by Mark Bloom | Feb 22, 2014 | Content Marketing
Personas Help You Write to a Specific Target
Whenever you write anything, the most important questions to ask yourself, before you begin, is:
Who am I writing this for? Who am I trying to reach?”
Regardless what you are writing, whether it’s a blog post, a brochure, a script, or even an email, you must answer these questions before you start typing. Your answers will determine:
- The language you use
- The approach you take
- The tone of your writing
Without the answers, you’ll likely miss your mark and not connect with your target audience. You’ll be wasting your time.
Imagining Your Audience
That’s where a persona can be useful. A persona is an imagined conglomerate of what your audience might look like. It takes some research, but ultimately, creating a persona can help you target your business communications more effectively: marketing, advertising, websites, etc. Its return on investment, if you think in those terms, is astronomical.
Here’s a primer on how to create a persona (or a series of personas) for your company.
Creating a Persona
After you’ve done your research, you should have a pretty good idea of the people you need to target for your business. In other words, you should know the demographic you’re marketing to. It might be women aged 45–60. It might teenagers in affluent neighborhoods. It might be avid bicycle riders.
The trick to creating a persona is to personify your target demographic into one or two imaginary people — people with names, characteristics, jobs, families, hobbies, and possessions. Provide as much detail as possible. What are the names of the person’s children? What is he/she making for dinner tonight? No detail is too insignificant. Include a photo or drawing of that person.
If your target market is wide enough, create a second, complimentary persona. Make sure this second persona is distinct enough from the first to be useful, even if they share certain attributes such as their income brackets.
For example, Pete is a 35-year-old computer scientist who sits in a chair all week. He keeps in shape by riding his bicycle on weekends. He earns $52,000 a year, has two young children, Joseph and Shelby, and a dog named Hank. He loves his bike and spends time cleaning the tires and tightening the gears after each ride. He belongs to a cycling club that organizes regular group rides. They also do fundraisers for local charities.
Employing Your Persona
When you’ve finished your persona, print it out or copy it onto large sheets of paper. Put it up on the wall. This is the person or these are the people you’re writing to. These are the human beings you’re trying to reach. Respect them. Respect their time. Offer them value. Get their attention.
Determine what they need before you start writing. What is it that you have that would interest them? Why indeed should they buy your product or service? If you can find persuasive arguments to sell to your personas, you’ll have persuasive arguments for the people they represent out there in the real world.
At Ray Access, we believe in doing the research for finding the market you’re trying to reach. We don’t start writing until we know who we’re writing for. You should do the same.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
by Mark Bloom | Jan 12, 2014 | Content Marketing
Website Trends to Watch in the Coming Year
Like we’ve always said: it’s no longer enough to have a website. Everyone and her brother have websites. To gain a competitive advantage, you now need an active website. If your website isn’t offering useful information to your clients and potential clients, it’s not reaching them.
Your website should be doing marketing work for you, attracting readers who turn into customers. If your website isn’t part of your marketing budget, with a constant investment, then you’ve wasted the money you’ve already spent on the site. It has to stay active to be effective.
Adding Content Isn’t Enough
In the past, we’ve said time and again that you need to keep adding to your website — such as with regular blog posts — to keep attracting readers to your business. The newest trend, however, suggests that simply adding content isn’t enough. You have to add useful content.
Useful content means answers to your clients’ questions. It means tips that can help your customers make better, more informed decisions. Your website content, as well as your blog post topics, should focus less on you and your company and more on your customers. Delivering useful content will help you stand out from your competition and pique the interest of search engines.
“Content Marketing” Is the New Buzzword Phrase
Search engines are refining how they rank pages. If you can deliver quality content, your site will be recognized, both by human readers and robotic search engines. Quality in 2014 will trump quantity.
Keywords will remain important, but if they are forced into the text unnaturally, Google and other search engines may penalize you. Instead, deliver clear, readable English that assists the people who are seeking solutions. Help these people, and they may become loyal customers.
Building Your Reputation, One Page at a Time
As you add useful information to your website, you are building value. That value will gain an audience, which will simultaneously build your company’s online reputation. If you are offering content that’s interesting, provocative, timely, and — most importantly — useful, then you are building value into your website.
Value, over the long haul, increases your online presence and your website page rank. Useful content delivered consistently over time ultimately translates into authority. So if you want to be seen as the authority in your field, your active website is the perfect vehicle to achieve that goal.
Quality Content Equals Good Marketing
To get ahead in 2014, think of your website as a marketing tool. Budget accordingly. If you don’t have the personnel to devote to this effort, outsource it. Ray Access specializes in content marketing. Let us turn your website into a marketing engine. You could say your company’s reputation depends on it.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
by Mark Bloom | Nov 29, 2013 | Content Marketing
And Is Content Still the Way to SEO Results?
Back in February, on Mark’s birthday no less, we published a blog post pronouncing that Content Is King. Here we are, some 10 months later, and we have to ask the question: Is content still king (or queen) when it comes to SEO and best practices for your website?
Our initial response is: Yes, of course content still rules the roost. After all, it’s content that draws readers to your website. It’s content that delivers SEO keywords. It’s content — useful, valuable information — that makes any site worthwhile.
We’ve always said that quality content is what will win the SEO wars, that Google and other search engines will eventually figure out how to recognize useful information from keyword-loaded crap. That’s still in the future, apparently.
Content Is Evolving
The definition of content is changing. Infographics are the current rage. Video is getting a lot of attention these days. Where does this leave the lonely word?
Words will never disappear. They are the foundation of language, even online. Infographics need words. Videos need scripts. And how often do you look for the pop-up “tooltips” that explain exactly what that little button or icon means?
The concept of content may change, but the goal has always been the same: to provide useful information people will want to read or watch and then share. If your content doesn’t reach that goal, then I don’t care how much SEO you’re buying, your website isn’t working.
Rethinking SEO
We came across an interesting article from CopyPress.com that talks about this idea. Basically, the article says:
To be good at SEO, you need to stop thinking about SEO.
In other words, the goal of SEO is to get beyond it. A local SEO expert told me once his idea of SEO was “creating community.” Not much about keywords in that sentence.
So, when you’re ready to treat SEO as a means to an end instead of as an end unto itself, contact us.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
by Mark Bloom | Sep 5, 2013 | Content Marketing
How Your Business Website Can Generate Cash
An earlier article by a content marketing firm revealed that the fastest growing companies get at least 40 percent of their leads from online marketing. That’s impressive enough, but the tactics of online marketing are so common sense these days that it’s a wonder everyone isn’t doing it.
Your Website Can Work for You
The most obvious online marketing strategy is using your website to attract potential customers and to reach out into the Internet to actively find potential customers. How can this work? Here’s a football analogy:
If a team has the fastest wide receiver in the game, that’s a tactical advantage. If the quarterback never throws to that receiver, however, the team has lost any tactical advantage and might be better off without that super fast receiver, who probably cost them a lot of money.
Your business website is just like that super fast receiver. You can have the slickest site in the world, but if you don’t use it properly to gain a tactical advantage, you might as well post a single page with your phone number on it. That site probably cost you a lot of money that you are now wasting.
To get the benefit of any website, whether it’s a super fast receiver or a third-and-long specialist, you need to make it active. An active site attracts the very people who are looking for your business. Those people are potential customers. It’s that simple.
How do you make a site active? Again, the simple answer is to keep it fresh. An active blog adds content to your website weekly. Adding information and changing content on other pages — even your About Us page — keeps the search engines busy re-indexing your site while moving your site up the page rankings.
Don’t Forget the Other Obvious Strategy
The other obvious online marketing strategy is SEO. SEO, in case you’ve been under a rock since 1999, stands for Search Engine Optimization. This strategy involves making each page of your website a clear destination for a specific question. Everything from the copy to the photos to the title should all say the same thing: what the page is about.
Keywords play a large role in SEO, but too many can backfire. Keyword placement on the page is important, but again, consistency is the real key. A content provider (gee, like us) can rewrite your website content to be SEO-friendly as well as human-friendly. It’s a win-win.
Hence Our Motto
We truly believe these strategies can increase traffic to your website without breaking your budget. It led us to our motto, which is: “If you’re ignoring your website, it’s likely ignoring you.” We mean it, too. Keep your site active and updated, and your company will benefit. Remember, according to CopyPress.com, the fastest growing companies get 40 percent of their leads online. What’s your percentage?
So when you want to use your website to grow your business, we can help.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
by Elle Ray | Aug 4, 2013 | Press Releases
Breaking News about Online Press Releases
Some time ago, we blogged about press releases, since we have experience writing them. We said that press releases had to contain real news and be directed at the right audience. We said that over time, these press releases have value.
Well, that was then — this is now.
We learned recently that in the new Google paradigm, links in an online press releases hold no SEO value. None. Zip. Nada. So if you’re writing a press release and sending it out online, you should not expect a bump in the page ranking of your website, even if you placed links in the release that point back to you.
Is a Press Release Useless Then?
Here’s the interesting thing. While an online press release by itself has no value, the content of the release has as much value as it’s ever had.
How can that be, you may ask? Simple, as SEO expert Matt Cutts once summarized:
So the link from a press release will probably not count, but if that press release convinces an editor or a reporter to write a story about it… then if that newspaper links to your website as a result of that… it doesn’t matter whether it started or was sparked by a press release or it was started by an email that you sent.”
It’s Press Release Content That Matters
Press releases today are really just meant to provide a lead for someone in the media to pick up and run with. If your press release can inspire that kind of response, then it’s done its job.
If the reporter sites your company or its website in the article, that link, ladies and gentlemen, has tremendous value in SEO. Depending on the reach of the media outlet that writes and distributes the story, that link can drive all kinds of traffic to your site. It’s the ultimate in marketing: an independent third party writing about your company. And it all might start from a press release.
Long Live Press Releases!
So the press release isn’t dead. It isn’t a waste of time and money. But — and it’s a big “but” — the press release has to matter to its audience… and that audience is always the media. It has to contain significant news. And it has to be well written.
The team at Ray Access is constantly on the lookout for trends and tools in the world of online writing. When we find something of interest, we don’t hoard it for ourselves; we share it with you. Because you have a right to know.
We realize you can choose anyone to write your online content, whether it’s press releases, blog posts, or even your website text. You’ve probably know someone whose nephew writes pretty well and works for beer money. That’s fine, but remember you get what you pay for. When you want quality, professional work, writing that is effective and gets you attention, you need the pros. You need us. For more advice about our services, contact us today.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
by Mark Bloom | Jun 28, 2013 | Content Marketing
Ray Access and Search Engine Optimization
First, let us state that we are not in the SEO business. Our core business, however — writing blog posts, press releases, and especially website copy — can directly effect a website’s page rank. The problem for many online marketing professionals, SEO firms included, is that Google continues to tweak its algorithms for what it values … and what it punishes.
Past SEO Practices
It used to be that you could load up on backlinks — essentially, links back to your site from other sites, reputable or not — and enjoy a high page rank. No more. So here are some SEO tips. As CopyPress.com recommends, “create a compelling site (i.e., engaging content)” and “use social platforms to increase [your] visibility organically.”
At Ray Access, we see the new paradigm as a positive development. What is SEO after all except the process of positioning truly useful websites at the top of applicable search results? Google wants you to use its search engine, and so it works hard (too hard, say some) to deliver useful results every time.
Creating a Compelling Site
Again, advice from CopyPress.com, so you know it’s not just us making things up:
With so much content created everyday online, it’s not enough for a company to mass-produce dull copy and then push it heavily on every social site with a heavy paid social campaign. If you’re satisfied with a quick spike in your social traffic that will disappear as soon as your budget does, then by all means you should continue.”
Indeed, as we’ve been saying since Day 1, quality content will eventually win the SEO wars. Quality content attracts both search engines and potential customers. Quality content — without tricks or hidden costs — increases your website’s page rank organically.
Increasing Your Visibility
How does quality content do all that? People online often want answers. If you can deliver those answers in your particular field, people will find you, learn to trust you, and share your content. Yes, Virginia, quality content has “shareability,” and it’s a trait every business wants.
“Shareability” means that your content can go viral. It increases your reach on social media outlets as well as in search engine results. “Shareability,” in other words, increases your website’s visibility. And it all starts with quality content.
To learn more about how your company can benefit from the kind of quality content that we develop at Ray Access, contact us. We’re always happy to discuss our passion: clear communication.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
