Great content, whether online on your company’s website or as text for physical brochures and print advertising is essential for successful marketing. The content should be a call to action as well as a description of your business’ mission.

You can’t create great content until you understand what your business is. You need to be able to describe it to yourself before you define it to your customers. You need to brand yourself.

The branding process calls for a little self-examination and answering some questions.

  • What customers are you targeting?
  • What is your company’s reason for being?
  • How should you communicate that message?
  • Why should your customers buy your product or service?
  • How do you want your customers to feel about your brand?
  • What do you want the brand to represent? Is it community, competition, care giving?
  • What is unique about doing business with your brand?
  • What is the company’s short-term strategy?
  • What is its long-term strategy?
  • How do you involve your employees in communicating your brand?
  • How should you manage your brand to assure that you take advantage of opportunities and make improvements when necessary?

Once you understand what your brand is, tie it to your content and make the text amusing and fun to read.

Of course, the content you include should focus on all the standard things — products or service you offer, locations of your stores or offices, profiles of the company and executives who run it, listings of special events, promotions, and more.

However, keep it fresh. Constantly update. Keeping the text fresh helps:

Increase traffic to your website. Internet tools like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) permits Internet users to search for what they want. The searches generate lists of websites that offer what is requested. The sites with the freshest content land higher up on the lists.

Manage your online branding. You can use this opportunity to communicate your brand message through quality, fresh content like blogs or other articles. They help draw more customers to your site.

Attract repeat visitors. New content including videos can encourage old customers who are looking for new information to keep returning to your site. Fresh content and videos describing new trends and current news about your business or trade or offering links to other sites of interest are ideal ways to get periodic customers returning to your site more often.

Take advantage of analytics software from major computer-related companies to obtain a better understanding of your customers so you can refine content to better reflect their interests, design campaigns to reach your target audience more successfully, and prepare content that keeps visitors on your site once they get there.

Finally, you will probably want to hire someone or assign an employee to manage your content marketing. Managing the details and writing fresh content can be a time consuming task better left to someone on a fulltime basis.