Many businesses understand content marketing or blogging; whatever term sits easy with what you think ‘writing content’ is. Many small local businesses don’t start because they can’t foresee that there is any tangible evidence that it works.
This is especially true when they are not selling a product online and are counting footfall through the door. My worry is that local businesses don’t have evidence and, therefore, just don’t try.
The following story about a salad just goes to show that a local business blogging can see a new customer acquired through organic search.
No good story starts with a salad…
Neville, one of my colleagues who works on the SEO team at our sister brand, Vertical Leap, came up with a quip saying “No good story started with a salad” as he was leaving for dinner today. Being the curious kind of fellow that I am, and partially wanting to wind him up, I went looking for ‘stories about salads’ on Google.
The typical results came up of a news story involving a salad, a Wiki page about Cobb salad, a salad recipe, but something caught my eye on Page 1 that I thought may be of use for my salad quest…
“My So Called Salad – salads with cool stories behind their names …”
The blog post has explanations of how two salads and one common lettuce used in salads came into being and acquired their names. It makes for an interesting post for people interested in their food and its origins.
The blog post was written in May 2013 by Rose the owner of Peardrop, a local business based at Portobello Road, London. She offers salad food for local workers wanting something healthy and delicious for their lunch and has recently partnered with Hunter Gather menswear store in Marylebone, supplying their café.
The proof here (and I would assume that Rose, the owner of Peardrop, knows), is a blog post does not die and fade away after you have shared it on your Twitter and Facebook. In this case, it has gained a new customer as my girlfriend and I quite often visit London, and with her being vegetarian we are always keen to try new places that suit her diet. This local business has done a fine job of putting content marketing at the forefront of their business.
After emailing Rose, she has grand plans on developing the business further:
“I would love to open a cafe in a year or so but for now I’m concentrating on moving my kitchen out of home and into a proper unit”
She also understands that you have to be contributing for a period of time until you get to see the fruits of your labour, but has already proven that blogging adds value for her current customers:
“I haven’t had an example of someone coming to me through the blog as yet but I only launched very recently (a month or so ago). One of my customers was on the 5:2 diet so I sent her the link to that post and she has made a few of the recipes.”
Warranted, in this case I’m over 70 miles away, which when you are a company looking to acquire a daily lunch time customer is not ideal, but we have recently opened an office in London so all is not lost. Plus you, the reader, may work round the corner from them and soon be winging an order in – and that my friend would be the butterfly effect of content marketing in action.