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11 Steps to Writing Sales-boosting Content
May 6, 2013 |Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Content is the heart of any social media program; content in all it’s forms--posts, papers, status updates, webinars, and videos--is a showcase for a company's knowledge of the industry and the problems customers face.
I like to tell people that content offers the reader a preview of how great it would be to work with the company that wrote it. Great content makes the reader treat the company as a credible player. And being treated as someone who should be given an opportunity more often will result in higher sales.
With that in mind, here’s how a company can become a high-quality content machine:
Write Often
More content means more opportunities to be seen. That means lots of content. One guest article or interview in a magazine or one white paper isn’t going to cut it. People want to see that a company has ideas (not the plural), and lots of content means lots of opportunities for that content to be seen. That may mean a blog post every week and updates on three different social media platforms every day.
So, where does a company come up with all that content?Writing Content: The Right, Expensive, and Wrong Way
The right way is to get everyone involved: Sales, marketing, executives, engineers, manufacturing and quality people, product managers--everyone. If they're too busy to write, they can be interviewed by someone who can. The alternative is to hire someone to do the writing. This is expensive and it may not work. After all, the new person won’t have the special insights that company insiders already have. The other alternative is to do neither of the first two, in which case the content marketing machine will clank to a halt.
Use a Content Calendar
This sounds exotic. but is actually very simple. A content calendar just has four components:
- A list of what content is in the queue to be created;
- To whom each piece of content is assigned;
- When it is due; and
- A list of ideas that may grow to become content.
Everyone should know what they are responsible for and when it is due.
Remember the Target Audience: Use Keywords
Using keywords and phrases will result in the content being found on the web. I am always amazed at companies that write some pretty good stuff, but then play hard to get by leaving out keyword and keyphrase opportunities. And this doesn’t mean keyword stuffing. An article or post on RF design issues should contain that expression or a variant of it several times.
Re-purpose and Re-package
With a minimum of effort, an article can become a two- or three-part guest column somewhere else and eight or nine blog posts or status updates. Content should always be maximized through insertion into multiple networks in multiple forms.
Learn to Curate
Become an avid curator. I write one column and several blog posts a week because that’s my limit due to time constraints. I read and curate from other sources another 12 to 20 articles and posts a week. I show up on some of my social networks five or more times a day. I find articles that should appeal to my audience and post them on my social networks, usually with a quick editorial comment. Even great companies have limits as to how much original content they can come up with.
Personalize Content Where Possible
By personalize, I mean target. If a company has customers with different applications, the content should be targeted at different applications. The more the content can be differentiated, the better.
Add a Call to Action
Request that the reader comment or share the content. The reader should always be invited to do something.
Offer High-Value Content in Exchange for Information
And that information is the person’s name, company, and e-mail address. Get rid of the long forms and requests for too much information--they result in fewer people signing up for an offer.
Measure and Track Your Progress
A million metrics can be used with social media, but, in the end, the key metrics are:
- What is the company’s reach? That is, how many people could see it’s content?
- How many people are reading the content and how quickly is this number growing?
- How many people are taking advantage of the company offers?
There are hundreds of others, but any metric should be judged on how it relates to the company accomplishing it’s social media goals.
Universal Concepts
Notice that I didn’t mention a single social network in this post. All these ideas are applicable any social media effort, whether they be on social networks, company blogs, e-mail newsletters, or even the company's website.Bruce Johnston is a sales consultant specializing in social media. He has over 25 years' experience in high-tech sales and management, most recently as general manager of a PCB manufacturer. He can be reached through his website www.practicalsmm.com or through his profile on LinkedIn.