Billups Design

The online world is all about content. What brings people, whether consumers or business clients, to a website? The obvious answer is: new ideas and information that solve their challenges and needs. Print, TV, radio and online ads can drive traffic to a website all day long, but what good is it if they get to the site and are bored or unsatisfied with the breadth of information and leave.

Or for that matter, what if they come once and like what they see and read, and then come back a week or a month later only to see the same content again and again. What about two months later, or a year. Staleness isn’t good in a potato chip and it certainly isn’t good in a website, especially yours. There comes a point when people and more importantly customers just won’t come back. Now, we aren’t recommending constantly changing the overall look and message of a website.

Consistency of message and design are essential to creating a lasting brand and taking a position in your audience’s mind. However, while a company and its website need to remain on brand point, your site is a living and breathing entity that can and should change to engage existing and potential customers. Customers are constantly craving new information and ideas like oxygen, water and light to grow their businesses and better their lives.
This is where creating a steady stream of content comes in. Give people a reason to visit your site on a regular basis, and you may catch them when they need you. Maybe they comment on your blog or call in to see how the subject can benefit their company. Either way a new conversation can begin. The question is, how do you know what will interest them?

Luckily, with the ever evolving social media landscape, we all have the opportunity to have constant and relevant two-way conversations with our customers. This is simply too convenient a forum to pass up. Take cues from trends in customer comments and create content and solutions that address their likes, dislikes, challenges and concerns. Reinforce your brand’s unique selling proposition by telling stories in the form of blogs, videos, press releases and webinars which illustrate how your company consistently solves problems or makes customers happy.
Now, creating content just for the sake of it can be a time consuming endeavor. So, content that is linked to the projects you are working on is the key. Updates on new technologies or telling a story about how you are creatively solving a client’s problems can make the task easier. Just because you are living a project day in and day out, doesn’t mean anyone else knows about it. This is a story that can be told in one piece like a case study or in ongoing fashion to show the solution building process. The “process approach” may actually be an interesting way of telling the story, allowing the solution to unfold like a mystery with an unknown ending. For our clients, we load up a battery of press releases and industry stories to post in a steady succession over time.

How does a company find the time create topics and publish new information, while managing to satisfy projects for clients?

* Be disciplined in your approach: have your staff or agency consistently generate new ideas for relevant topics
* Assign multiple staff members to work on articles
* Write about what you know: industry challenges, recent successes or ongoing projects
* Keep a daily journal
* Monitor your social media sites and sentiment trends
* Turn questions from customers into topics

With the folding and thinning of print publications potential customers across all industries are seeking out credible sources of content that can help them solve problems in their business or everyday life. Your website provides your customers a forum for relevant and credible content, a place to come and visit for a stream of useful information. Establish your company as a thought leader in your field and business is naturally drawn to you.

So while you may not sell ads on your site, it pays to think like an editor. Editors are selling content and creating a value proposition for their magazines, stations or websites. Your company is essentially doing the same thing, but for bottom line benefit you need to turn website views into calls, meetings and sales.

So whether your business sells tangible products on a website or through distribution channels content is the link that brings people to your site and sells them on using your product or service. Getting people to use your site, products and services is worth dedicating some time daily, weekly and monthly to let people know what value your company has to offer.

Our clients find it valuable for us to help handle and manage content while their key marketing staff can focus on developing new products and strategies. This keeps their name in front of editors and customers, establishing them as thought leaders and experts constantly providing informed opinions on industry trends.
As you can see we feel it is worth dedicating staff time to provide you with new information, to keep you coming back.

Check back next week and you can count on something fresh and relevant. At Billups Design we put content behind our brand. We believe companies and web sites should never stand still — never stop moving….or, in this case, writing.

Additional Reading:

For even more authoritative views, you can visit this site braintraffic.com and also purecontent.com.

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