03 Feb BMC blog: Why quality content is king
Why use content marketing to promote your business?
The simple answer is to build your brand and engage with your audience (sometimes, but not always, potential customers) – which matters more in an age where people prefer connection, engagement, interaction, feeling and sometimes explanation over crude and obvious sales messaging.
That doesn’t mean selling and calls to action are dead. Far from it.
We all need to pop the question to win new business. It’s just that to develop the relationships to win that business, you need to affect the way people feel about you.
This means creating content – in many and varied ways – that is high quality, relevant and on message.
When I became editor of the official Beijing 2008 Olympic Games website, I discovered that most of our content had been dominated by corporate stories, Games-speak and explanations of different sports and the schedule of events.
Functional necessities but, frankly, a bit boring. This wasn’t going to draw an audience or create a loyal following.
I wanted us to be top of the search engines rankings and on as many bookmark menus as possible.
We weren’t ramping up interest and neither were our team of writers (all Chinese – only sub editors and myself as editor were non-Chinese nationals) being trained for the content they’d need to deliver fast and furious around the clock during the Games.
The answer lay in the content – quality and quantity. We used every single major championship involving Olympic sport that summer – and the top competitors coming to Beijing – to practise and build up our content.
In SEO terms, writing about the big names heading to Beijing – Lionel Messi, Roger Federer, Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Kobe Bryant and co – took care of optimisation as long as our content was quality (the latest news) and we were producing lots of it (serving as an informative, up to date multi-sport digest).
Slowly we reached the top of the search engine rankings for various key phrases and terms but our team got up to speed with delivering around the clock content – fast, accurate and knowledgeable. Better still, they were given time to thoroughly research the specific sports they would cover during the games and the key competitors vying for medals.
That’s how we achieved up to 70 million hits a day during the peak of the Games. Not only were we first with the news (we set a target for ‘flash’ reports to go online within three minutes of an event finishing) but we were trusted by the folks reading it – ours was the Official Games’ website after all.
Team work also became dream work. By splitting our writers into specialist teams (one sub-editor and proof-reader/researcher to three writers) friendly, in-built competition emerged that made the workflow seamlessly.
We also varied the content. Our previews, features and reviews were incisive, insightful and informative – they added colour, feeling and analysis to the mere reportage of results. Our audience trusted us – and came back day after day.
The lessons to learn from this experience are:
1. Plan and schedule your content – meticulously;
2. Practise and perfect it – get good;
3. Variety counts – not all stories merit a blog or article and stories can be told in many ways – how-tos, listicles, video blogs, podcasts etc;
4. Quality counts – particularly if you aim to become a thought leader in your profession or industry.
One final thing – have fun with it. Some people struggle to tell a story – so work in whichever and whichever methods seem to suit (and work) best.
If you’re stuck, employ a wordsmith to help out. We can do it smarter, faster and with a bit of word magic usually – better than spending endless hours hoping the words will come.
Make quality content king is the theme of February’s Business Media Club meeting on Friday, February 28 (9.30am-12.30pm) at the CGM Media Centre in Worcester.
Among the things we’ll show you is how to create your own marketing content calendar.
To join our regular attendees and book your seat visit Eventbrite. First time visitor donations support our club charity Worcester Foodbank.
For further information, vist our Business Media Club page, call us on 01905 754336 or email info@chrisgreenmedia.co.uk
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