Sazbean

Software Development Management

Main navigation

You are here: Home / Archives for content strategy

content strategy

/

eNewsletter Benefits

envelopetimmorganBy offering timely information of value, an email newsletter can be a great way to connect with your customers and business contacts to create an ongoing relationship.  Content is important to your Internet business strategy and eNewsletters give you another type of media to circulate your message.  Here are some of the other benefits of an eNewsletter:

  • Keep customers and business partners informed of new products and services.
  • Direct contact with people interested in your business.
  • Opportunity to build reputation and brand loyalty.
  • Ability to track customer interest via opens and clicks.
  • Reduces marketing efforts – can offer promotions directly to customers.
  • Collect customer research via surveys and responses.
  • Cost effective marketing and communication with a targeted audience.
  • Can schedule regular communications with customers – for anniversaries, birthdays, etc.
  • Offer information to help purchase decisions.
  • Followup on potential leads.
  • Reduce support costs via continuing product and service information.
  • Continue relationship with customers.

(photo by Tim Morgan @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

/

Are your FAQs Questions your Customers Actually Ask Frequently?

question-bastWhen was the last time you went to a website looking for some information about a product or service?  Did they have a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)?  Was the information you were looking for actually there?  A lot of times FAQs are only marketing driven – trying to cover any doubts a customer may have about purchasing a product.  But there is a real opportunity to provide useful information for your customers by providing answers to questions they actually ask frequently.

Obviously listening to your customers is one way to find out what types of questions they may have – and the best way –  support and sales people often are a good source within your company.  Another source of information is the search functionality on your website (if you have one).  What searches are people performing on your website?  Those may be the types of questions that are worthwhile to provide answers for (and make easy to find).

If you don’t have search on your website, or don’t have a good way to tell what people are searching for (both I would recommend remedying), take a look at the searches (keywords) that people use to come to your site from outside search engines.  This is information that the search engines feel you are good at answering, so it may be a good idea to make sure your answers are well rounded and provide all the information your customers (or potential customers) need.

The best source of FAQs really should be your customers.  Provide contact forms and periodically poll your customers (both in-person and online), to make sure you really do have all their frequently asked questions answered. By providing FAQs that your customers actually need, you’ll provide more support information for current customers and more purchasing information for potential customers.

(photo by -bast- @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

/

8 Places to Syndicate Your Business Content

broadcastsoundman1024Now that you understand RSS, you can use it to syndicate your content to other places on the Internet.  Part of your content strategy should be syndicating or publishing your content in multiple places online.  The more places you can use the same piece of content, the more return you’ll get for your effort. Here are some places to consider:

  1. Twitter – Using Twitterfeed you can automatically tweet the title and a link to any of your content (website, blog, delicious) that has a RSS feed.
  2. LinkedIn – LinkedIn has added the ability to add blog and twitter content (both of which have RSS feeds) right to your LinkedIn profile.
  3. FaceBook – There is a Twitter application that will send your tweets right to your Facebook page (as status updates) and with Notes you can have any RSS feeds show up as well.  If you create a page for your business, you can have your content show up there as well.
  4. BlogCatalog – A social network to connect with other bloggers, use your rss feeds to syndicate content from twitter, your blog, delicious, etc.
  5. MyBlogLog – Another social network to connect with other bloggers.
  6. FriendFeed – An easy way for your friends and connections to see all of your content from various sources in one place.
  7. Plaxo – A Business social network, you can syndicate content from your blog, twitter, etc. using your RSS feeds.
  8. Your Social Networks – Many social networks will allow you to add a feed to your content.  If not, consider copying and pasting your content to show up on your social networks.

The more places your content is, the higher chance you’ll be able to provide some useful information to a potential customer.  Keep in mind that your content needs to be useful to others – not just marketing or PR.

(photo by soundman1024 @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,