Guest blogger: Debra Semans, Lead Writer at Harpeth Marketing
Content is King!
Consider*:
- Companies that blog 15 or more times per month get five times more traffic than companies that don’t blog at all.
- Small businesses (1-10 employees) tend to see the biggest gains in traffic when they publish more articles.
- Companies that increase blogging from 3-5 times/month to 6-8 times/month almost double their leads.
- Even B2B companies that blog only 1-2 times/month generate 70% more leads than those that don’t blog at all.
Content marketing – the sharing of useful information (through articles, blog posts, ebooks, webinars, etc.) with your target audience – can be and SHOULD be an integral part of your marketing initiative. Done right, content marketing is a non-threatening (read: non-salesy) way to reach out and touch clients and prospects, to build awareness for your firm in the marketplace and to help position you as a thought leader in certain areas of research.
The key to all of these is that you must publish. And as shown in the Hubspot research results, you need to publish frequently, and the more often the better…
… which can be a terrific burden on you, especially if you approach every piece of content as if it were “War and Peace.”
…which can drive you crazy if you have three levels of review on every piece of content or if you typically run to more than three drafts of a piece before you get approval to publish.
So here’s a breakthrough thought: It doesn’t have to be perfect.
Don’t get me wrong… it has to be really good – contain valuable content, be well-written and grammatically correct, certainly accurate, easy-to-read and not-at-all salesy… but it does not have to be perfect! As the great Vince Lombardi once said, “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”
Don’t worry about every little detail, particularly as you get into the minutiae of your methodologies or technologies… it might be important to you, but it isn’t that important to your clients. Don’t agonize over every single word. Why not? In a nutshell… your clients and prospects don’t really care about what you can do… they care about what you can do for them.
An example… let’s say you’re writing about your online qualitative capabilities. Don’t worry about the specifics of how it happens and all of the technical details (you’ll get the opportunity to go over that later), but focus on what your clients and prospects really want to know:
- “Help me understand the fundamentals.”
- “What are the best applications for it?”
- “How does it compare to the traditional methods we’ve been using?”
Here’s a little tip to get you started… when you sit down to write, imagine the ideal sales prospect sitting across from you. What does he or she want to know? What’s important to them? What keeps them up at night?
Answer those kinds of questions as you’re writing and you’ll build a distinct competitive advantage as your words connect with clients and prospects in a way that others’ don’t. Then have one person review and comment on your piece. Is it grammatically correct and error-free? Is there any way that it can be shortened – either through bulleted lists, word reductions or just cutting out the extra?
All good? OK… now publish!
And remember, you don’t have to be perfect… just helpful. Catch excellence!