We let all our clients know about the importance of content. In that regard why is content truly important, how can it increase your effectiveness, and how can it help you grow your small business? When you have content that is designed to drive an interaction that creates a sale you can easily create a goal within your analytics software, track it, and justify the contents success and value. In most cases success from your quality content happens over a period. Quality content will showcase your expertise, build trust, educate, and establish your brand as a leader in your industry. In this article we will delve into five key items of why quality content is important to your brand.
More than just text
When we talk about marketing content to improve your overall reach we often think of the text of the article, case study, and sales material being created. This is not always the case when it comes to educating and informing your audience. In many cases pictures and video are equally important in telling your story. When you use text, images, and video together you are reaching many aspects of marketing. Text helps you reach your audience by having content that not only people read but the search engines read. Images have always been said to convey hundreds, thousands, and even millions of words from a single graphic. Video captivates and brings people further into your sales process.
Improve your organic search
Writing quality content takes time and you want to grow your business. The benefit of this quality content is that the search engines will reward you for it. Recently we have had a large influx of people wanting to do paid advertising to reach people. Many we help with paid advertising on Google, Bing, and Facebook. This isn't where the power of content is though. The power of having quality content comes from being found organically (e.g. free). The quality content costs (and money) to create as time has a price. What it gives you is that lasting value that helps you grow.
Evergreen content prevails
When it comes to longevity of your content and something that truly lasts the test of time you need to think of quality evergreen content. What though is evergreen and why do I care about it? Evergreen content is content that is not time sensitive that lasts months and years down the road. This is where true quality content lives. When you create great content for your website or social media marketing the content can be used over-and-over to reach and impact your audience.
Sales funnel process
We always put emphasis on long-term, educating, and informing of your audience to why your brand is something that is worth buying. All too often we talk with small businesses directly looking at big business (e.g. Wal-Mart, Target, Kohl's, etc.). Small business can rarely beat these companies on price as they are buying in such large quantities it just won't happen. Many consumers want a quality product, they want to be something more than “just a customer”. They want to know they are helping their community grow. Although we shop at Wal-Mart all the time when it comes push-to-shove we always look at small business first and see if they have what we need as we know it helps our community.
Being the industry leader
We have briefly talked about being the industry leader but what does being an industry leader mean and do for my business when all I want to do is make sales? Sales takes more than “one touch” to complete a sale. In our industry we often will touch someone 20 or more times before a person starts to gain interest in purchasing our products. A touch can be anything from passing someone on the street and saying hello (they need to know who you are though), phone calls, emails, and information (like this blog article) that showcases knowledge and information. All websites whether someone wants to admit it or not is a sales tool. You are showing your products and services, providing customer support, and helping educate people about who you are. The more you educate the more you become the expert in your industry that people will go to.
Bonus – How often to create content
We would be amiss to not talk about how often one should write, update, and educate when it comes to content. The holy grail when it comes to content is once per week. Once per month should be your minimum for writing content for your website. You want to stay consistent (another bonus – consistency!!!!) in your schedule. If you have a marketing company, they should be taking valuable information from you on what you want to talk about and helping you create this content and publishing it for you under your name so that you can focus on growing your business in the real-world. For our clients, we strive for twice per month to achieve maximum effectiveness of promoting their brand and what we believe should be the minimum (yes that's more than once per month!).
Conclusion
A quality article like this will be around 700-1,000 words that inform, provide value (people walk away with new knowledge and information), and keep your name in front of their mind. This article has taken about 45 minutes to create. The page offers benefits to everyone by providing value, quality organic search engine optimization or SEO, and allows the reader to go back and take the information and use it to grow their business.
If your business wants to grow online and you don't have time to do so as you want to focus on your core business in the real-world the team at JM2 Webdesigners and Marketing from Valparaiso Indiana is ready to assist you with our social media, search engine optimization, and content writers that we have on-staff to help your small business grow. Give us a call at 855-456-2669, email at sales@jm2marketing.com, or through our online contact form here.
