Get the most from your business website and provide your visitors with valuable information about the services you offer. Make your website useful and consider adding a blog to help your visitors solve their problems.
What is content marketing?
Simply put, you create rich content about your skills and pass on your expertise with how-to guides along with valuable tips and advice to your customers in the form of blogs. Your blog posts can then be posted on social media which in turn provides you with links back to your website. This will also give your website content more authority which is a ranking measure used by the major search engines. For example, if you are a plumber in Swindon, you could write an informative article about changing a tap or a washer. You provide expert knowledge, demonstrate how to do the job, the tools needed and how long it will take and explain the difficulty levels, etc. In turn, the reader learns how the process works and feels empowered to do the job themselves. You have directly helped a customer for free!
Sounds counter-intuitive doesn’t it? Why would I tell my visitors how to do my job?
That’s the whole point of content marketing.
A well-aimed blog about how to fix a leaking tap is something that people will search for and a subject that your website will be found for. You are helping your customers as well as creating new ones, you are making yourself the go-to person for advice about plumbing in your town. Your posts stand a good chance of being bookmarked, liked and shared and help establish you as an expert in your field. You are positioning yourself as the guide on the subject whilst at the same time, adding value to your customers. You’re one of the good businesses. The more you write, the more your business appears as the most helpful plumbing business in town. See how that works?
Assuming you are a busy person, set aside an hour a month to write your blog about helping your customers overcome a problem and then publish it on your social media and website. That’s obviously twelve really useful blog posts that you have to call upon to re-purpose as you need to. Blogs can be rewritten, updated and fine-tuned to evergreen content that will cement your website firmly in the high levels of search rankings. You could even write about a current hot topic of the day if it somehow relates to your business. You could go viral!
When do I start?
The sooner the better. Take an honest look at your existing social media posts and website content. Do they add any value? Are they useful to your potential customers? Or do you just talk about yourself?
Now, replace all of your old posts with your new fresh, helpful blog content and your business will become an authoritative resource for customers. Customers are more likely to reach out to you first when experiencing a plumbing issue! You have positioned yourself as a guide, creating brand awareness and could even have created one or two brand evangelists!
Writing is like a muscle, the more you exercise it, the easier it gets. Once you get used to writing and researching blog information it becomes second nature. But it takes time to get results. You have to put the work in to see a return.
Nobody knows your business better than you do but don’t advertise that fact, let your content marketing prove that for you.
