How much of your week do you dedicate to creating content for your business? Blogs, tweets, LinkedIn posts, email campaigns, website copy, credentials, reports. The list goes on, and if you’re going to invest time into making them, they should work as hard as they can for you. So we’ve come up with these little tips to fine-tune your content to make sure that they’re driving new business leads for your company.
- Host an event around your content. Nothing beats getting face-time with your prospective clients. So if your content is hot enough, launch it with some drinks for your clients and an opportunity to network with their peers. You’ll be surprised how well this works. One of our favourite events is the one hosted by the guys at Techdept. The Tech Off, a “Fight Club for Geeks”. It’s very creatively packaged (check out the website) and is aimed at marketing technologists and was so in demand, the Cannes Lions invited them to host a Tech Off event there.
- Eat, Sleep, Index, Repeat If you can create valuable insight into something your customers want and that changes all the time, do it over and over again and get famous for it, like The Economist’s Big Mac Index, to measure X. Our favourite example of this is from Prestige Purchasing, which works with the procurement directors of food service companies. As you can imagine, these guys are always interested in what’s happening with the price of things like cheese or fish. So Prestige Purchasing creates the annual Food Inflation Index, which it launches at an event. It’s so good, the BBC, Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mirror, along with all of the hospitality trade press have written about it (with our help, of course). Another one is Urban Airship’s Good Push Index, a report on which brands are using push notifications well.
- How you doin’? Bench-marking reports are lovely opportunity to name-check your prospects, if your team can invest the time. Pick a list of companies (the FTSE 100, the top 5 supermarkets or whatever) and benchmark them against something your company does. Use this to place feature articles, host masterclasses and for new business outreach to the companies mentioned. Who doesn’t want to hear how they’re performing against their peers and tips on how to beat their competitors? We love this banking app benchmarking report from Adaptive Labs. Simple and effective.
- Seek and ye shall find – There are some topics that your customers are searching for all the time. So, why not provide a shot of inspiration with a blog post? Use Google’s Keyword Planner Tool, to find search volumes and create some content to fill that gap. Often, your customers are looking for examples of best practice, so a gallery format can work well. Here’s one from e-commerce platform Shopify, which lists 30 Beautiful and Creative e-commerce website designs. It appears top of Google when you search for ‘Best ecommerce sites’. Smart. And what’s that you say? This blog post? No, we wouldn’t do that, would we?
