Creating Valuable Content For Your Business

Stay on topic

Make sure the content you post is relevant to your business. I’ve seen companies posting everything from cat memes to news stories from the national and local news. Not opinion pieces about the news – the actual stories themselves.

Your potential customers aren’t interested in content that has no connection to your company, industry or the products/services you’re selling. More importantly, Google may see you as a spammer, which will harm your search visibility and reduce the amount traffic coming into your site.

That’s not to say you can’t be creative with your content topics. Think about subjects which fall slightly outside your area of business but are still highly relevant to the kind of customers you’re targeting. For example, if you’re selling car insurance, you could produce a report on driverless cars or put together a guide on saving on fuel costs.

Let your readers behind the curtain

Many businesses are understandably jittery when it comes to sharing their work processes, particularly those offering services rather than products. What if giving your trade secrets away just encourages your potential customers to do it themselves? What if your competitors use your insider knowledge to their advantage?

In reality, there’s a lot of value in offering up your own advice and giving your potential customers a brief insight into how you work.

Let’s say you work as an accountant; you could demonstrate how to fill in a self-assessment form, offer up tips on how to reduce your outgoings, or reveal some of the stranger client cases you’ve had to deal with.

By demonstrating your knowledge and expertise, and showing the world your human face, you’ll build trust with your customers and give them realistic expectations of how you can help them. (You’ll also promote yourself as an authority on your subject, so people will be more inclined to share your content and your search rankings will likely rise.)

Use human language

But formal semantics and industry vocabulary connote intellect and professionalism, don’t they?

Read that last sentence again. Isn’t it painful to get through? Now imagine a whole article written in that style.

People don’t want to read stuffy content with incomprehensible jargon that only you can understand. Cut out the complex terminology (or at least explain their definitions) and talk to your audience like a human – it makes you seem more friendly and approachable, and it helps to make unfamiliar, confusing subjects more clear and understandable.

Help your customers out

Ultimately, all the content you put out there on the internet should be there for the benefit of your prospective and existing customers – they’re the people who will be consuming it, after all.

However, it’s very easy to end up with content which is all about you. Small businesses often feel the urge to introduce themselves fully to their prospective customers, and end up with content which comes across as narcissistic and doesn’t help the customer at all.

Try creating content around frequently asked questions. Take a look at some of the queries which have been posed to you (either over the phone, via email, site comments or social media posts) and see if you can develop in-depth, authoritative guides to answer them.

You might also consider creating advice pieces to help your customers get the most out of your products or services. For example, if you sell air conditioning equipment, you might explain the best settings for particular weather conditions, to keep your unit running at its best. You might also show your customers how to inspect their AC unit for issues and how to prevent breakdowns in the first place.