Determining what content to create for your website can be intimidating for many small business owners. Content development may not naturally be part of your skillset, leaving you without knowing what to write. However, if you and your marketing team put your heads together with sales and customer service, you can come up with an impressive list of content that your prospects and customers will value.
What Visitors to Your Site Want
Whether visitors to your website come from Google, or from other marketing channels, the primary reason that they land on your website is to seek information to answer a question. In order to develop content that is important to your target audience, you need to survey your team for common customer questions.
What is the impact on business objectives?
Tying all metrics to organizational goals is the surest road to a building a sustainable content plan. If the relationship between content and the bottom line is unclear, justifying your content budget becomes difficult. Measuring clicks, likes and page views are great, but don’t stop there. Make a strong case for how content can meet your toughest business challenges, from branding, awareness, or increasing sales. Quantify the impact on your business and communicate it often to your executive team.
Working Across Departments
Marketing has limited direct interaction with prospects and existing customers. Therefore, it is a good idea for the marketing team to brainstorm a list of topics with sales and customer service.
The sales department can help develop a list of topics from the common questions that leads and prospects ask them during meetings and phone calls. It is likely that the sales team already knows the most common questions off-the-cuff. However, it is helpful to dig deeper for underlying concerns that prospects bring up.
Fixing Problems for Customers
Customer service can offer a different side of customer relations. They often talk to existing customers who need help using or installing a product. They also receive the calls when a product is not working properly. Creating content to answer these questions will help your customers before they call.
How can you support ongoing content development? Content marketing is not a campaign to be turned on and off, and the biggest obstacle to overcome is typically a lack of content. Identifying sources of content – both internally and externally – that can contribute on a continual basis will help alleviate this issue. For example, one of our clients identified several subject matter experts within their company whose expertise aligned with their messaging platform. We are now using those individuals as sources of content as part of their integrated marketing and PR strategy.
What does success look like?
You’d be surprised by how often this question is overlooked. Understanding the purpose for each piece of content will help you determine how to measure performance. For some content, success looks like a low bounce rate, for others KPIs measure latency and loyalty. Performance indicators will look a little different for everyone. Make sure your KPIs are unique to your business, content type and your audience.
81 percent of people research products and services online before they call for information. You can reach many of these people by answering their questions with your content. Contact us for more information on content development or to learn more about internet marketing.