Marketing

Great article worth the time to read: Just a taste…

What types of content work best for educating your audience?

• Podcasts – Podcasts are becomingly increasingly popular and serve as a fantastic way to engage and educate your audience in an easily digestible format.
• Seminars – People want information packaged in ways that will help them get what they want. Presentations, workshop, and seminars are tremendous ways to provide education with increased engagement.
• FAQs – There’s no denying the value of information packaged in this format, but go beyond the questions that routinely get asked and include those that should get asked but don’t.
• Success stories – Building rich examples of actual clients succeeding through the use of your product or service offerings is a tremendous way to help people learn from other individuals and business just like them.

What types of content build trust?

• Blogs – A blog should be your starting point for your content strategy because it makes content production, syndication and sharing so easy. Plus, search engines love blog content which can help boost your SEO.
• Social media – Building rich profiles, and optimizing links, images and videos that point back to your main site is an important part of the content as strategy plan.
• Reviews – You’ll never have total control over this category, but ignore it and it may be one of the most damaging to your brand. Get proactive and monitor this channel aggressively.
• Testimonials – This content adds important trust-building endorsements and makes for great brand building assets out there on Google and YouTube.

John Jantsch is a marketing consultant, speaker and bestselling author of Duct Tape Marketing, Duct Tape Selling, The Commitment Engine & The Referral Engine.

I thought this blurb by Allison M Reilly was useful: Blogging for business involves writing an article every week or every other week, about 400 words, about something related to your company or around a keyword for which you want to rank. It’s enough to get by, but it’s not enough to do business blogging well. It’s a lot more than writing blog posts, even if that’s blogging for business in its simplest form. If you want your business blogging efforts to generate traffic and leads and actually do something for your SEO, then getting something up every now and then isn’t going to do that. Business blogging is about your customers, creating something of value to them while offering a great experience with your company. Follow these five small business blogging tips to provide more value, and to take your business blogging to the next level.