Writing content for your local market

Content Writing for Local Market

Wondering how to write content for your local market? If you’re mostly serving customers and clients within your city and you face lots of tough competition you need to strategically create content so that you can be easily found on the web.

While writing content for your local market you need to take care of the following:

You need to focus on the name of your city or all the surrounding cities you provide your product or service in
Focus on local landmarks. Landmarks are normally exclusive to particular cities. For instance, the statue of liberty is unique to the city of New York, if I’m not mistaken.
Focus on the local topics people can really relate to

While creating content for your local market you don’t always have to worry about your marketing pitch. Yes, of course people recognise you and your content by the business you represent, but in order to optimize your content for your local market and generate targeted traffic you need to write content (or get it written by a content writer) that talks about local issues either exclusively or in the context of your business.

Take for instance a fundraising marathon taking place in your area and one of the participants representing your business. You can publish a series of blog posts chronicling all the activities happening around the event, including how the person who will be representing your business is preparing for the big day. You can have video interviews. You can have photographs. You can compile a list of similar events organized in your city over the past 10 years, and so on. This will make you a part of the hubbub going on around you.

But you will have to make sure somewhere or the other your brand or your business is an integral part of your localised content marketing. Recently I came across a website that offers content writing services and it primarily concentrates on those clients who are specifically looking for content writers from India. In order to get content for almost everything related to India they have created a huge repository of articles and blog posts covering hundreds of topics. Although this might be getting tons of traffic to their website I’m not sure how much of this traffic actually converts. I am not against this strategy because if nothing else, thousands of people coming to your website everyday at least raises awareness. It’s just that you need lots of time and money to generate so much content.

Since content marketing can cost you money, you should focus on material that pushes your business interests forward instead of simply creating traffic. You can cover local events, local landmarks and other local news but make sure somehow they are related to your business.

Is content marketing the only marketing left?

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This is something Seth Godin said in one of the interviews he keeps giving on various Internet marketing forums, that content marketing is the only marketing left.

Many people tend to disagree, but they don’t get the import of the thing. They always equate content marketing with something that necessarily has to do with the Internet. Of course a major part of content marketing evolves on the Internet, but it goes beyond the realms of the world wide web.

Content marketing in its truest sense means two-way engagement. Unlike conventional advertising you are not simply broadcasting promotional messages using various channels (print magazines, newspapers, TV, radio and even some form of Internet advertising), you are actually trying to reach out to your target customers and clients. First with the arrival of the contemporary Internet and then with social networking and social media, the dynamics of how people consume content (information, education or advertising) have gone through a paradigm shift. It’s no longer about passively receiving messages. Now people immediately respond to those messages and also create their own messages.

This, is a big difference. People talk to businesses and they talk among themselves. Your business and your brand must be talked about in order to remain relevant. This can only be achieved by engaging content, and hence the relevance of content marketing.

Again, although I mostly deal with writing, content, it can be anything. It can be a video, and info-graphic, an audio, a presentation, a PDF file, your postings on social networking websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. It can be images and videos on Pinterest and YouTube.

The biggest reason why content marketing is the only marketing left is that people “search” on the Internet before doing business with you. People no longer buy your products and services after seeing your advertisements and flyers. They log onto their favourite search engine, and they search for your product name or your service name (and various other combinations involving your product name or your service name), and read and view information and opinions about it. If not their favourite search engine, then they use their favourite social networking website (most such websites like Twitter and Facebook are making search a big part of their offerings) to know what people are saying about your product or service.

Conventional marketing brings you brand awareness. Content marketing brings you brand involvement, and this is what you need in the current scenario. You want conversations to happen around your brand and business, and if possible, positive conversations. This happens when you create and promote content people can share, respond to or react to.

Content marketing also gives you an ability to measure various aspects of its effectiveness. Take for instance blogging. At a particular time, using analytics tools, you can easily find out how many people are reading your blog posts, from which geographic regions, at what particular time of the day, during which days of the week, etc. By actively engaging them in your comments section you can even get more information.

The same holds true for social networking websites like Facebook. The amount of information its analytics can give you is unparalleled.

Content marketing strategy for landscaping business

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Content Marketing Strategy for Landscaping Business

This year I have written content for more than four landscaping businesses so it will be safe to say that people in this particular industry realize the importance of targeted content writing and content marketing. So what should be your content marketing strategy if you want to promote your landscaping business?

In this business people are primarily influenced by the following:

Your experience/portfolio
The clients you have worked for
Personal recommendations
Visual collateral
Constant communication

If you don’t have a blog then you should definitely start a blog for your landscaping business website. A blog is not just a “trendy” thing to have: it is a top-notch communication channel. If this doesn’t motivate you, a regularly published blog can increase your search traffic easily by 100-200% within 3-4 months (it depends on the frequency and quality of your blog posts).

When we use the word “content marketing strategy” it means you are not simply going to publish content – you’re going to make sure that the content reaches the right audience and then it makes the right impact.

Not all your landscaping clients will be visiting your website. They will be on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on other blogs and websites or simply looking around for a similar service on various search engines. Your content marketing strategy involves using multiple channels as well as multiple content formats to reach your prospective clients. Since I provide textual content, this is my focus.

So in order to launch a content marketing strategy for your landscaping business you need to do the following if you haven’t already done so:

Start a blog under your own domain name (something like http://your-business-website.com/blog) and start publishing content on it on a regular basis. Focus on quality but also be regular. In the beginning it will help you if you can post everyday or at least thrice a week. The growth of your blog should be gradual. It’s not a good strategy to hire a writer in the Philippines, for instance, make him create 50 blog posts and then publish them in one go. In a day, publish just a single blog post.
Create Facebook and Twitter profiles and start interacting with people over there. Although this might sound like social networking but your content plays a vital role in creating a solid presence for you or your brand. People will recognize you on the basis of the content you regularly post under your profiles.
Carry out a content analysis of your business website. Are all the necessary pages there? Do you think all the information the client needs in order to make a decision in your favor is present on your website? Does it have testimonials and the FAQs section? Does it properly explain what sort of landscaping services you provide and what sort of material you use?
Set up an account with an email marketing service such as mailchimp. Permission-based marketing, although as old as the contemporary Internet, still rules the roost when it comes to reaching out to your target audience in the most effective manner. You will need high-quality content for your email marketing campaigns.

You must be wondering once you have established these channels (and many more) what you’re going to talk about. For instance, your blog. Of course you will be talking about landscaping. You can start by explaining the various aspects of how you carry out individual projects and what parameters you take into consideration. You can talk about various forms of landscaping, materials, methods and architectural conventions. Once you have started, the ideas begin to come on their own.

Remember that link building must be an integral part of your overall content marketing strategy. Google looks for quality websites and blogs that link back to you. So continuously create content people would like to link to as this will significantly improve your search engine rankings for your targeted keywords – primary, secondary and longtail.

The same holds true for your social networking and social media profiles. Keep in mind that search engines these days list social media content also. So be careful of what you are posting.

Why most of my clients are happy with my content writing work

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Blowing my own horn? It may seem like that but this is more of an active thinking and constantly keeping in mind what works when it comes to delivering services your customers and clients really appreciate, and not just appreciate, but also profit from them.

Professional content writing is not just writing; you’re helping a person do business. You’re helping the person make a living by making an impact. And you cannot make an impact out of thin air. You really need to know people you are addressing via your content. In order to write convincingly, primarily I try to gather the following bits of information:

What exactly is the product or service my client intends to promote
What are the benefits delivered by that product or service
Why his or her customers or clients should choose that service or product rather than something from his or her competitors
Who is the target audience – its educational and professional background, money spending abilities and age group
What are the catch words or phrases the client thinks his target customers and clients respond to
A targeted list of keywords, if possible, and if needed
What should be the style – formal, informal, hard sell or suggestive

This list can be as comprehensive as you want but more information may overwhelm your client and also distract you. Detailed content writing work such as case studies and white papers requires more in-depth knowledge of the demography of the market as well as why the product or service exists, but for normal business pages, this information is sufficient.

Once I have gathered all the information I start writing for my client as if I’m writing for my own business. If I’m writing for my own business, my primary concern would be to write in such a manner that more and more business comes to me. Not just traffic, but real business. Higher search engine rankings can definitely be a plus, but it is of no value if that traffic doesn’t convert. So conversion first, and then search engine friendly content.

So when I understand the needs of my clients and also the nuances and dynamics of their target customers and clients, and then write content for them as if I am writing it for my own business, I am able to deliver what the clients want.

My favorite content writing tool

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Early in the day I was reading somebody’s blog post in which she had listed 50 of her favorite blogging and content writing tools. Right now I cannot access the post because I’m writing this from my galaxy tab and not my computer.

But if you ask me what are my favorite blogging and content writing tools these days, I’ll simply say Google Docs, and nothing else. And even the too I keep my editor window maximized (F11) and toolbar disabled so that I have just the editing screen with my text.

In order to improve my focus and eliminate distractions I’m rapidly moving towards minimalism and this also means using less and less tools. After all what do I have to do? I have to write. Whether I’m writing for one of my clients or for myself, all I need is an ability to type without much fuss.

So when I’m away from my computer I use my 7-inch Android tablet and google drive and when I’m in front of my computer I use Google Docs. Other than these, at least for writing, I don’t use anything else.

Of course for publishing I use WordPress but that’s not a tool but a platform. In fact, even for my main content writing website I use WordPress as backend.

Oh, and I forgot to mention GetPocket that was previously known as “Read it Later” or something. I use it not only to read useful blog posts and articles on my tab but also to compile content writing ideas.