Content is Queen

When I first set up Appletree back in 2000, I worked as a freelance copywriter. I wrote content for all sorts of marketing material, for all sorts of small businesses. As time has passed, we’ve done a lot of other things to help businesses with their marketing.

But one thing has stayed constant – the provision of content for our clients. Why? Because content is the best way for our clients to promote themselves. It’s also been a great way for us to promote Appletree, so this blog looks at why Content is Queen!

When you provide a service to your clients, rather than selling products, what you’re actually selling is your expertise and your knowledge. You are selling all the stuff in your head that you’ve collected over the years of doing what you do. To get that information and knowledge out of your head, you need to create content. It will form the basis of all the marketing you do – regardless of the different marketing tools you use.

Show you know your stuff

With services, you need to encourage a prospect to worth with you, before they’ve seen the results you could achieve for them. To help you do this, you need to demonstrate to potential clients that you know your stuff. There’s no better way to do this than be creating content. Share your knowledge in a free email newsletter; put your opinions into a regular blog; give away snippets of advice in your tweets. This will all show prospects that you really know what you’re talking about.

Send traffic to your website

When you put new content onto your website, you give the search engines a reason to go back and look at your site again. You also give real people a reason to visit it again. You could update your website just by changing a few words, but why not share a blog post, add an article or put up a useful fact sheet? That way, when you tweet about the latest addition to your site, you have something that is really worth looking at. And keeping visitors going to your website has got to be a good thing!

Integrate your marketing

Ad hoc marketing just doesn’t work. You need an integrated, consistent approach and content is a great way to do this. If you write an email newsletter every month, turn the copy into one or two blog posts and dozens of tweets. Create a video about the same topic. Give a talk at a networking meeting to discuss the same issue. Add a fact sheet to your website too. This way, you’ll give out a consistent message to your prospects without confusing them with too many different messages.

So the next time you’re wondering what would be the best way to promote your business, take a look at the content you’re sending out and work on improving it in terms of quality and consistency.