A content strategy is key to driving more sales!

If you want a way to connect with your potential customers and clients you need to look at blogging. It is a great way to easily show people your skills, knowledge and understanding of the subject area that you are experienced in. However if you want to create a successful blog, you need to make sure that the content that you are producing is original content. It is a delicate balance to achieve between original content and satisfying the Google algorithm. Working on a content strategy forms part of your funnel, and you will want to vary content and channels to market by funnel stage. For the purposes of this article, we are considering how to drive the holy grail of brand awareness with top of funnel activities.

You need to build content - your customers are researching before the buy phase - content is one of the ways to reach them early on.

The stats are mixed, with quotes ranging between 25 - 60% depending on whether you are selling a product, a service and which sector to, yet one thing is crystal clear; buyers do their research before they are ready to buy. If you're in the b2b space and are reaching out to customers, don't be surprised to hear that you are too late and that they have already made their down selection of agencies, businesses or preferred parties. How to remedy this? Consider your top of funnel activities and invest in a high quality content strategy, that sees your business publishing excellent quality, original thought leadership that really adds value to your ideal customer profile (ICP). This is what your buyers want to see: something that helps them with their predicament. You need to be up to date and focused on what matters to them. Content that demonstrates you know their pain points and challenges, will help them to understand what life might be like working with you. Businesses look to partner with their suppliers, not for a 1 dimensional, transactional relationship.

If you're still not sold on why create content, think about this. The second reason to create blog content is that this helps support your SEO / SEM and if you do it correctly, you can answer your customer's pain points and match your content to the relevant search intents.

What are search intents?

These are the various segments of a type of content. They fall into four broad categories.

• Informational - someone has a question that they want an answer to. This is where businesses look to feature in 'people also asked' and is also the reason behind large faq pages on websites.

• Navigational - the client knows the website they are looking for and are typing that into Google search (opinion is split whether to bid on your own website or not).

• Commercial - these are keywords entered into Google search bar when a customer is looking to buy or trying to learn about a product or service that they wish to buy. This signals purchase intent.

• Transactional - is another strong intent signal, it indicates that people are ready to buy, people are looking to google search to take them to the product (or service page immediately). Therefore they know what they want to buy yet they may not have decided on brand, or be aware of which brands sell what they want.

Planning your blog - it's not as easy as just penning a few paragraphs of text.

Given the importance of blogging and the potential that this has for you business, alongside the upcoming changes on the Google landscape with third party cookies being removed, you want to invest time into proper content planning now. Leave it until the end of the year and you'll be looking to compete with all the other content. You want to action this now. That means that once you have thought of your topics for your business - that meet your customer's pain points, you need to carry out keyword research. There are some online tools which can help you here, and as a small company, you may benefit from being able to use a free account which might have limited features, it will help you to identify some of the key words you need for your blog. Ubersuggest is very easy to use, serpstat and SEM rush have various free accounts and trials to get you started. You want to keep an eye on your competition as well as identify what is relevant for your audience. Organic traffic is your aim, but it's not all about satisfying Google after all. Your prospects are the ones you want to buy from you. Using SEO tools helps you to find relevant keywords by search intent, they might make suggestions based on your website. You can see how many times the search term is searched on, by volumes and they may also give you an idea of keyword difficulty (ie - how well other businesses rank for that term, making it very difficult for you to rank for it) and what the cost is, if you were to bid on the search term. This is known as paid search, or ppc (pay per click) or what used to be called 'Adwords'. All of this research is a vital step in your approach to content.

Other things to think about

There are other ways to boost organic traffic to your website, aside from back links, which can help to drive your domain authority score, helping you to rank higher. It is worth mentioning here that SEO is a complicated beast, and doesn't just rest on keywords. We go into this in much more detail in our series of blogs on SEO here. However, we wanted to highlight that your website's domain score or authority score and your website's speed all have a significant impact on how well your content will rank. If your website isn't optimised for mobile and in 2023, that is a crying shame, then you won't have much luck in pushing your content up the rankings either.

There are a number of things that Google wants you to satisfy, you may have heard of EAT. That all changed in 2021, when it was emphasises that Experience had a massive part to play in ranking So it has now expanded to EEAT. This is what Google considers (or it's robots crawl for) when it considers each individual page of a website.

Golden rules of content writing

Vary the lengths of copy

• Short 200-350 words

• Medium 500 - 800 words

• Long form content 1000+ words.

Links Your blogs should contain a call to action, a link to external websites and a link to an internal blog or section on your website also. Think about what you want to achieve from your content and remember that the hard sell puts people off, so either balance this with directing people to other content on your website, a few of the products or services that you offer or to contact you to find out more information. Struggling to write, or find time to write? Repurpose content!

A favourite of mine. Your content should always be able to be repurposed. Got a podcast? Create a script and upload to your website. You can create a summary from the script either yourself, or by using an AI tool to speed up the process.

Video still remains one of the largest consumed forms of content and YouTube remains the most beneficial platform to publish your longer forms of content. Want to tap into it? Your blog can be fed into a video editor, which will then produce a video for your based on your content. My favourite is Lumen5. Their AI tool works ok and speeds up the process which you can spend time finessing. The list goes on. Going slightly off tangent, but if you have a podcast and you want to create sound snippets that appear as a video (and you haven't recorded your video live) something like Wave, or Wonderama allows you to do this creatively. Lastly...

Have fun make it interesting and very valuable for your ideal customer profile. If writing is your thing then enjoy it. This is your way to show personality and to demonstrate knowledge, skills and most importantly, what your prospect can expect from working with you. Still wondering whether content is worth investing in? Done well and executed correctly, it supports the sales effort and will help you to win business. With a competitive landscape and changes in third party cookies, this is one way to drive better awareness of your business before the landscape changes.

For more hints, tips and ideas, follow #snackablemarketing on Linkedin.