Getting your website noticed online… and working for you

To put it simply, there’s no point in having a carefully crafted marketing plan that’s designed to drive traffic to your website if your website isn’t ready to work hard too. A successful plan can only do so much (see our web page on creating a marketing strategy that makes a difference) and websites can’t sit still. Even if they look and read great one day, they’ll soon slip behind. And worse than that, if the promises you are sending out aren’t matched, or the appetite whetters don’t satisfy once a visitor reads your content, then your efforts will fail and your brand will suffer into the bargain. Thus for your website to be noticed AND for it to keep working for you, it needs to be up to date, vibrant, and relevant. And the only way to achieve this is to offer up to date, vibrant, and relevant content. Adding great new content regularly, therefore, is critical, and being able to get that great content onto your website quickly and easily will also make a huge difference.

Content management makes life easy… and keeps you agile

Being able to add new pages and content to your website in-house, without needing to be a web developer, means you can respond instantly to changes in the market, advertise new projects and offers, and keep your audience engaged. The type of system you need to be able to do this is called a content management system (CMS), a great example being WordPress. In nutshell, a good CMS will:

• Be easy to use, without the user needing to be technically gifted
• Be web-based, and thus updateable wherever you are as long as you have access to the internet
• Enable multiple users in your organisation to update relevant parts of the website 24/7
• Connect with social media platforms
• Prompt consideration of search engine optimisation
• Connect with RSS feeds (if desired) and enable GDPR friendly email subscription

In effect, a website with a good CMS becomes an extra pair of hands working alongside you in the business… and that is invaluable.

With that said, then, what do we mean by great content?

Creating great, engaging content

Great content adds value in many ways, but there is no one size fits all. So catering for your audience by providing content tailored for different points in their customer journey will make a huge difference to how much you can engage and hold them until they’re ready to buy. Buyers carry out research long before they contact you. So being aware of the stages your customers go through, and providing content that catches the eye, hooks, and keeps you in their minds at each stage is the name of the game.

Buyer journey stages include:

• Buyer becomes aware of a need and begins to investigate
• Buyer discovers options and begins to evaluate
• Buyer creates a shortlist and compares
• Buyer makes a decision
• Buyer moves onto being ready for retention

At every step of the way, you can have influence through carefully managed digital marketing and relevant content on your website.

What kind of content are we talking about?

We’re talking about blogs, articles, product reviews, industry updates, white papers, videos, interviews, competitions. You name it, if it’s well written, catchy, and concise, it will get someone’s attention in the right way. Your objective with each piece will be determined by the point in the buyer’s journey that you’re seeking to hit. But you’ll either be aiming to convert, increase credibility, enhance your professional status, build brand trust, and/or become an industry go-to with top tips and snippets of info. And all the time you’re doing this, you will be engaging, engaging, engaging.

How do you sing about this great content?

Social media platforms are the ideal way of getting your content noticed out there. Each platform caters for a particular demographic. B2B works well on LinkedIn, for example, and Instagram is pretty good for strong visual updates for youngsters. Facebook is great for an older market. And Twitter, as generalised as it is, is prowled by the journalists; and there’s nothing like a bit of free PR with a well written article in a tweet, eh?! And then of course there are other, more traditional, channels such as newsletters, email updates, newspaper advertorial, SEO, PPC, and so on. There really are loads of options available to you.

So we challenge you… If you’ve got a marketing plan, what’s the content planning section looking like? And if you’re struggling with one or both of these plans… why not give us a call? We’d love to help!