The Secret to Attracting the Prospects you want with your Content

Who is your Favorite Prospect Calling Your Business?

You should have a pretty good idea of the kinds of calls you like to get from prospects. There is a choice of location or locations, and there is a critical type of project that is right in your wheelhouse.

Also there is just a certain type of customer, discerning, who likes beautiful things, who appreciates quality workmanship; who understands the construction or service business that you are in and has reasonable expectations of the process.

Now not all of our callers are perfect matches because people are different and we all have our own dab of weird; but your choice of content can help here also;

• help people understand the fundamental issues impacting their success with your service niche and how to avoid faux solutions
• helping set expectations 
• even help overcoming objections

but that is a separate part of the story. Here we are talking about attracting the right prospects.

You can attract the type of prospect you really want calling you with the strategic content choices you make. 

You attract your favorites by writing content that catches the attention of and attracts these particular prospects. Let's work our way through how to make this work.

You have an intuitive sense of what your best prospects want because you have talked to them before; your people are also talking to prospects and customers. We just need to listen better and think about what we are hearing and then address the issues and the opportunities presented. Your people can be a huge intelligence gathering mechanism here.

You also can put your impetus on your local market by sharing images and content with a specific local flavor. Use the zip codes you want to work in, reference the neighborhoods you want to work in. There are a lot of useful Local SEO craft you can use here, and I am not getting into it here. But I will point out that what actually will work will be local references around real useful content and not the superfluous BS from SEO "specialists" rewriting the same rehashed generalities for Fort Worth Roofer and Arlington Roofer and Dallas roofer. It was just a momentary decisions to pick on roofers; but I could have easily picked on several local HVAC contractors. When you look at the actual search in an incognito window; well... I pick on more ways to create useless content here.

I am assuming the prospect you want is the discerning web visitor looking for specific information and ready to use that information to pick out a reliable and trustworthy contractor or service company. This then gives you a great opportunity to create really specific articles and posts about identifiable conditions and issues around which you enjoy solving problems with fundamental solutions.

You create specific useful information around a particular topic, and people looking for useful information around that topic will find you in a search tool. They will keep looking through any other links provided by, say Google search, and keep returning to Google for more answers, and finally Google will figure out you are the authentic search for that particular turn of phrase.

Thus then, writing the right article will get you the type of web visitor that you want.

Of course, this kind of  content is not the usual rephrasing of the usual cliches available online about any subject. And this actually takes the active  role of experts working in the field to create.
We talk about the only real source of useful content here.
We talk about how to create this kind of content here.

With the plethora of information on the Internet, it also helps to leverage your great content of social media. We talk about that here, but the point to be made here is that, again, the type of social posting you provide helps determine the type of reader that will respond. And again, you have a strong intuitive sense of what is important here; you just have to match that intuitive sense up well with your ability to use social media effectively.

All efforts at creating compelling content to attract the people you want to hear from...  is not a given. You get no rewards for hitting the PUBLISH button. Once upon a time, just a great website made it possible to get great traffic just using great content. Today, with a plethora of choices online, strategic sharing of content in appropriate social media venues is a key to getting more web traffic. So the value of strategic content must also include your ability to create useful attractants displayed in social media that creates conversations and connections and drives traffic back to your website. We discuss the power of social media here. 

There is a big issue with many business owners not understanding the way websites work and they value they generate. And the value is completely unreported until you have an analytics system in place that tracks conversions and dollar values that make sense. Make sure you have the analytical tools engaged to measure what matters.

This data is never as accurate as the good old bookkeeping system, but always remember the real important big tools that impact your business do not show up in the numbers in your bookkeeping system, they just impact the numbers you get.

Understanding the Power of Interactivity on a website Post

We have to understand  the impact of our content on our web visitor. Feedback is critical. We discuss at the length tracking conversions and getting feedback, but we also need to understand the power of interactivity to help us understand how our content is being perceived by our web visitor.

Conversion tracking parallets and reinforces the information we get from our efforts at creating interactivity and surveying web visitors. We can use survey instruments and micro-conversions to help determine how well we are matching the intent and meeting the particular value thresholds for our chosen pre-customers. We can get an idea from a survey form create content we think is useful and then see how the new material affects our conversion testing.

We also get feedback from site visitors through our surveys. Insights from these responses cause us to change the site. We get a sense of the impact of the change by watching the response in our conversion tracking system.
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How well are you able to differentiate those who are ready to buy, and those just enjoying shopping?
How do people describe their concern?
How can you tie your service to a psychological trigger that gets them to listen to you as a subject of personal interest?
It always starts with keywords, but what do they mean by their query? this is at the very heart of interactivity on the website and tracking conversions.
It gets around to asking the right questions and then watching those questions part the waters between who you want to deal with and the rest.
You focus your content around the intent of the chosen.
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Question 1: “Based on today’s visit, how would you rate your site experience overall?”

Question 2: “Which of the following best describes the primary purpose of your visit?”

Question 3: “Were you able to complete the purpose of your visit today?”

If they answer yes to Question 3…

Question 4: “What do you value most about the [company] website?”

If they answer no to Question 3…

Question 4: “Please tell us why you were not able to fully complete the purpose of your visit today.”
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[adjust] Oh, and make sure you understand the implications here. You have to have your content creation process in play because you need an active system to take in feedback and then respond to it, and the response is changing the content and then tracking the responses and the results in your system of analytics.

Essential Measurement Metrics Show the Way

analytics notes in notebook++

Validate that your investments can actually move the needle.

You can invest a lot of time and energy, and dollars, and people into one of these channels to try and move the needle on something, and get what look like good results in the channel itself. Like, "Oh, search is driving lots of traffic." Or, "We have high rankings." Or, "We are spending a lot on this display channel, and we're seeing lots of people visit."

If possible, two of the earliest investments I recommend are A.) automated, easy-to-access metrics,building up a culture of metrics and a way to get those metrics easily so that every time you launch something new it doesn't take you an inordinate amount of time to go get the metrics. Every week or month or quarter, however your reporting cycle goes, it doesn't take you tons and tons of time to collect and report on those metrics. Automated metrics, especially for SEO, but all kinds of metrics are hugely valuable.

How will we capture metrics, measure if it's working, and ID potential problems early?

Finally, last question I'll ask in this prioritization is: How are we going to capture the right metrics around this, measure it, see that it's working, and identify potential problems early on? One of the things that happens with SEO is sometimes something goes wrong — either in the planning phase or the implementation or the launch itself — or something unexpected happens. We update the user profiles to be way more SEO friendly and realize that in the new profile pages we no longer link to this very important piece of internal content that users had uploaded or had created, and so now we've lost a bunch of internal links to that and our indexation is dropping out. The user profile pages may be doing great, but that user-generated content is shrinking fast, and so we need to correct that immediately.

We have to be on the watch for those. That requires validation of design, some form of test if you can (sometimes it's not needed but many times it is), some launch metrics so you can watch and see how it's doing, and then ongoing metrics to tell you was that a good change and did it map well to what we predicted it was going to do.
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Let take a short jaunt into technology issues.

The technology of tracking conversions and calls is complex to set up and takes a lot of careful thought to design the micro-conversions so they actually create more business and not just more tracking activity. All conversion tracking must also be tracked to the final results- more and better results from our estimate writing processes. Estimates and following up on estimates is discussed separately in the top document and elsewhere.

We have powerful new tracking and analysis tools from Google

Google wants us to do really well with Google Ads. All Google can do is help us get more clicks, but the provide the tools for testing and improving conversions, because good knows that is what is critical to their customers.

Google Tag Manager allows setting tags and tracking custom events we create- as micro conversions. The events show up in custom tracking goals which we can set up in Google Analytics. Google analytics will provide our basic data providing an initial baseline and then stats as they change in relations to our testing and website changes.

Custom events can be configured to fill a dashboard with key data and on a month to month basis show progress or points of opportunity.

We also have click to call options with Google Adwords and call conversion technology within the Adwords system. We have the potential to not only track actual calls from an ad, ( we have not implemented this but need to consider it carefully as part of a broader plan for conversion tracking) and know the duration of the call, but also track the ad click when they just visit and review the site. The ad cookie stays active for 90 days or more, and allows us to tie our conversions to the original ad click. This is much more useful information that available in the past- particular when matched to the search query used.

Call tracking is not perfect because the number is visible on the site on PCs and our web visitor can pick up the phone and just dial, and good things are happening without leaving a trace; in fact, the trace could look like a bounce. But these are the people who know us, who have a direct referral to us and are not perusing the site where they would be exposed to our micro-conversions...

But we are more interested in our impact on people who have never met us- the over 83%- first time visitors to our site, who are looking us over before they call us, and these people will have an opportunity to run across a micro-conversion or even a conversion that we are tracking as we work to influence them into trusting Brick Doctor. This cultivation process is where we want to test and measure our ability to improve conversions.

(we have other options with phone calls but that level of conversation does not fit at this basic overview of the technology)

The click to call technology is particularly well suited to smart phones, and more and more of our calls are coming through smart phones all the time. People on smart phones, according to stats, want definitive answers and we we can create a call us button right in the ad, and have it ring our phones during business hours only.

The right technology and how to utilize it will be an iterative process and can be built as we modify the site. There is a natural order to progress and a working survey system to create interactivity and a useful conversion tracking system will take time, but it will be

a powerful tool to improve the effectiveness of the site to convert visitors,

and a power tool for stakeholders to assess how business development is improving and productivity growing.

Monthly reports around specific goal tracking would be useful and even year on year reports would help us figure out our best marketing approach across the seasons of the year. Queries change and interests wax and wane. We need data from conversions.

Understanding the Role of Conversions and Feedback in Creating Great Content

 We all suffer from assumptions we each make about what other people mean. We are human, of course, but when we are working as sales people or in business development, we know or at least we have heard before, how important it is not to jump to conclusions about what a prospect means when they as a question or make what sounds like an objection.

We also know it is easy to draw conclusions about what people actually understand about what we are talking about at any time.

We have to bring this same questioning and verification nature when we start drawing conclusions about what is important to our web visitors who visit our website.

Now, we as business owners have a pretty good idea what people want,  what is important to people by having talked to prospects and customers for years, BUT, and this is a particularly important BIG BUT; we really must decide to start testing our website visitors reactions to our content; to better understand their values, to better understand what they want and to better understand the attitudes they have about what you do; and what their expectations are from you.




From within our own heads, we assume people understand what we understand. Always go with the email rule. How many ways to people figure out how to screw up something as simple as sending email. Strategic content is laid out in a pattern that a person searching for answers can decipher. Gems of information should not be hid and scattered about and taken for granted. You need the bread crumb trails and links for people to make sense of your content.

Conversion Experts Change Minds It’s critical to understand what can repel a customer. Perhaps more-so than understanding what persuades them. It’s what helps you define precisely who your customer is; what they want; what they fear; what motivates them; and why. So that you can design campaigns that capture their imaginations … and compel them to take the action that both you and they desire. Are you prepared to persuade?   - Brian Eisenberg

A website conversion tracking system is strategically important because it provides a means for testing and improving the effectiveness of the site content to attract and capture the chosen customer. We can use intuition to accurately estimate what the chosen want, but listening and testing and measuring gives the edge to the smart competitor.

First off, we need to define conversions on your site. A conversion is an actual contact to your business asking for help or asking for an estimate.
Standard conversions on our site are

• phone calls to you
• emails sent to you
• form filled out asking you to contact them. 

There can be many steps to a conversion on your website. Visitors might come in through any number of pages. They might look at some pictures and captions. They might read a bit, skip some text and then glance over at your citations. They do what they please.

There are only 4 outcomes of their visit. They either 

• create a conversion for you, or 
• create a bookmark- a thought to come back in the future or 
• they share the page with a spouse or partner for further discussion or 
• they wander off to find some other information.

Some head back to Google because they did not find what they were looking for. Some of these you might want to wander off, but some of these wanderers would be great clients for you. You have no idea how many are slipping through the holes in your net.

Tracking conversions is a key ingredient in the process of creating new content which better answers the needs and desires of your market.

The challenge is- people online have high hopes they are going to find exactly what they want, and they are always ready to click on a new potential prize. You need to capture them when they are on your site, or you will likely never see them again. Confuse them, don’t speak to their explicit intent- and they are gone.

How do we improve our connection to these desired web visitors? We make smart intuitive choices and then test and measure. With the feedback we receive we make changes the our strategic content and then test again. The data will tell  us if we improve. If our changes are useful, we improve our conversions.

This then is the significance of conversion testing. 

Next, we need to understand micro-conversions. Micro-conversions are the steps we strategically plan that attract clicks on our website, with these potential hooks we design as a next step that signifies that what we are talking about, is important to our visitor; and they have clicked on an offering that promises to tell them more. So a click on a hook we design around a topic that we are hoping to convert to a connection to us, is a micro-conversion.

Conversion tracking requires the thoughtful design and creation of micro-conversions. These are not just any link but carefully organized links that form a tentative progressive path towards an actual conversion on the site. The micro conversion might be a link to

• more detailed information about a particular topic on your site, for instance, 
• or a video; 
• or a series of images

and when associated with a particular topic, would denote a micro-conversion by virtue of the revealed in-depth interest in the information follow up around that subject.

Conversion tracking can come in handy for many uses. 

Conversion tracking allows us to postulate that particular information is critical to getting a conversion. Is the video popular? Has the number of conversions gone up since the addition of the video? The conversion improvement is giving you feedback and insight as to what creates the most satisfactory response from your web visitor.

If you are buying leads, say through Google Adwords, as you improve your conversions here, you are better able to differentiate what works best, and achieve a better return on investment and improve your leverage and use of the advertising  medium as compared to your competitors. Feedback and adjusting your content to match what you learn  from feedback is a good thing. This is a gambit that can give you a better return  on your ad investment in this case. It also insures you continue your advantage over the competition. Tracking conversions and taking in and using feedback makes your business more effective making sales.

Tracking conversions is actionable information. Our analytics can track social media sharing. We can track bulk traffic to the site. All this information, and none more important than conversion tracking; can help us understand the reaction to particular pieces of content and help us be smarter, fit better and convert more business with the same number of leads. We explore the analytics part of this effort here. 

Conversion tracking parallets and reinforces the information we get from our efforts at creating interactivity and surveying web visitors. We can use survey instruments and micro-conversions to help determine how well we are matching the intent and meeting the particular value thresholds for our chosen pre-customers. We can get an idea from a survey form create content we think is useful and then see how the new material affects our conversion testing.

We also get feedback from site visitors through our surveys and interactivity on the website. There is a nuanced but critical difference. This is soliciting for feedback. Make sure you see this post also. Together, conversion tracing and active attempts at interactivity and surveying help make sure you are getting the feedback you need to improve your content to better match the select web visitors you want to influence and connect to.

Oh, and make sure you understand the implications here. You have to have your content creation process in play because you need an active system to take in feedback and then respond to it, and the response is changing the content and then tracking the responses and the results in your system of analytics.

We learn. We get smarter. We pay less per conversion. We make sales easier because our site is being more simpatico with our visitors and winning them over before they call us. We are under less strain. We are more productive. A carefully thought out and verified conversion improvement process will pay off for us.


We will deal with fewer poor fits and spend more time with prime prospects. This is all sorted out through the interplay of our learned experience, the content we create and what we learn and adjust to through the combined interaction of our interactive processes on the site and in our conversations, and how well we integrate our conversion tracking system to track results.

The technology to make conversion tracking work is discussed here. Software makes this process easy to do, and with proper alignment of goals and testing methods, you can have effective feedback that works

So what else needs to be said here? Who  has some feedback?

Strategic Content is Critically Important in Dollars and Cents

We really need to nail down the actual value of strategic content to a business. The value to your own business will vary depending on how strategically worthwhile your goals are, and how well served your business strategy is by your strategic content. I leave it to you to figure it out for your own business. But, in the abstract,  there is no plausible denial of the importance of strategic content in business development in the 21st century.

First, we will define the value. This is essential because serious and effective content creation is not just a brain fart exercise, but takes actual effort. So we need to prove that an investment of time and thought and effort makes sense, even as we also work to talk about what makes for effective content.

Strategic content creation is the most powerful tool available to build business now; we just need to understand that useful content helps you grow your business, useless content is ignored. Make sure you know the difference.

Beware your own limiting attitude about website content.

It still amazes some business owners that web visitors will actually find content online. Most business owners are a bit myopic about how they see the world. They are really busy and don't use the Internet and social media as many of their customers, and just make assumptions that the people they want to meet, are just like them. Well, they are not and your attitudes about the value of useful content is costing you big.

I have been asked many times: but how will people find that content and how will it make a difference? This is  a really important question because it gets at the very heart of investing time in content.

And, of course, this  means that content needs to be strategic and be well planned to content that draws traffic. I had a real smart sales manager tell me last week that a blog post would not get 20 hits in a year. Now he might be right around a particular article, but way off around another more popular article. And, you meet the exact right people with those 20 clicks in one year and you might do some great business.

Where do you get new customers?

You are blessed with repeat customers. You are blessed with customers and professionals who refer you. Aren't referrals great! You do a variety of advertising and lead generation programs and these help you find future customers. Your people are out in the field making a good impression and people are watching them and noting the name on the truck... maybe they walk over and say hello...

Otherwise, your website, and the assortment of digital outposts you keep surrounding your website, youtube- social media- newsletters and email subscriptions are the means by which people cross your path. And all these digital way stations absolutely depend on useful strategic content to actually attract the right traffic, capture their attention and allow you an  opportunity to introduce yourself and your company. Great value is generated here.  Make sure you see the discussion at How are you being Introduced to Future Customers?

So what is this worth in the evaluation of your company?

And we must realize, in fact, that the effectiveness of our advertising, and our lead generation depends on the website, because they usually visit the website before they call you, and those that just call are not as great a prospect because they are not being discerning but much more likely to be transaction based, and see what you do as a commodity.

And the effectiveness of lead generation programs using online advertising, is directly dictated by your strategic content's ability to create the conversions that turn a click into a call. This is a non-trivial pursuit. It takes useful content and you better have a great idea what useful content is...

Yes, useful content makes the difference in successful sales in the 21st century. 

You, as a business owner are in a gold rush to find new customers in a market disrupted by technology. Let's look at the underlying principles here. Traditionally, only about 15% of people did not know who they would call if they had a particular problem. Car problem? Yes, they have a trusted mechanic. Roofing problem? yes, the vast majority of people had a trusted roofer.

Well, this has been disrupted because so many traditional businesses really did not have to do anything to keep happy customers at home because the gradient to finding new talent was steep. You could look at generic ads in the Yellow pages and call people you knew nothing about for an estimate. Buy a self-help book for information. Read a magazine article.  Remember Sunset Books? Remember Mother Earth News magazines?

Well, now you have a question and you pick up a smart phone and ask a question at the search prompt. Now, you can pose a question on your favorite social media venue. Now, you can look up reviews on BBB and YELP and a variety of review sites. You can look over their website and figure out if you like them...

Yes, the search for information has changed and how we show and find stuff to buy has changed. Websites and technology are allowing all kinds of companies to reach out to new people with suggestions, and ideas, warnings and recommendations; and it is so easy to get suggestions and referrals from friends in social media.

In this time of realignment, in this period where technology expands the ways we can find useful information; well, the rules and the conventional thinking in marketing is being usurped by new options.

These new options impact the Real Value of your strategic content  in dollars and cents in two critical ways

You have a lot to gain and a lot to prevent losing. You get to make friends and earn new customers, but you get the added responsibility of keeping your existing customers happy at home in the corral.

And you have a lot to lose by not paying attention, or doing a botched up job of content creation and just putting forward the usual blah blah blah on your website and in social media. People turn away from banal. People turn away from self promotion. People turn away from the same old cliches. Here is another reminder to make sure you stop and study what is actually useful content

We need to make sure we understand the value of an existing customer. We can get caught up in finding new customers and take for granted the repeat customer. This is folly and it is double folly not to have an active plan to keep existing customers happily ensconced with your company.

We also need to appraise the overall value of a website. It is the central repository of your public presence in the marketplace. When someone gives your company as a referral, the vast majority of folks will immediately look up your website to check you out. This should stop most of us in our tracks because our website; yes, even  this blog, is the view of you for people who don't know you.

Content is where people find out if you offer them value. Successful businesses looking forward to a long prosperous future want to attract customers looking for a trusting relationship and not just a transaction based on low price. There is no better way to earn trust with this select customer than having customer centric content.

There are many other more intangible ways great content creates value for your business. 

Useful content helps meet new people online and in social media.
How do you meet new customers? The Internet and social media are key tools. Let's make sure you understand how that actually works. Lets make sure we understand how new people meet you online.

We will not discuss here strategic content that fits your particular business needs. That requires careful self analysis and we pick that subject up separately.

And we need to also associate video and podcasts and webinars and the many other ways great content can be re-purposed to reach individual markets more effectively. Useful content is easy to turn into quite useful video. Conversely with insipid content, you can also make insipid video. Remember, customer centric is a big deal.

There are valuable skills that your team develops in the process of participation in strategic content creation. This is an important intangible that is hard to put a number to, but the value is significant. We talk about evaluating intangibles here.

Let's take a moment to understand the strategic value in building team muscles to deal with change; the virtue in promoting adaptability, and the value in looking for ways to be innovative on a regular basis. This is anathema to the industrial mindset, but is an essential skill in a fast changing marketplace driven ever faster by technology. Keep your eyes focused on working hard with eyes lowered and shoulder to the wheel, and you are likely headed into the ditch. Here are other notes on the virtue of fostering adaptability.

Creating great content also helps your sales team, and, in fact, the entire team learn to deal with fear in prospects and deal with objections right up front. The right content can play a unique role in dealing with objections and mythology that can prevent a sale. The right content can deal with just plain fear and apprehension, huge barriers that prevent trust. We talk about the power of content to deal with objections here.

The content creation process also supports a strong inner camaraderie between team members as

• great storytelling around great acts of watching out for the customers interests, or 
• taking an active role in the community, or 
• supporting the team effort 

create and develop an esprit de corp around your company with your people. These acts of caring, of courage, of indomitable spirit, of going the extra mile- all documented within your on content creation system, has a payoff that is another intangible. Hard  to measure but a significant value.

Then there are collaborative levels of leverage once you have developed your strategic content creation skills. This is Internet marketing 2.0 and entails the combined leverage and power of trusted partners cooperating together to create shared content. 

These trusted partners can create content together, create newsletters together and address common issues with homes in a cross discipline fashion and work together to build a large community of homeowners that trust and hire and refer the members of your collaborative  team. We discuss this issue separately  PAGE

Related Posts How do people find or run across your services? Differentiating Between Useful and Useless Content The Essential Role of Leadership in Establishing a Content Creation Process

So, who has some thoughts on the value of strategic content?
What would you like to add?
The value of useful content is hard to overestimate. And it keeps working. All the time. When your select visitor is searching for just what you are talking about.
Feel free to add your thoughts below.

So why does useful content happen so seldom?

Useful content happens quite infrequently. Most often content on websites is mundane, repetitive and generally worthless. We talk about differentiating useful and useless content here.

How does useless content happen?

This is a critical question, because some of you are going to see the light and decide to step out and be remarkable and you cannot step out and be remarkable unless you can identify what is happening now.

It is critical for leadership to understand the strategic content is just not making up stuff and then promoting it with a loud voice. Make sure you are not caught up in the concept that social media participation is free and content creation is free therefore creating content is a breeze and free.

Too often website content is relegated to anyone with a brain fart to share, or who wants to put just about anything onto the social media grill. Business owners often pass content creation onto an ad agency and the content is not even tracked for quality, or readability, or usefulness.

There are content writers out there who make a living finding content online and rewording it a bit for the next customer. This is a fruitless exercise for the business owner. It is a living for the english major and pays the bills at the agency.

You, as a thoughtful leader do not want to be here. Oh, and if you are seeing great analytics each month with this arrangement; something is wrong. What is being measured does not represent value for you.

We must understand that all content is not the same. 

Just because a Jugo and a Mercedes Benz had 98% of the same components does not make the Jugo compare favorably. The Jugo was a real bargain though when you thought about only up front costs.

Most of us understand the critical differentiators between a Jugo- are Jugos even made anymore? and the Benz; but the same can be said about content also. Useful content and useless content are made up of the same stuff, and brain fart content is easier because there is little extra work.

There are a variety of forces pushing toward mediocre content. 

1. Agencies make a living by helping with SEO and because websites require content, they are interested in content that gets the project done. Easy brain fart content rehashed from anywhere or some platitudes picked from the brain of the owner, works.

There is also a lot of  mediocre content created under the guise of being useful for Local SEO. You might see the same content belched up 6 different ways so that the material can be presented around  a particular city. This is folly for local SEO.  It  also undermines the confidence of the web visitor to see tripe printed on the page.

2. The next great source of easy content is promotional material talking about the company; tooting the company horn is usually quite pleasing to the person paying the bill and we are creating content at high speed here. So what is easier than pleasing platitudes.

Do you ever watch those videos to introduce a company? They are usually filled with generic information that no one cares about except the business owner and the person responsible for creating the video. It gets him or her home and the project finished.

3. Owners just like to make stuff up. They know what is best.  They are used to giving orders. And it is the boss' privilege to assume they know what you are talking about at any time. I recently heard a business owner deciding what they could put up on Facebook last week. He spends about an hour a month on Facebook, maybe... but felt perfectly comfortable deciding what made sense here. This is the HIPPO problem. Highest Paid Person's Opinion.

Discerning leadership must understand that, while we can develop an intuitive understanding of the type of people who hire us, and we can create useful content within this context; it is essential to be seeking feedback, interacting with site visitors and asking questions and testing.

Actual testing allows you to better understand and better serve the types of people you really want to work for. This takes effort, and planning and time and this brings us to our last point standing in the way of creating really useful content...

4. Owners like to see their people doing useful work. Useful work is getting stuff done that pays the bills now. Investing in the future is more of an intangible goal, and these types of projects are mostly thought about after work when the owner can muse and imagine great stuff. When the work day starts, there is a strong tendency to bring out the industrial brain. and with the industrial brain, anything that stands in the way of production and the daily urgent tasks, has the priority.

Oh there is a lot of lip service here, and head bobbing when we start talking about finding space for the important and not urgent, but daybreak comes and the workday begins and... uh, what were we talking about?

So who feels like I am  totally out of line here? What are your thoughts/ Am I completely off base here? Am I just being a cranky old fart? Lets here from some searchers too. Are you finding what you want to find?

Understanding the Power and Utility of Social Media

Most companies fail when it comes to coupling social media to business development. These failures result in a lot of wasted energy and time, and a lot of chasing after worthless goals. The energy wasted could be so easily leveraged using  social media well. Let's figure this out a bit.

People go to social media for all kinds of reasons: for news, for local news, for entertainment, to see what their friends are up to, to look for funny, provocative and unusual information.

Businesses should go to social media to cross paths with new prospects. As business owners, we go here to drop attractants that relate in some way to our business services. We can attract friends and likes and shares when when we offer useful bits.

Too many businesses think like bosses. You can talk about anything you want with paid employees and they pay attention; probably not for the reasons you wish, but it is part of earning a paycheck. Make the boss feel good.

Too many businesses hire social media help using the same attitude. Social media creation types are there to make a buck putting up on social media what you want to see and hear. They are paid to make you happy. I am not. Therefore, this may feel like a face slap, but the people you are trying to attract and influence probably have the most fleeting interest in what strokes your ego. So why do we see so much of this type of content?

Reasons while social media failures occur so often might be in this list.
We love to make stuff up because we know what works.
Just too busy to stop and think about important stuff.
Creating content is an afterthought what with all the really urgent stuff to do.
We love being the boss and making stuff up. This is the HIPPO effect.

So what makes good sense when trying to use social media?
The great content that we share as blog posts or articles, fit into sharing on social media nicely. We also need a nice hook to get attention. We actually serve up useful information for our visitors. We give visitors an opportunity to use and share our genuinely important information. If the link does not relate to your core business, or if you think your role is to be share any funny thing, or talk about football or cats or dogs; you are diluting your utility. Facebook is full of entertainment. People do not come to you for entertainment. You just mess up your role and bore people. You need to concentrate on being in the cultivating new customers business.

Now grounded content can run over a gamut of creative tidbits. We are in the bonding business. We offer useful information, people get the answers they want, we earn trust, people ask us questions and ask us for estimates, and they become happy long term customers.

Here is a short list of useful topics that work well being shared on Facebook and social media. There are more; feel free to suggest a few. Oh, and I threw in some caveats, also.

• attractive bits relating to useful content around your specific service that you have published to your website. Facebook is not a reliable place to post original content. There is no reliable searching mechanism. This is called social media for a reason. 
• local events and community involvement by your people. There are interesting tools on Facebook to promote events. Document the events on your website. Share pictures  and links to Facebook. 
• Awards won and recognition earned by your people.
• great testimonials - this is a tricky place. Heap praise on the people who get mentioned. Humble bragging is not good. We are just red faced embarrassed at the profuse praise heaped on us... just shut up. People are  finding you annoying.  There are humble braggarts out there. Are you one of them?
• you can be creative but be real and do not just fill space.
• no gratuitous offerings of your brand logos. Why? might someone forget your brand? Just knock it off. You often see this when an agency has a box to check off as a post. 
• skip the empty reminders of important calendar events. I get newsletters from several companies' who email on Mother's day and the 4th of July and Christmas. My heart sings their praises for being so authentic and caring. That is Stu sarcasm. You can make these real, and make them personal. Talk about what your people are doing, maybe; but just the drab standard line and this is the only time anybody hears from you....  People know that software sends these out and the note was written 4 years ago. No points for priming the calendar. 

There is all kinds of space here for creativity and bonding to real people and we always link back to our website which is the hub of all our online activities. We must always be offering value. Now this is a wide ranging field. Just be real. Be there with real thought out additions to the dialog. Don't just fill space.

Your use of Facebook or any other social media tool must relate to how that tool is actually used for good purpose by the regulars and your posts must blend in with other useful information in that medium. We must not be interlopers shouting for attention.

We need to test and measure to see how we are doing. We talk about measuring metrics here.
Conversions are creating a link to useful content, say on your website around a subject that attracts attention.

Social Media 2.0
There are powerful ways to find influencers in social media that relate to the value you bring to the market place. You can friend them and win them over to common cause and combine your efforts to reach more people and create a win-win for both parties.

You can also collaborate in a group you build, but this is a big deal and will not be addressed here. You can also participate in other groups. But remember, work to add real value or you will be ignored and be worse off for trying. Be authentic.

We must be conscious of working to be useful.
This brings up a widespread issue in the publishing content world. The myriad forces which push towards mediocrity in content development. Leadership must refrain from making stuff up and doing the easy brain fart type of posting or allowing an agency to post hokum for you on a regular basis just to fill space. We must be conscious of being useful

Your content and your social media postings must relate to the buying cycle
You need to be strategic and you need to understand the multiple steps of a sales process and how to address each of these stages with your content.
You can work within any of these categories, and by being strategic you can create a matrices of content connection points that allow people to find a path to you and follow that path to giving you a call.
We are working in these categories. You might have some clearer verbiage here.

• capturing attention, 
• to creating the wish for more information
• to planting an idea in someone's head 
• to helping answer questions 
• to helping to solve objections and alleviate fears
• to setting your company apart from the competition
•  to cultivating a desire for the service, 
• to writing an estimate and closing the sale

Understanding buying cycles is important and we discuss several here. If you don't understand the buying cycle you can get your sales process out of order and miss sales.  If you don't understand the buying cycle, you could be missing a critical part of the market and have a weakness in your strategic implementation. The sales process is one step at a time, and you need to have a pretty good idea that there is time involved as people move through the buying process.

OK, so make sure you understand that there are no points won for the number of people who like you, or the number of posts you do. The value of social media is set by your ability to get shares and likes driving visitors back to your content on your website. Follow the stats. Follow the conversions. Improve by testing. Don't make stuff up.

Any other thoughts about social media?

Smart Business Strategy Finds Time and Space for Adaptability

Many different topics pop on when business owners are musing a wish list of skills they wished there people had, but adaptability is not generally one of them. In fact, adaptability could easily be a key factor in solving the constraints most businesses have, but usually solutions are seen as revolving around sweating more, and getting more done, and getting things done on time, and working faster and more productively... these do not fit so well when considering the virtues of adaptability.

Adaptability as a virtue revolves around change, and change is the antithesis of getting more done. But when technology is changing the world and how people buy stuff and how people discover what they want to buy and how people figure out what they need and what they want; doing things the same old way is only going to work so long.

Lessons to Learn from Evolution Survival of the Fittest is a concept from Charles Darwin we can all learn from. Charles said  animals evolved because of pressure on the species. It was not the strongest that survived, it was not the dominant species that survived, but the species  most adaptable to change.  What does this mean to you? If you are a small company growing, you can take heart that some of your big competitors are going to be quite happy to continue doing what has brought them success in the past, and not adapt well to the future; and you can grow and thrive by being smart and strategic.  If you are a dominant company now, I am hoping this note jars you out of complacency and helps you understand you cannot rest on your laurels but be developing your adapting skills

Understanding the virtues of keeping eyes open, being adaptable to change, paying attention on what is going on around you, being patient and bringing your team along to learn new skills and work at innovation, even if there is some failure; needs to be seen as a virtue. Time spent learning to adapt to new technologies, experimenting with new processes is a virtue, and a team of people used to taking time to be creative and innovative is a virtue.

This is vs the standard industrial thinking - centering activities around what works the best to get production done right now, and keeping the shoulder to the wheel and producing... this is the industrial mindset, keep doing more of what is working now and get those number up every quarter.

You may have discovered my ulterior motive, 
I want more businesses to understand the critical value of content creation and to find the space in the work schedule to facilitate it. But beyond my ulterior motive, nurturing the skill to be looking for ways to improve processes and taking the time to engage with change and be adaptable is a basic business strategy.

The problem is creativity takes effort and time and effort away from what makes money racks the lizard brain and time away from production costs real money. It is much easier to feel the cost of being adaptable that figuring out the intangible cost of staying put where you are.

Seth Godin is quite eloquent about the struggle between deciding to spend time being frustrated learning something new and just staying with the status quo.

The problem with evaluating the first fifteen minutes of frustration is that we easily forget about the 5,000 minutes of leverage that frustration earns us if we stick it out. 

This might be a good time to check out his point. Now he is speaking more to the individual artist or craftsman but it does not take genius to carry his point over to the entire team. The First 15 Minutes

The business environment right now is a good time for keeping one's eyes open as things change. You need to understand what is happening and the implications of those changes.

You need to understand what is attracting people and interconnections and figure out how to participate authentically there. You need to know who you want to talk to and figure out where they spend their time in social media. And you need to do it well. Useless and boring is as bad as not being there.

There is an art to using social media effectively. You have to understand where the people you want to meet, hang out and figure out how to contribute there with real value and make some new friends. You actually have to spend time and do some study to understand how any social media tool is used effectively or have someone you trust help you figure out how to use it effectively.

You also need time to discern well enough to miss the BS and innovate around Fundamentals, not be talked into the latest fad technology that will fade into the vapor. Innovation brought to you by sales people offering easy and effortless ways to do what you know takes effort, is BS.

The best example I see are creative ways to create worthless content. Lots of people are hired who turn brain farts into florid text, and rehash existing content online into new hash. Some even turn to other countries to find writing talent to create content. People are even working on content written by machines. Would not that makes things easy?

Optimizing technologies to aid the human hand, technologies to help with SEO and to sort keywords and phrases cannot turn worthless rehashed content into something useful. In the end, people have to read what you say and like it and respond. A back button is the ultimate exit from boring and useless.

you also need to be beware the fads in web design. That feature that everyone has. let me just pick on one in particular. I hate carousels. This new technology popped up a few years ago and most websites have this feature because it looks cool to the owner. I beat up on carousels here. 

Here is a really big deal. And I put it last because it was not about content creation. There are just the greatest software apps available today to help make all kinds of human activities easier. There are creat CRM systems for keeping track of prospects and customers and projects. There are great ways to communicate with the staff and staff with each other, to keep everyone on the same page at the same time, on whatever smart device they are using.

Such software takes the sweat of working with images, and creating content, and leaves the fun part; commenting and creating and telling stories.

Then the other side of the coin is learning to use the technology well. You probably know people who do not know how to use the power of their own word processor or their own spreadsheet and database engine. When you use a handy tool, like a hammer, you have reduced the handy tool to the level of a hammer and it probably functions poorly as a hammer. We talk about using software well here. 

And this gets back to Seth Godin theme above; do not let the little bit of work required to learn and leverage a sophisticated tool from helping you reap the added leverage of using the tool well.

Adaptability in the modern world is essential for survival. It is in the spirit of Daniel Boone who mosied into Kentucky paying attention to where he was going to stay out of trouble with the bears and stay out of trouble with the rightful property owners.

Smart business owners must learn to relax a little more and allow the space and time- i.e. slack to give people room to think, to innovate, to try new ideas.... we must become adaptable to change because change is coming and it is better to relish it and be near the front of the parade.

Being adaptable keeps you aware of the change in the winds and help you adjust to forces at work and keeps you on course.

OK, who has a thought here? What kind of experiences have you had that touch on the subject?

You need to Understand the Basic Buying cycle ehh Buying Cycles

If you don't understand the buying processes you encounter in your service niche, you do not understand or have an effective business development process.

Great marketers work at getting prospects into the buying cycle earlier and earlier and basically taking them off the market from all those bounders waiting around for a one night stand, or put more delicately, the quick sale.

The bounder mentality just does not stop to comprehend the steps towards a sale and basically begin their thinking at the time of the particular buyer is looking at reviews and figuring out who they are going to trust and buy from.

Now remember, this site is intended to help small service companies and manufacturers improve their business development and their sale processes. The greatest part of Internet advice you will ever see is oriented towards helping retail locations succeed and restaurants and every other location that caters to the whim of folks zooming around and enjoying shopping and catching a snack and perusing cool stuff... this is not you, and the majority of advice is tangential to what you need to do.

There are a lot of companies out there whose front page consists of promotional offers and "call now for service". Now, the front page is not critical to search unless all the site's information is on the front page, and not critical unless you are using online ads that dump people on the front page and this is a money robbing mistake.

These concentration on the quick sale is a misunderstanding of the buying cycle and the many different step that homeowners go through before they are ready to go shopping.

Web visitors first encounters with your content as they are searching for answers about something they are concerned about, or something they see in social media that touches on an inkling they have. It depends on the theme and the 100 different ways to draw attention to that theme that helps create a search connection between you content and their intent; and this is arranged by being high on the search page with Google.
What do I mean by theme? I mean a broad issue around which another 100 stories could be told which would relate back to the broader theme. Like indoor air quality or IAQ. We talk about dominating  critical themes elsewhere but here we are relating any particular theme to the buying cycle.

So someone is searching for reasons for a musty odor like composing vegetation in a bedroom. Now they are not interested in special offers, or "schedule your appointment today" they are looking for content that gives them a sense of what might be going on. Now content like this that is part of a story which relates the real life experience of a customer could easily be matched up by Google because of the quite specific terms. And they are not showing up on the front page; but a blog post that when prepared through a strategic content creation system is meeting this web visitor around their subject and matching their intent.

And here is the big win. When people find useful information they are appreciate. This phenomenon is called reciprocity and it is in our nature as humans. And so if your content is useful and you offer a hook that gets their attention and that matches well their next step in their buying cycle; well you are on your way to winning hearts and creating influence

The type of buyers most smart companies want are customers who are discerning, who want top quality and professional services more than they want the cheapest price. Quality workmanship and attention to the fundamentals of a repair and cheapest price do not really keep company because the cheapest price depends on corner cutting on the fundamentals.
Yes, you hear about cutting profit to the bare bones, and cutting down on expensive overhead... this is BS for cutting corners. Companies in for the long haul understand the cost of doing business and overhead and the cost of top quality workmanship and the fundamentals of repairs and, while they do sharpen their pencils around expenses they are not cutting corners to be the lowest price.

I did not mean to get on that riff on pricing there, but wanted to underline the utility of understanding the buying cycle and creating strategic content around the steps in the buying cycle. The web visitors you meet working the buying cycle well, are the discerning buyers so that you are giving your company the best chance to meet the discerning buyer you want; first.

And it is your web visitor to lose. But you don't lose them if you understand the next steps in the buying cycle and help them pass easily, even over a length of time to become your buyer and your lifelong customer.

Understanding the buying cycle and utilizing this knowledge to meet and win new customers is

• helping the chosen become aware, 
• helping the aware to better understand what is happening
• helping the chosen learn to discerning about the actions they need to take.
• give them useful information around which to make smart choices and avoid faux solutions.
• give them plenty of opportunity to explore your credentials
• give them plenty of opportunity to check you out and your team
• create your own unique systems to get them to connect to you, to stay in touch with useful information- social media? nurturing emails? a newsletter preferably a newsletter that you collaborate in... shared in email...

Understanding the buying cycle and thinking about strategic content marketing can help you win in the battle for the hearts and minds of your chosen web visitors, and you do this on a steady basis and you will have real problems on your hands. You will have to grow your company, and do more hiring, and train new managers... the small business owners work is never done.

Related Posts The Critical Role of Leadership in Creating a Strategic Marketing Plan Empowering People – Empowering Your Business How are you being Introduced to Future Customers?

All right so who has a point to add here? This is critical turf for business owners to be thinking about. Leave your thoughts below.

The Essential Role of Leadership in Establishing a Content Creation Process

There are all kinds of perceived obstacles and real roadblocks to instituting a smart strategic content creation strategy, and this is good news for the thoughtful leader.

• We need to know the roadblocks and the pitfalls to avoid failure. 
• We need to go understand the obstacles, both real and perceived, to assess reality. 
• We also need to understand the value of strategic content. We want return on investment. We will basically discuss the cost of creating strategic content and the value and then you can make your own decisions. 

It makes sense to get a true perspective on the value of useful content. Value created helps alleviate the anxiety of investing time and money and thinking. Great content and the useful leveraging of this content on the Internet, in social media, in online advertising, in newsletters, in nurturing email, off-line- is the big lever in the battle for business growth. Lets look at this value quite closely. 

There are many pitfalls you have to watch out for.
There are so many traps that let us create content that sucks. Useless content is easy, but it does take time, and it provides no useful results. Yet why is there so much useless content? We need to be clearly differentiating between the usual blah blah blah, the usual self promoting bilge and useful content that attracts the web visitors you would like to know better.

There are many obstacles that are just felt, that are just basically fear.
Creating a process for effective content creation can sound hard to do. It can feel like folly. There is this boogie man that keeps companies standing still when action is needed and the highest real risk is standing in place as the world changes how it buys stuff.

This is the problem of the lizard brain- the fight or flight response to any change from a ancient psyche that kept us safe when the dangers were real not imagined but, today keeps us standing on the virtual railroad tracks as technology changes the way we do business at at rapid pace.There is the tyranny of the daily urgent and unimportant that can displace the attention to the important but not urgent.

There is often an overbearing sense that everybody is busy now or that we need to concentrate on the tasks that make income right now.  A strategic content creation strategy that interlinks useful content is important, and is a good investment and needs to be engaged now as the way people buy, is changing. But even when this importance is understood, the daily urgencies intervene, and the usual rush to get something done, pushes for pragmatism right now. Leaders with vision cannot be satisfied with industrial thinking but can take the time, to find the space to fit in what is important.

There is actual disruption in creating a process to create useful content
 but this disruption of existing process is no different than say, moving from a paper working environment to a paperless environment. It takes a vision from leadership who understand the tremendous value of having shared docs and not having to depend on tracking and sorting and filing pieces of paper. Moving forward, requires a description of the process, and maybe even a procedure for dealing with issues which will arise. Right from the start we plan well to minimize possible disruption.

The actual changes are first led by the early adopters and then there are some laggards on the other end who take longer. And when all is said and done, there is a big gain in productivity and an improved ability to manage data and you are better able to care for customers.

Useful content requires a team and we lay out a rough outline for creating useful content here.

Leadership is responsible for the vision forward. Leadership must create the tenor, must create the safe environment for people to participate here, to share ideas, and move forward. And Leadership must not allow the daily urgent to interfere. Leadership must have the patience to let the team develop some new habits and acquire some new perspective. It is all good. Maybe you need to go back and review the section of actual value of content. This is the big tool with which to build and sustain business development.

Differentiating Between Useful and Useless Content

Useless content is rehashed content that is the same old blah blah blah shared from competitor to competitor. So much of it sounds like some boring grade school teacher reciting laundry lists of facts and caveats and advice in a monotone. If your content does not grab your visitor and wake them up and get their attention, it is useless.

Useless content can also be all about the company written with the expectation that the web visitor is dazzled and impressed with your glittering reputation and exciting  intonation of your company virtues and high levels of experience and expertise that you like to talk about.

Useless content is all the stuff on a website that gets between the web visitor and the information that they are actually look for. This often starts with the usual carousel of images that lets the web designer appear to have worked his fingers to the bone. Website owners love these too, because they get to show off what is important to them. Always remember that effective websites are customer centric, not there to stroke the ego. I really dislike carousels.

Useful content is not the usual rehashed blah blah blah but is useful. It is not the writing exercise of english majors writing sentences on subjects they actually know nothing about, but the stories of people engaged in solving problems and creating solutions for customers.

And talking louder does not make boring information any more useful. More volume does not make boring information more impactful. More social media microphones just makes more noise. Extra tweets just make you harder to avoid. . Therefore there is great power is speaking useful information in a still small voice and earning the right to speak as early in the coming conflagration as you can.

Compelling and useful content requires the participation of experts, of sales people, of people in the front office who are dealing with people, their questions, their misunderstandings, their concerns. We describe the only reliable means to get great content here.

We discuss the actual content creation process here. Here is how great content can be created.

So why does useful content happen so seldom? 

This is a critical question, because some of you are going to see the light and decide to step out and be remarkable and you cannot step out and be remarkable unless you can identify what is happening now. We work through the process of how useless content is created here. Maybe you need to look this over and see if anything in particular sounds familiar.

 We talk about antidotes to the industrial brain here.

This is a critical battle for leadership to win. Leadership must be engaged in a strategic content creation system to make content truly effective. It is not something to be left to vendors, or contractors, or the whims of whomever.

Useful content is the only kind of content worth having. Stop and think. Easy brainfart content is a waste of time and it perpetuates the same waste into the future.

Here are some related posts addressing issues surrounding useful content. Understanding the Role of Feedback in Creating Great Content Great Content Matches the Intent of the Web Visitor Strategic Content is Critically Important in Dollars and Cents

OK, who has a thought here? Who have I offended? Feel free to set me straight.

There is no more Worthless Website Feature than a Carousel

I consider the image carousel that is a common feature on most service company websites as the most intrusive website component interfering with the efforts of your web visitor to find the information that they are actually look for.

People come to your website with a particular intention. They usually have a question. This is the earliest stage of the buying cycle. And the first thing they see is a big carousel that fills they entire view port of their desktop; we won't even mention the small screen "whack a mole" effect as the screen starts exchanging out images.

People want an answer to their question. They do not want to sit through your slideshow to figure out if what you are so eager to show off has anything to do with their quest.

Now carousels are popular because the people who pay for websites are not actually using the website and are all excited to show off what they think is important. And the web designer gets to appear as if he has worked his fingers to the bone, by making something twinkly.

Carousels create all kinds of dismal effects for your website.

So a good share of web visitors hit the back button and return to the search engine where they figure the perfect answer is at the next click.  So, what is the result of this quick return to Google?

Well, google notes that their searcher did not get much help from your content and bounced back and the result  is that your page  is denigrated with google as useful to Google's clientele, and I guarantee Google cares about their users.

Now some of your web visitors are intrepid and so they find something promising to click on and the next page, looks exactly the same! Is the site broken? Oh, no they quickly figure  out that the carousel is still here filling the view port and they get to scroll down to actually find real information around the carousel.

The carousel  is a disaster and serves no useful purpose. 

You don't have to take my word as truth on carousels, here is another opinion. This is great. Jared W. Smith doesn't really like them either. http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/  He has his own set of reasons.

Is there a place for a carousel?

Maybe, if you are offering a smorgasbord of entertainment and your visitor is perusing your offerings.  If you are doing this, you are on the wrong website.

The purpose of this website is carrying on a dialogue with smart small business owners who are in a service business, or maybe you are a small manufacturer. None of you should be  or are in the entertainment business.

If people are coming to your site for information, to check you out from a referral, or figuring out if they can trust you, a carousel is a bit of hubris that stands in the way of your web visitor finding value on your site. You are expecting them to patiently wait while your carousel takes them on your flight of fancy rather than helping them with their quest.
And you are losing web visitors. And maybe your referrals are wandering off.

Content strategy is serious business. It helps you create new customers. When the strategy works. Bad design issues don't help.

Anybody want to defend carousels?