As a business trying to gain new customers is a challenge. Then most of us are competing with bigger companies that have the resources to develop multi-million dollar ad campaigns that are viral, creative, and “sexy”. All of which are great on occasion. Instead a new trend for small businesses is to become more helpful than their larger competitors.
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Helpful?
I say helpful only for the fact that information is plentiful, but finding the correct information is where the problem is. Take Google’s search engine for an example. In quarter four in 2013, Google spent a more than a billion dollars on infrastructure, for their data centers and storage to provide the absolute best and most relevant results for their search engine. Google knows that its search engine is the main source of information for users today. Getting your business in those results is difficult. This is where helpful comes into play. If you are going out and sharing your knowledge and expertise on your business, lets say mortgages, then people searching for mortgages are more likely to have two things happen; One would be they would find you in the massive amounts of other websites claiming to offer similar products. Two they would have a better understanding and trust with you and your business because it was easy to find the information they were looking for in one place. The more difficult content is to track down the less likely you are to convert that user from a information gatherer to a client. After all we are the experts in the business we are in.
Turning from marketing to journalism
Although posting articles to commonly asked questions is one thing, but almost everyone does it. How many times do you get contacted and the potential client says I just have one quick question? Probably more than you’d like to say. The best route to take when determining what to write about or why you’re even writing in the first place is to determine the answer you want to talk about then cover the 5 Ws — who, what, where, when, and why. The how combines all the Ws into a nicely formatted article that will answer those questions that are the random obscure questions or even just finding an answer to a common question that needed a little more explanation.
“But journalism sounds like a lot of work.”
You’re right, it can be. The main thing you want to discuss in your article is the how; How does this affect me (the client). That’s really what the client wants to know right? How much will this cost me?
After all, we all want to help each other in our core. Get out there and help someone!
