Posts for December 2012

The power of web content to boost your business

This year, Google has made significant changes to its search engine algorithm, most notably their “Panda” update which devalues sites with poor quality content.

Poor quality content can be anything from plagiarised or duplicate content to text littered with SEO keywords clearly designed to manipulate the search rankings.

Small businesses which have website content that is not up to scratch will find themselves plummeting down the rankings, losing both vital traffic and potential business. So how do you create content for your website that’s inspiring, compelling and, most importantly, genuinely useful to your customers?

Identify personas

The best place to start is by identifying and researching the behaviours of all of the different types of people that use your services. We’re an airport parking specialist, so we understood that families going on holiday regularly book with us. That’s a good starting point but the trick is to delve deeper.

We looked at what issues families may face when travelling to the airport. For example, they tend to be carrying a lot of luggage plus buggies and their children and, as a result, can take longer to get to the airport than most people. Therefore the start of their holiday is often a stressful time. How could we help them further when they book with us?

Providing a solution

If you’ve identified all of the different types of people that may use your services then the next step is to delve into online forums and social communities relevant to your customers to find the kind of questions that they are asking. These questions can be used to generate ideas for content.

Continuing the families’ example, we looked into various parent forums online and saw that they were asking questions such as “what are the regulations with taking food and drink through security?” So we created in-depth content to answer these questions including a guide to Heathrow security and a family travel guide looking at packing, researching and booking a holiday, getting to the airport and what to do at the airport.

Extending your reach

So you understand your customers and have created content to answer their questions — now you need to consider how you’re going to spread the word far and wide to let more people know that your content actually exists.

Create a detailed seeding plan looking at relevant sites to approach with your content and consider writing and distributing a press release to send out via online newswires to help spread the word.

Time well spent

All of this may seem time consuming, and it is! However, if done properly, your efforts will be well worth it. Off the back of our new and improved content we’ve seen big increases in traffic to our website, better conversion results and increased overall revenue. Content is most certainly king.

Oliver Inwards is e-commerce manager at Purple Parking.

We have lots of great blogs and articles about creating website content to help and inspire you:

• Why content is king in today’s marketing

• How to promote your business by writing a killer case study

• Keep your sentences short — and other secrets of good writing

• Q&A: Is your blog up to the job?

• 50 shades of content

What's the best way to reach your customers?

How do you talk to your customers? The choices are many — by email, by letter, on the phone, by text, via Twitter, Facebook or any number of social media sites  — or even, shock horror — in person.

What works best for you? If you are like one in four British adults, you may avoid picking up the phone at all costs — preferring to text rather than actually speak to someone (Daisy Group survey).

Perhaps you prefer emailing. Or are you one of the 6% of people that have totally lost control of their inboxes? (research by Varonis).

If you like your communication informal and online, you may prefer building relationships on social media sites.

But enough about your needs — the real question is, how do your customers like be approached? Let’s face it. You might be mad about Twitter but if your target market doesn’t tweet, you need to find a way to reach them that works on their terms.

New research by Ofcom could help you to understand your target market a little better, thanks to its investigations into the different communication habits of British people.

It has highlighted five types, from the “always on” to the “detached”. Now this may seem simplistic but if your marketing is totally excluding one or more of these groups, you could be missing out on a lot of business.

What it makes clear is that in a multi-channel world, everyone has their favourite ways to keep in touch — and no business can afford to take a one-size-fits-all approach.

Here are the five groups:

Always on (22% of adults)

• The youngest group, with half (50%) aged under 35, they communicate a lot, especially with their friends and family.
• They are almost twice as likely to use services such as Twitter (28%) than the national average (16%).
• They are more likely to own a mobile phone and have access to a computer than average — they use new technology to keep in touch.
• They use their mobile phones especially for texting (90%) and calls (88%) and are more comfortable about sharing information online.

Enlightened (19% of adults)

• A young group, with 44% aged under 35, these enlightened communicators like to keep up to date with the latest technology.
• They are more likely to say they are knowledgeable about the internet and are careful about sharing personal information online.
• Enlightened communicators use text and email to keep in touch with friends and family, and around a third say their use of email has increased in the past two years.

Middle-of-the-road (22% of adults)

• Generally aged 35-54, their levels of communication are much more in line with the general population.
• Middle-of-the-road communicators tend to use a range of methods to keep in touch, with face-to-face (78%) their favourite.
• They are most likely to be hesitant about sharing personal opinions on social media and will tend to let others try out new services first before they give them a go themselves (11% say they are the first to try new products and services compared to 21% overall).

Conventional (21% of adults)

• The oldest group, with almost half (47%) aged over 65, conventional communicators tend to be retired and live on their own.
• Conventional communicators are more likely to have a landline phone (81%), rather than a computer (39%) or mobile phone (73%).
• Their top preferred methods of keeping in touch with friends and family are meeting face-to-face (75% compared to 67% nationally) or calling them on their home phone (16% compared to 10% nationally).
• On special occasions such as birthdays, they are more likely to send their friends or family a card or present in the post (69%) than the overall population (58%).

Detached (16% of adults)

• More likely to be men across a wide range of ages, communication isn’t a priority for them.
• They are least likely to choose to meet someone face-to-face, with only 42% saying it is their top preferred method of communicating with friends and family compared to 67% nationally.
• They are more likely to use newer quick form text methods of communication, such as Twitter, than the overall population (19% v 16%).

Isn’t it time you found out more about the communication preferences of your customers?

• Rachel Miller is the editor of Marketing Donut.