You don’t need a marketing degree from Western University to understand that content rules the modern marketing landscape.
What you’re reading is content. Scrolling through Instagram or TikTok? Content. Memes your grandma sends you through email?
All of it is content.
In this guide, we’re going to teach you how to make killer content that will bring more Londoners to your website and help you grow your business.
Why you should generate content for your London, ON business
Digital marketing and content go hand in hand. Want to promote your London, ON business online? You’ll need content.
That’s the most high-level answer for why content creation is valuable, but we can get a little more granular.
When creating content, who is your target audience? Are you building content to use on your social media pages, or are you mainly trying to improve your ranking on search engines?
Here’s the magic of great content—it can be used across multiple platforms, cross-promoted, and reposted. From online advertising to email marketing, content can be used everywhere.
High-quality content can help your London business generate more leads, increase customer retention, improve your brand’s image, bolster your SEO efforts, and more. Content marketing costs less than traditional marketing, too.
To maximize the benefits of your content—whether it’s built for your site or for your social media channels—you need more than just killer copy—you need a content strategy. The rest of this article will help you develop just that.
The types of content you’ll need
You can divide most of your content creation efforts into two categories: Content that’s relevant to your industry and content that’s relevant to Londoners—or to any markets around London you do business in.
All of your content needs to be uniquely useful—you’ve got to provide your potential customers with information, entertainment, and insight that they wouldn’t find anywhere else.
That’s a tall order, but it’s what you’ll need to stand out from the competition.
Start by thinking about what makes your business unique in the first place. Are there processes you can explain? Employees you can highlight? A sense of humour that no one else in your industry seems to have?
Use those features to your advantage when brainstorming content. People want to know what your brand is all about! Show them.
You’ll also want to diversify your content. Photos for Instagram! Written content for your blogs! Videos for YouTube! By creating content that your London business can use across all platforms, you’ll increase your reach.
Want to improve your digital marketing strategy? Learn to use content synergistically (a bit of a buzzword, we know). Embed videos into your blog. Learn about image optimization, and include images in your blog. Promote your blogs in your Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn posts.
One of your goals should be to drive traffic to your website and leverage your content to move up the search engine ranks. This won’t happen unless you have a good deal of content hosted on your site.
Remember that social media content can be used to promote blog content and vice versa. Linking between platforms is one of the easiest ways to promote your content.
Keywords you should include
To maximize the advantages of content creation for SEO, you need to target keywords that are relevant to your industry and your location.
The first step to doing this is keyword research; you need to find the keywords that have a high enough search volume and that align with your business goals. Growing brand awareness? Increasing customer acquisition? There’s a keyword for almost any goal you might have.
We highly recommend targeting what are known as service in location (SIL) keywords—things like “restaurant in London” or “massage therapist in Westmount”. A service you offer + a place you offer the service—simple stuff!
Never keyword stuff—well-written content should organically contain most of (if not all) the keywords you’d want to aim for. Use keywords to guide your content creation, then let well-researched, unique content do its thing.
Choose to focus on the keywords your customers care about, then build compelling content around those keywords—your customers will take full advantage of this new way to engage with your business.
Picking hashtags for social media content is also important—target keywords for blog content and hashtags for social media content!
How you can generate content
You’ll want to avoid taking a shot-in-the-dark approach to content creation; a top-down content strategy is what you’ll need.
Broadly, there are two approaches to content creation: Make it yourself or get someone else to handle content creation for you. Both approaches have their advantages.
The make-it-yourself approach works because you know your industry and you know London.
You know your brand and your customers. You’ve got a great base upon which to start building content.
There are a number of questions you should ask yourself before taking that plunge, however. Do you know what kinds of content perform well on different platforms? How about how content performs for different keywords? Have you ever created a digital marketing content strategy? How much do you know about social media marketing and SEO?
How good are you at writing content and making videos?
Some of you will answer these questions and decide that the time and effort it will take to make content in-house is well worth it.
Everyone else will need to partner with a content agency like us. We’ll help you save time by generating content for you and increase your sales by generating content that’s proven to perform.
The fact that you’re reading this is proof of our success.
We know the market in London. We’ve got a team of all-Canadian writers who work in-house; your content will never be outsourced.
Best of all, we’re also masters of London SEO.
Take the guesswork out of content creation. Partner with First Rank today!
firstrank.ca
