It’s a common challenge. The content team at US headquarters pumps out volumes of great content, and the US or global marketing director doesn’t understand why you want to engage an Australian content marketing agency to create localised content. Can’t you just tweak it? Maybe, you reply cautiously. Some pieces of content can be easily touched up for an Australian audience. Other pieces will have so many issues you don’t know where to begin – or how to explain the problem to someone who might not understand how delightfully different we are Down Under. Aside from the Australian English versus American English issue, there are other factors that come into play, like differences in buyer motivation, cultural attitudes and the suitability of examples used in American content. Here’s a handy guide to help you identify the issues involved, or perhaps to more easily explain the scale of the content localisation problem to US HQ! How are we different? Let us count the ways: Spelling – American English vs Australian English Back in the 18th century, English spelling was somewhat inconsistent. Two influential chaps decided to put an end to that, and each published a dictionary. Unfortunately, they were different. The English began to favour one dictionary, but Americans favored the other, so now we have inconsistency on a global scale. Australia followed the English, as we often do. A few examples: OUR (AU) versus OR (US): Our Aussie humour can be a little colourful. We’re sure American humor can be colorful too, even if we don’t find all of it funny. ISE (AU) versus IZE (US): That wouldn’t stop...
Would you like to create the kind of content that draws in a crowd, generates engagement and results in new connections and opportunities? Of course you would! But how do you go about it? When you want to be a champion, one of the best things to do is to look to the real champions, and check out what they do and how they do it. Naturally you don’t want to plagiarise, but imitation is the greatest form of flattery after all, and there’s nothing wrong with picking up a few tips from the high flyers! CEOs who pull this off really well often have these things in common: They courageously tell it like it is – or at least how they see it. They use descriptive language to tell stories that people can relate to. They are generous in sharing their thoughts, ideas and experiences without asking for anything in return. They bring their personality with them so that you get a glimpse of it through their posts. To demonstrate, let’s turn to LinkedIn Pulse and look at three very different business owners who do this well, each in their own way – Mark Bouris, Moby Siddique, and Thang Ngo. Before we dive in, let me point out that Moby and Thang don’t yet have massive followings on Pulse, but they’re on the way with over 1200 and 1700 followers respectively, and if they continue to publish content with heart, (and in Moby’s case a little more often!) their followings are likely to grow substantially. As you might expect, with the advantage of being well known, Mark Bouris...
Heading into the New Year with a resolution to step up your marketing efforts? If you didn’t get the results you wanted in 2016, here’s a quick checklist you can use to identify weak spots in your content marketing. Assuming you’ve made some effort to publish content during 2016, here are the four top mistakes we see that diminish the results: 1. Putting Little Effort into Content Creation With so much content online, if you’re not making a big effort to create content that hits home with your audience, you might be wasting your time creating content at all. Short shallow articles that state the obvious won’t hold audience attention even if a catchy headline entices people to click through to read it. And what’s the point of attracting visitors to your website or LinkedIn article if they’re going to roll their eyes and click the back button? The bad news: good content takes time and effort to create. The good news: even one or two excellent articles a month, properly promoted on social channels, can increase your audience, and help you connect with prospective clients. If your team can’t devote the time, there are content writing services who will be happy to help! 2. Failing to promote content on social media Many business owners believe that simply publishing regularly on their blog will drive additional traffic to their websites and deliver extra business. If you undertake your keyword research and publish well optimised posts, you might indeed garner some extra traffic to your website. But you’ll bring in more if you’re drawing people’s attention to your content via social...
Having recently written about the content creation processes that agencies need to produce quality blog content for their clients, I realised that many business owners would benefit by understanding some of those processes too. It’s likely there’s much more to it than you thought, so here are some of our relevant processes. Most will be relevant to you whether you’re creating your content in-house or outsourcing the task to professional content writers. Defining your audience It’s the first hurdle, and many fall here. It’s often because the business concerned has more than one target market and so they either create content that attempts to address both, or they only think to address one audience, which may or may not be the one that brings in the most revenue. The audience split might be something like residential/commercial,direct client/agency, or business/individual, or it could be split across industries, sectors, or even age groups or other personal factors. The split usually means that your audience groups have slightly different interests, and different factors that will motivate their purchase decisions. It stands to reason that you need to understand the interests and motivating factors for each important audience group, and tailor content that speaks well to that audience. When you create one-size-fits-all content, you risk not capturing anyone’s interest. Creating buyer personas can be a very helpful exercise. Understanding the steps of their buyers’ journey The ‘buyers journey’ might sound like marketing speak, but not taking it into consideration can also result in creating content that doesn’t appeal. But if you’ve been in business for a while, it’s likely you’ll be able to...
As a content marketing tool, blogging can be very good for just about any type or size of business. Business blogging can help you to better connect with your customers, to provide them with valuable information on a topic, and to inject fresh content into your website. However, while just about anyone can write a few paragraphs on a topic, successful blogging involves a great deal more than that. Business blogging must be planned well, done wisely, and provide real value to target audiences. MORE: Choosing the Best Channels for Promoting Business Content In the sections below we cover some of the benefits of blogging, and provide tips on how to blog successfully. Keep in mind that if you don’t have blog writers on your in-house team, it’s possible to engage a professional business blog writing service. 7 Benefits of business blogging Creates fresh content: Search engines make a point of giving preference to quality websites that show signs of being active. This means that while you are not likely to update or change your web pages very often, blogging can give you the opportunity to regularly inject new, relevant content on your site and create new pages for search engine indexing and ranking. This can help to increase the likelihood of your content showing up in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) than if your website was just left to go ‘stale’. Better connect with customers: Blogging allows you to create content that offers value to your target audiences and customers, and to connect with them by allowing comments, interaction and feedback. Provides opportunities for sharing and promotion: Your blogs can...
Blogging is easy. Doing it in a way that gets results is trickier. If you’ve wasted time or money creating blog content that isn’t yielding results for your business, it’s likely due to a simple gap in your understanding of the art (and science) of business blogging. Here are some fundamentals that could shed some light on why your current approach isn’t working. Cut your own path. Don’t assume that your competitors who publish frequently are getting it right and try to imitate their strategy. Only a tiny percentage of them are likely to be achieving significant results. Learn how to excel – the rewards really are there for the taking. The content bar is much higher than most people think it is. Informative style articles on your blog offering a few basic tips might seem perfectly acceptable in terms of quality, but in reality it’s mediocre to poor in its capacity to generate engagement and leads. If you want outstanding results, your blog writers need to be producing outstanding content – the type of content that’s so amazingly useful to your target audience that some will share it with their contacts and colleagues. It also needs to be a ‘good read’ in terms of structure, pace and flow. Publish and promote. Posting an article on your blog and hoping people find it while searching for information on that topic might bring you some site visitors, but you’ll be missing the bigger opportunity. You need to promote the article by linking to it from your social media accounts, and using an update teaser that’s good enough to compel people...
