again. If you are still not convinced – Bazaarvoice has a large collection of stats on why product reviews matter.

Transparency is the key here- you have to be prepared to suck it up and take the rough with the smooth.

Larger companies like Asos are getting this right – just recently they have launched AsosReviews.com - which highlights the good and the bad comments coming directly from customers via Twitter, and provides a visual gauge to let potential customers to see how they are doing at a glance.

If there’s one thing you can be sure of with social media, it’s that you don’t control the conversation. The conversation controls you.

Be honest and allow negative feedback as well as positive. Address it on your own site when it occurs – or face your visitors taking the negative feedback elsewhere on the web, more often than not to higher profile social sites where a larger audience are likely to see and potentially share it. Lest we forget the Streisand effect.

If haven’t currently got a budget for supplying this review service on your own website, you should be asking your customer base for reviews on various other websites around the web. See point two on this post for some of the places Google are using for data purposes to work out who to list highest in Google product search.

Both map searches, and Google Base (shopping) – are now using reviews as a ranking factor within their algorithm to work out who should get the traffic.

Remember – Consumers are most attracted to a website that provides good advice and reassurance about their purchase, with outfit suggestions (43%), recommendations (46%) and customer reviews (40%) cited as features that consumers most like. [IMRG] – it is possible to tap into these trends through both social shopping sites and using reviews and recommendations.

Social media profiling

As part of your overall marketing strategy you should be asking all of your existing customers the questions to find out how many of them have a social media profile or indeed a blog that you can update within your existing customer database.

This can easily be built in into your newsletter requests, or made an optional query as part of the checkout process. You may even want to reward customers that offer this data freely to you with a once off discount voucher to encourage participation.

For example – if 65% of your customers have a Facebook profile, and 10% have a Twitter profile – then running a Facebook campaign is clearly going to be more beneficial than using Twitter to reach out to them. It also gives you the data you need to run a more targeted email marketing campaign which will tie closely in with each of the audiences.

Data is your friend online, and you have to be smart about what you choose to collect, and how you can use it your advantage, and gain insight into your customer base. Social media profiles are one metric that smart retailers are collecting as part of their overall marketing strategy.

Rewarding social sharing

Ultimately one of your primary goals when using social media to grow your business, and website traffic, should be encouraging the sharing process. There has to be an underlying reason for someone to do so, and without motivation, it simply wont happen. For retailers, this means that the unusual products get the captivating responses – and if you have no quirk, you are just another website. In other words if you are selling just another blue t-shirt, you can’t expect any kind of excitement or buzz to build around your site. Enter reward schemes.

Smart retailers are offering discount and special offers to those customers who are tweeting their products, or sharing them with their friends, running promos directly from within each of these networks to spread their coverage that bit further. Some are monitoring the social sphere and offering a points based reward system for those loyal customers who are referring other customers, via their blogs, or their social media profiles.

To me, its pointless to just put a “share this” button somewhere on each of your product pages and hope to get results – mainly for the reasons stated above. This is something I see retailers doing time after time – slapping a button on product pages because they hear its a good idea without thinking it through. Some even end up damaging conversion rates, depending on how intrusive the sharing implementation is.

Instead of this – offering some bait and reward scheme right at the checkout process which provides an instant discount prior to purchase is more likely to encourage sharing, particularly for items which wouldn’t have otherwise received natural shares.

Blogger outreach

Linkbuilding is hard. However, its the single most important ranking factor in the major search engines’ algorithms. Retailers have one up on the rest of us. Many of the smarter retailers are using their stock (both the difficult to shift, and best lines) to link build, giving it away free of charge in exchange for reviews of the product, or sponsorship of competitions. There are a variety of bloggers who have chosen to niche directly in honest product reviews.

If you hand pick who you give to, you can pretty much guarantee relevant contextual links back to your site – which google will end up paying you with traffic for. Sometimes you have to speculate to accumulate, and blogger outreach can position your brand in front of shoppers, who are often online, and with credit card ready to buy.

Summary

Overall social media offers new and creative ways to reach customers, you just have to take the leap, jump in and get going to realise the benefits.

Article by : Webdistortion, 2009

When it comes to marketing for your small business, you need to have a website that people can visit to get information about what your small business, you need to understand the difference between two fundamental marketing theories to ensure you’re publishing the type of content and comments that will help you reach your blogging goals. Those two theories are push marketing and pull marketing, and they’re at the basis of all marketing strategies.

Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase before; it’s commonly tossed around when the subject of marketing comes up. But what does it mean and how does it apply to your small business? Basically, it defines the two different approaches to marketing that you might use in your small business. The difference between them is based on who the target of your marketing efforts is.

Push Marketing

Push marketing works exactly as the name implies. Businesses (or you as a blogger trying to grow your blog’s audience) push messages to consumers in an attempt to pique consumers’ interests in a product or business and make sales. Most often, the business controls push marketing strategies and has a very specific end goal in mind. Traditional advertising is a form of push marketing where companies try to craft messages and images that will motivate consumers to take an action such as making a purchase. Similarly, pushing a discount message out to your audience via Twitter or another form of social media is a push marketing tactic. Consumers may not have asked for such a discount, but you’re pushing it in their direction with the hope that they’ll be motivated to make a purchase.

Ford Kicks Off F-150 Online Push

Pull Marketing

Pull marketing is the opposite of push marketing. Instead of pushing information to consumers, consumers pull information from businesses. In other words, companies create marketing messages in response to consumers’ specific demands. When consumers make it clear that they want a new product from you, and you deliver that product, you’ve responded to a type of pull marketing. Similarly, if the online conversation prompts you to publish a blog post that answers questions you heard in that conversation, you’ve just implemented a pull marketing tactic.

Using social media marketing and content marketing to promote your blog enables you to pursue both push marketing and pull marketing tactics. In fact, the best social media marketing and content marketing strategy for a blogger is to pursue far more pull marketing tactics than push marketing tactics. In other words, spend most of your time listening to conversations, finding opportunities, and filling those gaps by publishing content and participating in conversations in which your audience is pulling you in and demanding more. Spend a much smaller amount of your time pursuing push marketing tactics that can be viewed as self-promotional.

Triumvirate Environmental Social Media Blog

When is it OK to Push?

Consumers understand that some push marketing is essential at the beginning of a campaign. You won’t turn off most people by sending out a regular email blast announcing and promoting a new blog and you won’t turn off most people by sending out email and Twitter promotions that those people will predictably be interested in — a sale preview announcement to opt-in email customers. But choose selectively where you need to push and pull wisely.

When is it OK to Pull?

Pull marketing is likely to be much more fruitful than push marketing attempts only as long as the pull message is not contaminated with a sales pitch. A company can post a compelling article about how to shop for a home alarm system and then kill the whole piece by finishing with “someone may be breaking into your home right now.”

Which works Best?

Both. The challenge is getting the emphasis and order right. The pull then push marketing sequence that works to move your business forward involves the following:

1. Create resources that pull prospects to you and your firm.
2. Get prospects to give you their contact information (Most firms let over 99% of the people who see their information go away and never follow up).
3. Push useful information out to self-selected prospects on a regular basis. (Remember the majority of buyers won’t make a purchase until they’ve had a minimum of 5-6 contacts with your firm).

When your prospects have a compelling need, they will turn to the firm that they’ve had regular communication with, know and trust. At some point prospects will want more details about your services, credentials and testimonials. But this is often the last information you need to provide.

Summary

Okay, so you get it, but what does this have to do with marketing for your small business? Well, any good marketing strategy incorporates all of the different tactics possible within the budget available. You should be looking at incorporating both “push marketing” and “pull marketing” into your small business marketing plan. Consider the pros and cons of each of them so that you can make decisions about how much time and energy to devote to both types of marketing. You’ll need different approaches to your advertising for each of the two kinds of marketing.

Article compiled by : Adrian (Maxwave Design & Marketing, 2010)