Small businesses may think they have a significant disadvantage when it comes to content marketing because they just don’t have the resources to create content.
The problem is that as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) becomes more sophisticated, your company’s website needs to have a regular supply of original content.
Now you could ignore this and hope that potential customers have the patience to click through multiple pages of website listings until they find yours, or just rely on word of mouth from your existing customers. This is all very well but realistically you need to make sure there is something new on your site each week.
If you’re really struggling for time, read on for some ideas on creating content without taking (much) time out from your job.
Take it step by step
People love to know how things work so if your business makes products, take a photo at each stage of the process and post them on your website with a brief sentence about each stage.
If you’re making a wedding cake for a customer, take a photo of the ingredients and then one of each important stage of baking and decorating and the finished product.
Building an extension for a customer? Take a before shot of their house, a few of each stage of building and then one of the final finished extension. It really doesn’t take long to snap a few photos and it’s a great way to showcase your services without taking up too much time.
Watch the news
While I do sort of mean literally as you never know what might be going on in the rest of the world that is relevant to your business, it’s also essential to keep an eye on the latest news and trends in your industry. Use the internet, social media and magazines to keep abreast of the latest updates and revelations that could affect you and your customers.
Ideally you should address these trends in an original article, but if you’re pressed for time then just write a quick summary of the news and how you think it will affect your customers and the industry. If it’s something that might worry your customers, you should also explain how your business will react to these changes to protect their interests.
Talk to your customers
Feedback is always good, so if you ask your customers to write a short testimonial of your work, you can post these on your website with a short introduction about what you did for them, any challenges etc.
Potential customers will expect to see some case studies or information about your past work. If you can include some photos of the work alongside the testimonial this also enhances the message and adds authority to the post.
Ask questions
Create a short survey for your customers and ask them to fill it out. Obviously if they write comments this is more useful, but even if they just score each aspect of your products and services out of five, you can then reveal the results on your site, either in a graph or short blog post.
Statistics also enhance your business’s authority as you can say things like “90% of our customers would recommend us to a friend” on your marketing material, or even use specific quotes across your website.
Recycle and reuse
If you’ve got content on your website from a few months ago, see if it’s still relevant and update it with any more recent developments. You can also link to old content via social media at different times to remind people of certain topics they should be thinking about. You can also combine content into one post in the form of “top articles from 2014” and link to each piece within this ‘new’ piece of content.
On social media you can keep your followers’ newsfeeds populated by retweeting and sharing posts you think your customers would find interesting. This also helps to promote your business to other companies as they might then share one of your posts.
However…
Although it’s fine to use these ideas, you shouldn’t rely on them to improve your site’s SEO and when you do have time, try to create as much content as you can – it’s always good to have a couple of spare posts for when you are pushed for time.
Once you get used to creating content, it does become quicker and easier – I promise!
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