We created our Building a Brand Series as a resource to help small business owners like you build your business online. This article will discuss how to grow an online business by mastering the content creation machine.
Let us take a moment to recap the steps we’ve taken to get to this point:
Understanding Your Target Audience
To successfully market your products or services, you must know who to market to. This is your target audience. Before launching your business, you need to understand who your audience is, what they are looking for, and how your business solves their problem.
Building a customer persona, sometimes called a buyer persona, helps you understand exactly wand built an article all about the process of identifying your target audience and crafting a customer persona: Building a Brand – What is a Customer Persona and Why Does it Matter?
Understanding Colors & Fonts
Once you have identified your target audience and created a customer persona, attracting them is crucial, depending on what that audience is will depend on the appropriate color palette and font styles to use. All while tying in the feel you want your brand to project.
Of course we have your back on this entire process in our article: Building a Brand – The Art of Colors & Fonts.
Elements of a Perfect Logo
Continuing the feel of your brand is a properly executed logo, one that not only represents your company’s mission and values, but also appeals to your target audience (you see how much revolves around your target audience).
This article Building a Brand – Elements of a Perfect Logo discusses what it takes to create the perfect logo.
Crafting a Converting Design
Now that you have nailed down your target audience, chosen your colors and fonts, and created a logo, you need somewhere to drive your customers to. Just as important as your physical storefront (if you have one) your website is a digital storefront which is going to convert someone from visitor to customer.
There is a lot of time and consideration that goes into creating a converting website. We discuss what you need to know about building a website in our article Building a Brand – Crafting a Converting Website.
The Content Machine
When trying to build a brand and grow your customer base, one of your biggest goals should be to drive traffic to your website. You can make efforts to grow your business online organically through content marketing.
In simple terms, this is the process of creating and posting content to the web, whether it be on your website, social media, or another company’s website, to make you rank higher on Google and other search engines for the keywords relevant to your business.
Ultimately you want your website to appear at the top of Google search results when someone is searching for something that your business’s product(s) or service(s) can solve. This isn’t an overnight process, it takes a great deal of time and effort to do, but if executed properly it will pay off ten-fold in the long run.
Types of Content
There are several different types and forms of content, but regardless of which you are creating, the purpose is to create content that offers readers something of value. Whether that is answering a question, teaching them something new and useful, or attempting to sell them on your product or service, the purpose is the same. Let’s take a closer look at the different types of content.
Writing for Awareness
This is the most basic type of content, but it is something every brand should use on the web. This type of content, you are bringing awareness to a particular topic, solving a problem your audience is searching for, all while putting your name behind it. This is your opportunity to set yourself apart from the competition and portray yourself as an authority in your industry or niche.
Awareness content is something every business needs to do regularly, these pieces of content are not necessarily designed to convert but a visitor may remember that your business helped them solve a problem, or taught them something new and decide to buy later on.
Writing for Engagement
With this type of content, your goal is to ultimately get your reader to perform an action, such as like, share, or comment. This is most commonly used in Social Media Marketing but the more people that comment on your website and share your content, the better you look to search engines. Google will see that people value what you provide and increase your authority for that particular topic. The goal of any search engine is to offer the most relevant and valuable information to those searching for answers. So that must also be your goal when creating any type of content.
Writing for Conversion
You have probably seen an ad for an interesting product on Facebook, clicked on it, to be taken directly to a page that is trying to get you to make a purchase. Content written with the intention of directly (keyword here) asking for something from the reader is conversion content.
So you might ask yourself, aren’t I always trying to sell my products or services? Yes, but awareness and engagement content does that indirectly, where conversion content you ask specifically for the action you want them to take. This could be anything from making a purchase, scheduling a meeting, or donating to a cause depending on your type of business.
Writing for conversions is an art, rather than a science. It’s carefully crafted to remind the reader of their problem, and then convince them that your product or service is the best solution.
Forms of Content
We’ve learned about the types of content you can create, now let’s dive into the different forms. Think of this as the delivery method for your content. This can be in the form of social media posts, blogs, site copy, and emails.
Social Media
Social media is a great way to get your message out to a large audience with the end goal of driving traffic back to your site. This could be in the form of a post to your profile, to a group you have created, or a paid ad.
An example of this would be summarizing a blog post in an engaging way and linking to the original article on your site. In your post, you want to craft it in a way that it gets the user to click to the article on your website. This isn’t just in the form of written content; this strategy also works well in videos.
Site Copy
Site copy goes hand in hand with writing for awareness, with the goal of converting. Your site copy should tell your story, state what sets you apart, and be clear and convincing. It is important to keep this simple and to the point.
One of the first things people do before they buy from a company is look at their about page. When creating site copy, you need to write to your customer persona and keep in mind what they are looking for, what is important to them, and what they look for in a company.
All site copy should include a call action and social proof whenever possible (such as Reviews, Certifications, etc.). Ultimately, what action do you want them to take? Make it clear and tell them how to do it.
Blogs
Blogs are a major part of building a brand and increasing your ranking. Many are not sure how to write a blog or where to even start. Blogs should answer searchers’ question(s) and be centered around keywords related to that topic. Keyword research is essential. Blogs should be created and posted regularly and focused on things people are currently searching for that are related to your brand or business.
For example, if you are an HVAC company and it’s summer. Potential customers are likely searching for things like ‘why is my AC turning on and off’ or ‘why is my air conditioner making noise?’
Answering questions your target audience is searching for offers them value and keeps them coming back. You will be seen as an authority in the industry, and search engines will start ranking you higher over time.
Email Campaigns
Email campaigns are great for when you have built an audience. Having people sign up for a newsletter is a great way to get them to give you their email addresses. You can provide incentives like coupon codes for their first purchase or discounts on a service you may offer.
Pro Tip: Obtaining an email is a form of conversion
Once they sign up, you periodically send them high-quality, relevant content through a drip campaign. Whether this is information on a product launch, something related to a blog you just posted, or a sale you may be having, it is extremely important not to be spammy.
Spamming will result in the email platforms sending you straight to the spam or junk boxes of your subscribers and can actually hurt your search engine rankings. Remember, you want to be an authority in your industry, not a pushy salesman.
How to Write Great Content
Writing great content is an art. All content needs a human touch and must be written for your customer persona to be successful. Depending on your company or brand, you must ensure all content is written in the correct tone as it relates to your target audience. A clothing company, for example, may have a casual tone, while a marketing company would have a professional tone.
Of course, the tone can vary depending on the content, but generally, you want to be consistent across your content.
When writing content, you want to provide value, answer questions, and go above and beyond. Research similar articles and pages on other websites.
- Can you find anything that is missing?
- Can you answer the question and provide more information in a better and easier-to-understand way?
You want to expand on what your competition is missing and exploit it. This is ultimately what will set you apart for your competitors.
Techniques for Success
Aside from the content itself, some basic techniques will set you up for success.
At least 1,000 Words
A solid blog that offers value to a reader should be at least 1,000 words. Answering questions in detail and offering customers value in shorter blogs is hard. Additionally, search engines see longer blogs that are free of grammar issues as more valuable and are more likely to rank those higher in search results.
Simplicity Is Your Friend
Your content needs to be clear, easy to read, and include a clear call to action. Content should be written towards the 9th-grade level at most. You do not want to be using words that most people have never heard of or that are not commonly used in everyday conversations. Especially when other phrases and words are more often used and understood by the general public.
While it might be tempting to be creative with word usage, simplicity is often your best bet. You do not want to distract the reader from the purpose of your content.
Pro Tip: Think of words the common searcher would be typing into Google
H4: Post Where Your Target Audience Is
While it may be tempting to post content on every single social media platform there is, this isn’t always necessary. When you create your customer persona, you should know where they spend their time online. You also do not want to burn yourself out doing something that will show little to no results.
Write it yourself, or hire a content writer in your field
You can write your content yourself if you have the time and skill. Most people growing a business have too many hats to wear already. You will have a better return if you hire a content writer familiar with your industry or field.
This can save you a lot of wasted time of trial and error, and ensure you get great content that will rank well.
Get Professional Tailored Content Strategy
When it comes to growing your business online, you need to have a strategy. This process can be a bit overwhelming, making it difficult to know where to start.
At Two Dot Marketing, we are experts in creating tailored content strategies. We offer completely free brand consultations, get started today.
