Finding the Right Balance between Entertainment, Information and Promotional Content
With the emphasis of the search engines shifting to relevancy the focus of online marketers has moved to creating quality content that will engage the reader. Creating relevant content has more benefits than just an improvement in your SEO and in a way the development of the search engine algorithms to return more readable pages in the SERPs is a reflection of how people are using the internet now. The rise of Web 2.0 sites across the social media spectrum has made users look online for their relationships, including professional ones and they now expect more engagement from a website.
The desire to take advantage of this networking opportunity is the motive that is largely behind the development of company blogs in recent years. The first businesses to engage their customers in this way had little or no competition but now that has changed and to be successful with your online content it must find the right balance between three elements. It must be entertaining enough to hold your readers, it should provide some valuable information or insight and it must still have room for your sales pitch.
Determining the right balance for your business will depend mostly on the type of business that you are promoting. A nightclub can use more entertaining copy with lots of pictures, gossip from recent events and can be fairly bold with their sales pitches whereas an accountancy firm would be light on levity and include more information about finances that their customers would find helpful while the sales pitch would take a more subtle, suggestive form.
Being entertaining in your online content can take many forms and can be a natural segue to introducing the information that you want to make the focus of your sales pitch. Relating amusing experiences that have had good customer outcomes can be an entertaining way of introducing other customers with the same problems to your solution. Most re-tweeted links are some sort of interesting fact or story and the sort of content that most people will enjoy will point out a new perspective or illustrate a commonly shared situation. Using inside jokes that only industry insiders will get is rarely suitable for promotional content and it goes without saying that anything remotely offensive should be avoided at all costs.
As much fun as it can be to blog about your business niche it is also important that you get your message across or else your efforts will never convert to sales. Keep the information in bite sized lengths so that it isn’t a long and involved process to get the point. If it takes longer than 3-5 minutes to get through the information in your internet copy then it may be worth breaking it up into a series of posts that lead the reader through it more gradually. This will also create interest as people wait for the next installment from your blog. The information should generally underline your knowledge on the subject and give the reader the confidence to trust you with their business.
Finally, don’t forget to include the actual promotion that you are pushing in the post and make sure that there is a clear call to action to promote the engagement that leads to sales conversions. Often the most informative posts don’t even need much of a sales pitch to generate sales but if you leave it out your readers may never even know that you are selling something. Content that combines these three elements along with eye catching web design will develop good SEO for your company website it will grow your base of organic followers that use your products because they can engage with your company online.
