With the wireframe for the website already being approved, we spoke to Sean Shanahan, the UrbanOps founder, to find out what he wanted from the content.

As well as covering the professional services offered by UrbanOps, Sean wanted to highlight the personal touch his company provides. The primary audiences for these pages were identified as homeowners, landlords and property managers of residential and commercial properties.

After our initial consultation and interview, we prepared and delivered content for the company’s homepage and various service pages to fit the wireframe. The copy was written to target the four personas identified.

Sean reviewed the content and shared it with industry-related colleagues for approval. The majority of the feedback was positive and, after one round of revisions, all changes requested were made and approved.

As a result, UrbanOps has website content that shows off the organisation in its best light, highlights its unique offerings and puts it ahead of the online competition by appealing directly to its target markets.

Talking about the project, Sean said “Oliver was easy and good to work with, he understood what I was looking for and gave me a product that allowed me to communicate with my customers and explain what we do and who we are.”

“Looking forward to working with Oliver with my next project.”

Update: In 2020, Sean got in touch with us again to create copy for a new service he was offering customers: Green Zone.

Content marketing showcases product benefits through online content such as blogs, articles and websites. This can help companies enhance customer engagement and control what customers associate with their brand, improving brand recognition, driving website traffic and creating customers.

Even products that are everyday, ordinary or seemingly boring can be marketed successfully through creative, interesting content. This article explores the food, travel and finance industries as examples.

The food industry

Whether you sell tomatoes or truffle oil, every food company can benefit from content marketing which focuses on selling the benefits of their products.

Case in point: sugar.

Sugar is an everyday purchase, something that we all have in our pantries and all know how to use, but sugar’s reputation has taken a battering in recent years and isn’t the most fashionable foodstuff in the world. So, how do you build a website for something that isn’t very good for you and that everyone already knows how to use?

Sugar company CSR’s content marketing strategy embodies the ‘sell benefits not features’ maxim. Check out CSR’s website and you’ll be bombarded with recipes and baking tutorials for scrumptious cakes, delicious biscuits and yummy jams – all the things that wouldn’t be possible without sugar.

CSR takes a single ingredient and turns it into thousands of possibilities. If cake recipes can sell sugar they can surely sell flour and milk too. In fact, all food producers can take a leaf out of CSR’s book: who else but an egg-farmer would you ask for a lesson on how to poach the perfect egg? And who better to school us in smashed avo than an avocado farmer?

The travel industry

All facets of the travel industry can sell benefits online, everyone from hoteliers to travel agencies to transport companies can grow their businesses through engaging content. While travel is certainly not a boring subject, it’s important to focus on the right aspects of travel in order to create interesting content.

Life may be all about the journey, but travel is all about the destination. Travel-based content should get customers excited about the possibilities of their holidays — all the exciting activities, excellent restaurants and brilliant attractions they will experience.

Mixing in helpful content about administrative aspects of travel (things like budgeting, visas and vaccinations works well too), as long as the content remains engaging and accessible.

The finance industry

Finance can be a very dry topic. Savings accounts, loan repayments and mortgages are not sexy subjects. Effective financial content focuses on the ends, not the means. Instead of getting bogged down in the details of APRs and loan repayments, good financial content shows customers what they stand to gain: a new home, a family holiday, a new car or whatever exciting thing they’re saving for.

Content should get customers thinking about possibilities. This could be done by talking about up-and-coming suburbs in the local area, new cars coming into the Australian market or awesome holiday destinations – anything to inflame customers’ imaginations.

By creating content which encourages people to consider the opportunities a loan or mortgage could bring them, you’re controlling how your business is perceived: when customers think of your financial institution they won’t think of bills and repayments, they’ll think of holidays, cars and family homes. If even one customer comes in to ask about a mortgage after seeing your content think how great your ROI would be.

And while a blog post may be about strengthening your brand or improving your search results, really it’s about selling dreams and benefits to a bigger pool of potential customers.

Why people contact brands on social media

Increasingly, customers prefer to contact brands via social media over traditional methods:

• Nearly 35% of consumers nominate social media as their preferred method of customer care
• Less than 25% prefer website or live web chat customer care
• Less than 20% prefer email-based customer care
• Call centre customer care comes in last place with just over 16% of consumers preferring phone-based customer care.

They may reach out to:

• Request pre-sale information
• Give feedback
• Complain

Customers also post about their customer care experiences on social media, with 47% of consumers aged 18-34 complaining about a brand’s customer support via social media.

Customer expectations online

Customer care is one of the most important aspects of running a business. Quality customer service leads to greater brand loyalty and higher customer spending, while poor customer service may force customers to abandon a brand.

With more than 60% of customers now expecting brands to offer customer support on social media, it has never been more important to provide social media customer care.

Customer expectations on social media response times are high with:

• 42% of customers expecting a response to their social media complaint within one hour
• 32% expecting a response in under 30 minutes
• 11% expecting an immediate response.

Thirty per cent of customers will switch to a competitor if a brand does not respond to their enquiry or complaint.

Benefits of social media customer care

When done well, social media customer care can have huge benefits for your company.

Social media customer care is highly cost-effective. It costs one dollar to resolve an issue on social media, which is one-sixth the price of resolving an issue via a call centre. Social media customer care agents are more than 160% more efficient than voice agents.

Facebook and Twitter are 48% more accurate and 44% faster methods of delivering customer care responses than email.

High quality social media customer care can yield:

• 92% customer retention
• 81% greater annual increase in revenue from customer referrals
• Increased customer spending of 20%-40%
• Annual return on investment increase of 30.7%
• Improved customer satisfaction rates by a margin of 26.6%

Providing good quality timely customer care via social media reduces call centre and other customer care costs and, most importantly, creates happy customers who will stay loyal to your brand.

Stats and images from Websitebuilder.org. See the full infographic here.

However great your blog posts are, you can’t rely on SEO alone to bring people to you. You need to put your content out there in the places where your target audience is most likely to find it and share it.

Follow these tips to promote your business blog effectively and start building your reputation as an expert in your field.

Sign up to everything

Social media is a boon to content marketing, as long as you’re using it effectively. Finding out which sites your target audience is most active on will inform your marketing strategy, but you also shouldn’t neglect other platforms that could be useful in the future.

Facebook is Australia’s most popular social media site and is a natural first step for promoting your content, especially if you are marketing to customers (B2C).

However, if you are primarily marketing to businesses (B2B), your priorities will be different. A study of B2B marketers by the LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community identified LinkedIn as the most effective platform for engaging audiences (82% effective) followed by Twitter (66%), YouTube (64%) and Facebook in fourth place (41%).

If you are publishing different types of content, these should be shared on the most appropriate sites – YouTube and Facebook for videos, Pinterest and Instagram for infographics, and SlideShare for slideshow presentations.

Research the most popular discussion forums dedicated to your industry, sign up and make your brand known. There’s a subreddit for everything.

Share other people’s content

The internet is a sharing economy, and you can’t expect people to share your content if you’re not interested in theirs.

Sharing isn’t just about networking and back-scratching. If you read something insightful online, your followers will probably appreciate it too.

Tell your fans

Even the people who already like you won’t always remember to check your blog for updates.

As well as promoting new blog posts on your social media accounts, you should include links and excerpts from recent posts in your regular newsletter and make it easy for your followers to subscribe to receive new content as soon as it’s published.

Tell your heroes

If you’ve been inspired by other bloggers in your industry, tell them about it on social media or in their comments section and share a link to a piece of your own content that you’re particularly proud of.

They’ll probably appreciate the flattery, and if a key influencer likes what they see and then talks about it, this will score you some major publicity for your business blog.

Share with promoters

There are people who live to share content just like yours. Make their lives easier and help more people to discover your business blog by sharing a link with promoters who are active on sites like Twitter, Reddit and Digg.

Share with communities

If your last blog post explained your thoughts on a hot topic, share these thoughts in targeted Google+ communities and LinkedIn Groups to join the conversation.

You should only ever post content that is relevant to the discussion and offers real value to your readers, otherwise you will come off as overly self-promotional and this will harm your image.

Tag people you mention

If your blog post name-checks a brand or individual, make this clear in your social media updates using the proper tags.

This will increase the chances of the named party and their followers noticing your post, and could even be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Time your posts

If you are writing for a local rather than an international audience, timing is crucial to make sure your blog posts are seen and shared when your readers are most active.

But that doesn’t mean you have to get to the office early to beat the morning coffee break – every blogging platform allows you to schedule posts to publish at any time you want.

Promote older content

There’s no rule that you can only promote new content. If a topic you discussed in the past is making the headlines again, you can invite your followers to read something they might not have seen the first time around.

It’s also a good idea to promote new blog posts several times in case your followers didn’t notice the original update in their feeds.

Write guest posts

Before your business blog becomes established, you can write for a bigger audience by offering original content to an established blog in your industry.

Many sites are happy to publish guest posts, which include a flattering author’s profile and a link to your main blog.

Mention your blog everywhere

Even if you’re using all the social media tools at your disposal to spread the word about your business blog, you might have neglected to mention it in obvious places.

Make sure you include a link to your blog in your social media profiles, email signature and business cards to make sure everyone who likes you knows about your blog’s existence.

If you’re preparing publicity materials for a conference and you’re not sure what to include, this is the perfect opportunity to show off your blog’s value by printing some of your best content.

Now that you know the basics of business blogging, keep checking the Civic Web Media blog or follow us on Twitter to pick up more content marketing tips.

But did they explain to you exactly why blogging is such an asset? Or did they fall back on jargon about SEO and dazzle you with impressive statistics about how companies that prioritise blogging have 97% more inbound links and are 13 times more likely to achieve positive marketing ROI than those that don’t? (HubSpot)

While all this is true, it only tells part of the story. We understand that you need something more relatable than that if you’re going to be committing your time and money.

So what are the advantages of business blogging?

Blogging gets you noticed

Everyone wants more people to visit their website. While you can help people to find you by improving your search engine ranking and posting ads, one of the most effective ways to get your site noticed is to make it harder to miss.

Every time you publish a blog post, you grow your site by one page. On average, companies that blog have 434% more indexed pages than those that don’t (HubSpot), which means lots more chances to show up in search results.

If you’re writing about interesting and engaging topics, people are more likely to share your blog posts on social media, which drives more visitors to your site.

Blogging establishes your authority

The focus of your business blog should primarily be on answering your customers’ questions.

When you produce informative blog posts that cover all aspects of the topic at hand (whatever it may be), using language that your readers are able to understand, you’re building your reputation as an authority in your field.

If someone asks you or your sales team a question, and you’re able to direct them to something you wrote that includes all the information they need, you’re showing that your expertise can be trusted. Linking to someone else’s explanation can do quite the opposite.

Blogging makes people like you

Even if your business is already successful and your customers trust you, do they really like you?

Business blogging personalises your brand, making it easier for people to relate to your ideas and values and helping you to develop lasting relationships.

Whether you invite your own experts to publish blog posts using their own names, faces and personalities, or you publish anonymously under your brand’s established identity, your readers will come to know what to expect from your business blog, and – as long as you make the right impression – they’ll keep coming back for more.

Blogging gives you all the content you’ll ever need

Many people starting out in business blogging worry about how to come up with new topics to write about. If you look back over your recent social media updates, newsletters and other promotions, you’ll quickly see that you are already writing content.

Think of your business blog as a central hub where you can inform your customers about what’s happening in your business, as well as other topics they’re interested in reading about. If you commit to publishing on a regular basis (ideally once a week), that means you’ll already have four topics for your next monthly newsletter and more excuses to post updates to your Facebook and Twitter followers.

Business blogs are the ideal testing ground for new ideas too, and sometimes the exercise of coming up with fresh content on a regular basis can lead to you striking gold in unexpected places.

Blogging keeps on giving

Blog posts aren’t a flash in the pan like social media updates, billboards or TV ads. Older entries will stop trending and get pushed off the front page eventually, but they stick around.

While some of your blog posts may be short-term in nature, most will continue to be of interest long after they are published. It doesn’t matter how deep they’re buried in the archive, your informative and authoritative resources are just a quick Google search away for interested readers.

If you do notice that some blog posts are performing exceptionally well, you can promote these to a more noticeable location on your website and re-push them on social media. You should also think about updating older posts to keep them relevant.

Blogging keeps your customers informed

Your business blog shouldn’t just be about self-promotion, but if you do have news that your customers will be interested to hear – whether it’s a sale, product launch or change of address – your blog is the perfect place to mention it.

With a blog, you can also go into much greater detail than a snappy advert or 140-character tweet allows. Those promotional activities will put eyes on your site, but it’s your blog posts that will provide all the information and generate leads.

Blogging makes you money

Of course it does! Otherwise, why bother?

Up to now, we’ve discussed your business blog as a way to establish your brand online and develop relationships with your customers, because this is the attitude you should be writing with.

At the end of the day, every promotional activity you invest in should deliver real rewards for your business. So how does writing a blog help with that?

Your blog posts bring more traffic to your website, which means more chances to convert interested readers into leads. You can make sure this happens by including a call-to-action (CTA) link in every post, which interested readers can follow to take the next step in the buyer’s journey.

Not every CTA should be a direct attempt to make a sale – in fact, this can often be off-putting and make you look a little desperate. Instead, you should provide links to more engaging content that will give your readers even more information about the subject they’re interested in and help them to answer their queries.

So on that note, why not find out more with our five reasons to start a business blog.

When you’re marketing your business, every action you take needs to be done with a clear audience in mind. If you try to write something general that will appeal to everyone, it’s likely you won’t make a connection with anyone.

Who is your target audience?

What does your business do better than the competition? These differentiating factors are the strengths you should be promoting and the reasons your customers choose you.

The car industry is just about the best example there is of similar products being clearly differentiated along brand lines. Many people need to buy a car, but there’s a big difference in the priorities of car buyers who choose a BMW (marketed for luxury and performance) or a Volvo (renowned for safety and reliability).

It’s not just what you’re selling, but who you’re selling it to. If you’re marketing a range of perfumes or cosmetics, are your customers women who want to look and smell great or men buying gifts for their partners who want to make the right impression? These two groups have very different goals, and your content will need to change accordingly.

So how can you find out what your audience wants?

Ask them.

If you are already established and have a customer base, find out what it is about your business that keeps people coming back.

You can call or e-mail representative customers directly, but a less intrusive way to get feedback from a broad range of customers is to invite them to complete a survey.

Sites like SurveyMonkey make it easy to create polls and questionnaires that you can post to your website or social media accounts to find out everything you need to know about your customers’ experiences and expectations.

Aim to keep your surveys as short as possible and show your customers that you value their opinions and the time they’ve taken by offering a discount or freebie upon completion, or entering survey respondents into a prize draw.

Find out what they’re searching for

You can find out what search queries related to your business are most popular right now using Google Keyword Planner. Does your content respond to these types of queries, or are you answering questions no one is asking?

Check how your site is performing

If you already have a website or business blog up and running, your CMS should include the tools you need to learn what search queries brought the most visitors to your site. Compare this to your keyword research: are you ranking for popular search terms?

Even if people are landing on your pages, are they satisfied with what they find there? Using your CMS and other tools such as Google Analytics, you can check factors such as the length of time people stay on pages and their conversion and bounce rates to discover which content is engaging your customers and which needs an overhaul.

Put yourself in their shoes

If you want to get an idea what it’s like for your customers, set yourself a number of basic goals and see how quickly and easily you can accomplish these on your website.

Read your landing pages and blog posts as a customer would. Do they answer your questions? Do they push the right emotional buttons?

If you already know what you’re looking for, how easy is it to reach your destination and make a transaction? Patience is in short supply online, and the longer it takes your customers to find what they’re looking for, the more likely they are to try somewhere else.

Test your main competitors’ websites in the same way. Is their content more or less engaging and user-friendly than yours?

Once you know people are looking for, find out more about the buyer’s journey and how you can use content every step of the way.

When it’s done badly, you’ll have wasted time and money producing content that no one wants to read or share.

There are many common traps that businesses fall into when starting out in content marketing. Find out how you can avoid them with our guide to content marketing dos and don’ts.

1. Don’t make it all about you

The most common content marketing mistake is making your content too self-promotional. Whether it’s boasting about your achievements or relentlessly plugging your new product, self-serving content turns off readers and can even damage your existing customer relationships.

Quality content answers your users’ questions and helps to solve their problems. Sometimes this might involve your new product launch, but your customers’ needs should be the focus of the conversation, not yours.

2. Don’t guess what your audience wants

What are your customers’ needs? Assuming that you have the answer before you even know the question won’t get you very far if no one is searching for what you’re offering.

There’s no excuse for not knowing what your site visitors are looking for when you have the tools to tell you precisely that. Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner are great ways to find out what search terms are currently trending, and you can find out what search queries are bringing people to your site through your CMS.

3. Don’t ignore analytics

Delving deeper into what brings people to your site can offer invaluable insights into the type of content that’s most likely to engage your readers are convert them into leads and sales. Analytics is about more than counting page views, and by finding out what content is driving traffic to your site and what’s being shared on social media, you can refine your content marketing strategy.

4. Don’t be boring

If you only think about your content as a sales tool, you’re never going to resonate with customers. Content should be relevant to your target audience, covering topics they are interested in and actually want to read about. If you can keep on top of the latest developments in your field, you could even become a trusted source for news.

5. Don’t just rely on text and images

Business blogging is a powerful tool, but you shouldn’t limit your story to words and pictures. Facebook recently announced that more than 500 million users watch videos every day on that platform alone, so if your short blog post would work better as a video, it could enjoy more views and shares that way.

A step-by-step guide might be ideally suited to a slide presentation, while an in-depth discussion could be a better fit for a podcast. You can get more value out of existing content by retooling it for different media.

6. Don’t stuff keywords

When it comes to writing your content, don’t make the mistake of stuffing it with keywords to improve your search ranking. Google and other search engines have long been wise to this practice, and a high proportion of repetitive keywords is more likely to see your site penalised rather than benefit.

Keywords are still important for helping users find your content, as long as they are used sparingly for the greatest effect. For advice on how to choose keywords, see our content strategies for different search queries.

7. Don’t underestimate titles

The headline is the first thing people see when they look at your content. If it fails to grab their attention, it will also be the last. You should have an idea of what the title will be before you start writing a piece of content, and you should spend as long as you need tweaking it afterwards to make sure it’s just right.

8. Don’t forget calls to action

You don’t want your buyers’ journey to end at the first step. Including a call to action (CTA) encourages interested customers to read more and advance towards your goal, whether that’s making a purchase, giving your staff a call or signing up to your newsletter.

9. Don’t be irregular

Regular updates to your business blog can lead to a significant increase in traffic and leads, and losing that momentum will cost you. At the minimum, you should aim to publish fresh content at least once a month, but the more often you’re able to provide, the better. Read more about how often you should publish blog posts.

10. Don’t forget to share

You might be publishing impressive content on a regular basis, but if you don’t actively promote this content, it won’t reach its potential audience. On the other hand, over-saturation by sharing too broadly can also dilute the impact of your content, so it’s important to find out which social platforms are the best fit to make the most of your quality content.

If you’re still sceptical about the benefits of content marketing for your business, check out these five reasons to start a business blog.

Using tools such as Google Analytics and features offered by your Content Management System (CMS) and social media, you can get a clear picture of how content marketing helps SEO, generates leads and drives sales.

Why are these insights important?

Analysing the impact of all the marketing content you put out, from blogs to videos and podcasts, will reveal what type of content is working for you and what isn’t.

Don’t forget that content marketing is all about helping you achieve your business goals. Finding out which content is most successful enables you to focus your marketing strategy on what works, producing more valuable content and avoiding wasting time and money on less successful content.

If you’re not already using Google Analytics, that’s the best place to start to gain insights about how content marketing is working for you. But it shouldn’t be the only tool you use.

What are the most important metrics?

Analytical tools let you measure your content’s success from so many different angles, it can be overwhelming at first. Not all of these metrics are equally important however, and narrowing your focus to what is important will give you a clearer picture of how your content is performing where it matters.

These essential metrics can be broken down into four categories, answering the questions:

• who is consuming your content?
• who is sharing your content?
• how does content marketing generate leads?
• how does content marketing drive sales?

1. Consumption metrics

These are the simplest metrics to measure, because it usually comes down to a number – how many people clicked on your blog post, watched your video or downloaded your file.

If you are publishing content to your own site, your CMS will inform you how many people viewed each piece of content. Many popular CMS platforms like WordPress also provide a more detailed breakdown of your audience, such as their location and the search terms that brought them to your site.

If you are publishing content to other sites, these often provide tools that can give you similarly detailed information on who is consuming your content, like YouTube Analytics for videos and Slideshare and Scribd for documents.

2. Sharing metrics

Measuring the success of content marketing doesn’t end at counting page views. You also need to know if people are sharing your content, as this will help it to reach a much wider audience and bring more traffic to your site.

Google Analytics is still the best tool for monitoring how your content is performing in the wider world, but you can gain more specific insights into the behaviour of your users by signing up to the social media sites where they are most likely to share your content.

If you’re not sure where your content is being shared, you can track inbound links through your CMS to find out how people are arriving at your site. If you’re new to social media, see our guide to Australia’s most popular social media sites for ideas where to focus your attention.

All the major social media platforms have tools that allow you to see how many times your content has been Liked, Retweeted, Pinned or +1’d, and you can encourage users to share your content by adding these social buttons wherever it’s published.

Of course, when it comes to encouraging people to share your content, the most important thing is to make sure you’re producing quality content that people will actually want to share.

3. Lead generation metrics

Content marketing isn’t a popularity contest, and it doesn’t matter how often your content is being shared and consumed if it doesn’t produce leads for your business.

Your CMS should include lead generation metrics that let you see how many people took further action after consuming your content, such as completing a web form, signing up to your newsletter, downloading an eBook, leaving a comment, subscribing to updates and other trackable activities. Google Analytics can provide further insights into less obvious ways your users’ behaviour can lead to conversion.

Comparing the conversion rates of your content marketing to your overall conversion rate will make it clear which types of content are the most successful and which are not performing.

4. Sales metrics

Finally, metrics can also tell you how content marketing is driving sales and making you money. Your ecommerce platform should make it simple to track the origin of online sales, and your CMS could also reveal what content users consumed before completing offline sales.

An effective way to trace sales back to individual content pieces is to include a unique Call to Action (CTA) and URL for each piece you publish. If you want to know whether more of your sales come from new or existing customers, you can offer your existing customer base exclusive or first access to content and monitor how it performs compared to public content.

Is content marketing helping you achieve your business goals?

Success is relative, and even if you are seeing leads and sales as a result of content marketing, you can evaluate whether this strategy is achieving the level of success you need by measuring its ROI.

This will tell you whether the investment you’re making to produce regular content is delivering as you hoped, or if your content marketing strategy needs an overhaul to help you reach a wider audience and convert more customers.

Read our crash course in content marketing to find out how to write winning content that will benefit your bottom line.