Attract Traffic with a Focused Blog Article (Matthew Stone)
Feb 8, 2010
Publicizing the things that makes your service or product different and better is only natural, right? Basing a promotional campaign around your product and service advantages should attract viewers to your web page and buyers to your place of business. Unfortunately, although many small enterprises provide significant market advantages to prospective customers, many businesses miss the fundamental points of promoting these advantages, particularly when engaged in article writing or blog posting. And without some plan or structure to guide the effort, these organizations may simply be wasting a good deal of time and money.
To help develop a fundamental promotional message, take a trip down Memory Lane back to Marketing 101 and recall that at least in the ancient business world, there are four central controllable marketing elements:
Product
Price
Promotion and
Place (location or point of distribution)
These elements usually came up on the first day in most business institutions, but even today, these provide a solid framework for building your blog articles and posts - especially as it applies to article content. Remembering that placing articles is an essential part of the internet placement and SEO/SEM strategy, carefully looking at these areas can help craft a useful message for future posts. Reconnecting with the "Four Ps of Marketing" may help focus your compositions and help attract prospective clients with new, useful and valuable information.
Discovering new topic ideas by looking at one's market message is a highly valuable exercise. New ideas or opportunities may be uncovered during the exercise. Look at each of the four market areas individually to fully understand the value you bring to the market in each area. Then simply make an outline of these ideas and build a blog posting schedule with one idea per article or post. This method will bring a general focus to your messaging strategy and will help potential customers understand the exact value of your service/product offering.
Product:
Most enterprises focus their marketing message in this area. Product features and service advantages are unique to each business. However, each manager should understand from current customers, exactly what the most valuable part of the product or service might be. Asking customers for this information frequently turns up valuable information.
In previous experience, a website owner that had noticed a great increase in traffic simply presumed that his product information caused more and more viewers to hit the site. In reviewing these viewers behavior though, it turned out that hitting the website to look for location telephone numbers was easier than going to a phone book. In this instance, some ancillary information - the location telephone numbers - turned out to be the single greatest value to the site. Had this business owner not asked his customers why they were using his site, he would have kept working to generate additional product features instead of working to make his locations more accessible by telephone.
Price
Cost or 'pricing' is of course hugely important in the buying decision. This decision however, should be examined in context. Businesses providing long term or durable goods should probably focus its message on emphasizing the long term "cost of ownership." It may result that even though one's product carries a lower purchase price, the overall cost of ownership is reduced because of shorter life expectancy of the product.
Right along with the central purchase price, other costs need to be figured in to determine the total "cost of acquisition." This cost includes all related shipping, finance and installation fees that would be required for the customer to receive the full value of the product or service.
Another area of interest for buyers is "Cost of Ownership." Products that require no upkeep or maintenance might justify increased purchase pricing if the customer can validate that cost savings will offset the purchase price over the longer term.
Promotion (consumer outreach, advertising and marketing)
Many webmasters erroneously believe that a website is for promotion alone. While internet marketing and advertising is useful and can attract new customers, most use the website to focus on product features. While this is hugely important, don't overlook other, more subtle benefits that your customers might find valuable.
Connecting with potential and current clients is another way to view the "Promotion" function. Delivering useful information to customers establishes your organization as a reliable and valuable partner.
Place
Acquiring the goods and services is actually a geographic question. Do you deliver your product, in which case the point of acquisition is the customer location, or does your customer need to visit your distribution point? Any advantage or convenience that you can offer potential customers makes good copy for a blog post or web article.
About the AuthorDenver SEO Consultants and author Matthew Stone assist companies improve sales using SEO..