Stay clear of a flash in the pan
When you first opened your business doors, you probably had plenty of clients to keep you busy in the first few months or even couple of years. Like most firms, your first clients were probably family, friends, and even neighbours. Soon they were telling their family, friends, and neighbours and you had a fairly steady stream of clients.
However, at some point, business started to slow down as your immediate network dried out. And then you realised that you may have to start marketing your firm to attract fresh leads. One way that many firms have found to be a useful marketing, as well as educational, tool is blogging. It’s an effective way to share your firm’s unique perspective and draw your team to participate in creating your marketing resources.
People are always searching for articles to simplify the complexities of the industry. So, blogging has become a natural resource.
Blogging allows you a huge opportunity to showcase your expertise, insight, and perspective. And by choosing the right topics, keywords, and focusing on quality, potential clients can find you when they search for solutions to problems you may have blogged about.
However, results won’t happen overnight. You’re not going to wake up the morning after publishing a blog piece you’re especially proud of to hundreds of email enquiries or voicemails asking about your services. Remember that results take time.
Blog to focus on consistent and targeted efforts
You don’t have to blog every day, but you do have to be active enough to remind your current clients you’re still there. A blog that’s been inactive for too many months or years may lead people to believe you’re no longer in business. And it lets down your readers who look forward to consuming your content. Also, regular blogging allows you to stay active across other channels as a newly published blog gives you something to promote on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Establish a guideline to help you manage consistency. Don’t scale back just because there’s a sudden boost in enquiries or give up so easily on a paid ad before it’s had time to reach its potential. Stick to a blog schedule that keeps you relevant and a reliable source of quality content.
Re-use of information, replicate to remind
Many firms don’t realise just how time-consuming content creation is. If you don’t always have the time to create content from scratch, leverage marketing resources that you already have.
Revisit a blog post that did particularly well or find creative ways to reinvent it. You never know, but its reformatted version may even perform better than it did the first time.
Reformat what you already have for different mediums. Turn a successful webinar into video tutorials; take an old blog post and turn it into a how-to guide; turn a slideshow into an infographic; start tweeting statistics from a blog post on statistics.
When you repurpose with purpose, you’re not just retaining your profile, but ultimately, you save time and money.
Results demand patience and consistency. You can’t give up so quickly when your efforts aren’t yielding results as fast as you hoped. Maintain that front of mind perspective and remember that results won’t happen overnight.
When it comes to blogging, remember that there’s plenty of creative ways to use what you already have. And by reinventing your star blog pieces, they never have to just be “one hit wonders.”