Five Quick and Easy Web Content Development Tips
If you have a small business, you probably don’t have time to sit around thinking about web content development. You’ve got a business to run and resources may be tight, but you know that you need to expand your online presence. Your customers are on the web and you want to be able to reach them. Where do you begin?
The trick is to stop thinking like a business and start thinking like a consumer. What do your prospective customers want? What problems are they facing and how do your products and services solve those problems? What makes your business the best one to patronize? Most importantly, how are your target customers using the web?
It shouldn’t take you long to answer these questions. In fact, if you’re already in business or if you’ve started laying the groundwork for your small business, then these are a few of the first questions you should have addressed. But all business owners lapse into entrepreneurial thinking. We get caught up in our own industries and fields of expertise. We forget that the consumer sees from a different point of view and speaks a completely different language.
Keeping the customer’s perspective in mind, you can apply the following five web content development tips to start creating content that will reach the right audience and get them to buy tickets to your show.
1. How-to Articles
You’re a pro at what you do, but your customers are novices. Don’t ever forget that. In addition to the products and services that you sell, you can give away your knowledge (advice) to make the customer’s experience more pleasurable. Let’s say you’re an electrician. You can just go to people’s houses and fix their wiring or you can leave a lasting impression and give your customers a branded flier that offers some tips on how they can maintain their electrical devices. Now, post those tips to your website and you’ve just added some useful content for your website visitors.
2. Case Studies and Storytelling
Once you’ve been in business for a few years, you’ll have some stories to tell. You’ll have stories about customers who benefited greatly from doing business with you and stories about customers who suffered because they didn’t. In the meantime, be creative. Use storytelling to show (not tell) people how your business offerings will improve their lives. If the story is long, add a page to your website. If the story is short, post it via your Facebook group. If it’s super short (140 characters or less), share it on Twitter.
3. Solving Problems
You need to think of your products and services as solutions. And you also need to think of your customers as people with a problem. Now, put the two together and explain to your customers how you can solve their problems. Many business owners tend to think that the problem/solution model is obvious. For example, our friend the electrician believes that if his customers have an electrical outlet that’s not working, they also know he’s the one who can help. But he needs to detail the problem and emphasize himself as the solution: Power outlets not working? Did you know faulty wiring and broken outlets can be a safety hazard? I’m here to help keep your family safe and make sure your electrical wiring works.
4.Transparency, Credibility, and Loyalty
For a small business, the best customer is a loyal customer. These are not only the customers that come back again and again, they’re also the customers that run around telling all their friends how great you are. They send you a lot of referrals. How do you land these kinds of customers? You start by building credibility. Establish your expertise and back it up with excellence. You can do this by publishing web content that showcases your top customers or by engaging in transparency. Write articles about your business processes. Explain your reasons when you make changes to your offerings or pricing. Let the customers come behind the scenes and help them become fans.
5. Find Their Haunts
Once you’ve got your website up and running, you have to drive traffic to it so you can convert that traffic into paying customers. In order to do that, you have to create even more web content and publish it around the ‘net. I call this peripheral content. It can be as short as a tweet or as long as an in-depth article. And it can be based on any of the four tips above. But you’ll need to find the haunts where your customers hang so you can get the content up on the wall. Here are a few bonus tips to help you find your people:
- FREE – Are you selling music, trendy clothing, or cheap eats? Trying to round up the teens? Get a spot on MySpace because that’s where the teens and tweens do the internet thing.
- FREE – Facebook offers a few different ways to connect. You can create a page or launch a group and then invite people to join or become fans. How do you find those people? Send an invitation to all your Facebook friends. Post updates to your wall. And add one of those how-to articles.
- PAID – Facebook also sells targeted advertising. So does Google and a number of other ad networks. Your ads will be shown to people who are either already searching for whatever you offer or who have expressed specific interest in it.
- FREE – Twitter’s great for relationship building. If you can carve out some time to engage on Twitter every day (or a few times a week), you’ll make some friends and they’ll share links to whatever good stuff you’re selling.
- FREE/PAID – Let’s go back to our friend the electrician. His main customers are homeowners. All he has to do is find out where homeowners hang out on the web and voila! He’s found his base. Search for forums where your customers hang out. Use your favorite search engine to find “homeowner forums.” If you service a geographic area, be sure to narrow your search appropriately (e.g. “homeowner forums new york”). Join the forums and participate in the conversation. Add value and grow your network.
- FREE/PAID – If you have web development skills, adding a blog to your site won’t cost a dime. Or, you can hire someone to take care of it for you. Either way, blogs that are properly designed and maintained have a tendency to draw traffic to a website. Blogs are great because your website visitors can subscribe and because they’ll get regular updates, they won’t forget about you!
And then there’s SEO, which helps make sure customers can find you via search engines, but that warrants a post of its own.
Web Content Development for Small Businesses
Building an effective online presence can have an exponential impact on the growth of your business. Think like a customer to create riveting content, then use social networking, blogging, and other online marketing efforts to bring visitors to your site and then convert them into customers.
Scribizzy offers web content development services for small businesses. We’ll devise a plan that’s tailored to your business and then create the content that brings the plan to fruition. Start growing your content today by getting a quote online.
About Melissa Donovan