Web Content Strategies for Businesses

Posted in Marketing, SEO, Web Content on April 21st, 2010 by Angelina

Content is key to a business’ success online. Frequently changing, engaging content not only adds value to your website for your visitors but a dynamic site will always be favoured by search engines.

The goal is always to persuade visitors onto your site, but more importantly to convert those visitors into clients or customers. Engaging content can bolster your reputation and increase a potential customers’ trust in your brand, and ultimately leads to increasing conversion rates.

Many websites remain static for years, and it may be difficult to justify the expense to pay an agency to produce, upload and distribute content for a business. But if you’re considering handling the process in-house, knowing where to start, knowing what constitutes valuable content, knowing where to source it and knowing how to then distribute it can also be daunting.

The truth is businesses have been producing content potential customers are likely to find both relevant and interesting for years - they just haven’t realised how it may be leveraged online.

I’m going to take a look at some of the content you’ve probably already produced offline, consider some of the activities your company already undertakes which have the opportunity to yield valuable content and also look at how all this content may be housed online.

Re-purposing Old Content…

Newsletters

Whether sent by email or on good old paper, content from previous newsletters, with a few tweaks, is likely to still be relevant today and suitable for distributing online. Future newsletter content should find a place on your site within a news or articles section.

Corporate videos or photos

Upload them onto your site. Better still upload them onto You Tube or flickr.

Presentation Slideshows

Presentations made at seminars or industry events are often great additions to a website or can add value to your brand when uploaded to online content sharing sites like scribd.

Case Studies & Collateral

You may have case studies or pieces of research that have formed part of your printed marketing collateral or have had internal purposes. Consider how they may have value on your website or distributed off-site.

Leverage Existing Activities…

Also consider existing activities that may also have the potential to spawn relevant content.

Philanthropy

If you sponsor a charity tell everyone about it with an article on your website. If you’re raising some money or doing some work in your community shout about it and keep your visitors up to date with it all.

Industry News

Chances are you know exactly what’s going on the industry in which you work and the markets in which you operate. Have a dedicated news section on your site and, in addition to adding your new newsletter content, regularly add some industry commentary.

White Papers

Heavier weight content such as technical or business benefit white papers can be leveraged further to build contact databases by requesting an email address prior to providing access to the resource. Well written white papers not only reach your target market, they may also have the ability to influence them.

Trade Shows & Seminars

If you attend a trade show or conference make an effort to do some ‘live blogging’ – that is use your company blog as a platform to report and comment on what is happening.

Now go blog about this

Think about your staff

It’s likely that there are some amazingly talented people sat nearby with some expert subject knowledge. Utilise skill sets and get staff involved in all your content generation activities. If you have subject experts have them writing the occasional article for your website or guest blog posts for other sites.

Where am I going to put all this content?

Start with your company’s website. A company blog is a great place to present and archive content. WordPress can seamlessly integrate with your existing site and provide all the functionality you could need. In addition to a blog, try to incorporate a news section and article or video archive.

There is also a wealth of opportunities to expose your content to an even wider audience by distributing online. Videos can be posted to You Tube, slideshows to scribd, photos to flickr, good article and news content to free article sites.

While I’m not suggesting that content creation and distribution strategies should be central to all your employees daily schedules, consideration of how you can increase your interaction with potential customers online by providing them with engaging content both on and off your website should certainly be given some thought, especially if you don’t want those potential customers drifting off to your competitors site where they do.

There are just two things I would suggest bearing in mind. The first is to not duplicate your content all over the internet; it will only devalue it. The second, more importantly, is to carefully consider what content you do place online – one way or another it is likely to be there for a long time.

image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nightthree

2010 Mazda MX5 Championship – Rounds 1, 2 & 3

Posted in Announcements on April 14th, 2010 by Hannah

Brands Hatch saw the first three rounds of the Mazda MX5 Championship on 10th & 11th April and the series got off to a flying start.

The Gravytrain sponsored E3 Sport team (who of course include our MD Kevin Taylor as one of their number) did us proud in a fiercely competitive, packed grid.

In group one qualifying, Chloe finished an impressive 7th in her group, clocking in a time of 59.125 seconds. She was closely followed by Kevin in 11th with a time of 59.653 seconds.

In group two qualifying Jim Snr finished 14th with a time of 59.726 seconds and Jade finished 21st in 60.211 seconds.

And so to the race proper – Chloe put in an absolutely fantastic performance, finishing 12th; 8th & 10th – which places her 15th in the overall Championship standings. Stonking!

Jim Snr also put in a solid performance finishing 10th, 12th & 17th which places him 20th in the overall Championship standings.

Kevin's car after the 3rd Round... Ouch

Kevin had a bit of a torrid time – despite getting spun in the first round he recovered and managed to place 24th; it was a similar story in round two where after being bumped off he placed 24th again. In the third round he crashed out, this time failing to finish. This sees him placed 45th overall.

Likewise Jade suffered a similar fate – crashed out in round one, a puncture in round two, bad times. Fortunately round 3 saw things start to go her way as she finished 14th. This places her 49th overall.

Want to live it for yourself? Join Kevin in the driver’s seat in the second round by viewing the in car video footage below – watch out for the spin around 6 minutes 10 seconds…

Brands Hatch Race 2 – 10th April 2010 from Kevin Taylor on Vimeo.

So what’s next? Rounds 4 & 5 take place at Snetterton, Norfolk on 24th & 25th April - we can’t wait!

How well is Social Media being leveraged in the run up to the Election?

Posted in Social Media on April 9th, 2010 by Angelina

This morning I heard that the Electoral Commission and Democracy UK have teamed up so that every Facebook user in the UK will, from tomorrow, be asked if they are registered to vote, and offer the option to print a registration form. Then, on the way to the office, it was a ‘take a look at the website’ that stood out from the other political rants of campaigning candidates that prompted me to take a flyer from an independent candidate.

The aforementioned website had all the usual links to twitter, the candidates’ blog and YouTube videos, but was, in all honesty, nothing special.

It got me thinking, how well is social media being leveraged by the political parties in the run up to the election? At first glance you might think fairly well, we’re not talking Barack Obama well but, still, fairly well. Labour have their twitter czar and there are repeated reports in the media of how the conservatives have more fans than everyone else on facebook.

But taking a closer look they all seem to be missing the point. Labour’s ‘twitter czar’, Kerry McCarthy’s tweet at 5.28pm yesterday, “This may be the first tweet sent from the House of Lords! It’s prorogation… rather bizarre ceremony.”, isn’t exactly engaging. I’m guessing ‘prorogation’ means little to the voting public and, more importantly, even less to the non-voting public.

Is twitter being leveraged to maximum effect?

Many of the tweets from the Labour and Conservative read like childish, albeit eloquent, playground taunts; ‘The Tory economic strategy – tell someone it’s not true’ and ‘Labour have failed to stop children starting a life of crime. Most of those released from custody reoffend within a year’. That’s not to say twitter hasn’t created a great forum for political discussion but with a little thought and creativity that forum could have much greater reach.

Obama admitted last year that he had never used twitter but, aside from his ‘rockstar’ status drawing followers, with a constant stream of interesting narrative style tweets he clearly knows some people that do.

Before engaging in any social media activity we would always ask clients to think ‘why should people care?’ – if you are planning to leverage such social networking platforms you’ll need to appeal to the audience there, speak in their language, etc.

A brief look at the top three election contenders’ facebook pages is a bland experience. I’d suggest that only the most staunch party followers are likely to publicly become ‘fans’ of such lacklustre facebook pages. I often quote the likes of Dominos in reference to how to facebook can be used to effectively. Their pages are filled with interactive content that you want to share – I guarantee you will spend more time there than on the facebook pages of any of the political parties! If you disagree, pizza’s on me.

Marmite are perhaps a better example of how to leverage both social media and the current election in a way that engages an audience; follow the links from the Marmite News Network to take look.

At the end of the day it all comes back to content and the presentation thereof. More importantly, there has to be consideration for whom that content is intended and then ensuring it is both relevant and engaging for that audience. Political parties, you would imagine, should have a clear understanding of the audiences they are targeting and the media channels that engage those audiences.

But maybe they don’t or they would realise that the majority of young new voters are not going to be inclined to become twitter followers or facebook fans of their current offerings, much less diggers of ‘Sowing The Seeds of The Big Society’ or sharers of various campaign pledges.

Gravytrain to sponsor E3 Sport in the Mazda MX5 Championship

Posted in Announcements on April 2nd, 2010 by Hannah

Tuesday 30th March saw the launch of the Mazda MX5 Championship, the biggest single-make motor racing series in the UK. With 95 cars, over 100 drivers and over 160 hours of TV coverage via MotorsTV, Eurosport & ITV4 this series looks set to be a corker.

Here at Gravytrain we’re very excited as not only are we sponsoring one of the teams – E3 Sport; our MD Kevin Taylor will be racing too! Over the next few weeks we’ll also be launching a new website for E3 Sport, and managing their online presence.

Having briefly considered doing a 'Dukes of Hazard'; Kevin elects to enter the car the old fashioned way...

So, who are E3 Sport?

Bar Kevin, it’s a family affair. The team is managed by Jim Edwards Junior, who started racing back in 1985 in the Super Road Saloon series. Jim Junior is a former Elf Renault 5 GT Turbo champion, Renault Clio Cup champion and BTCC race winner.

Jim Edwards Senior (Jim Junior’s’ father) has come out of retirement to race again. He’s a seasoned pro – a former Formula 3 driver and the 1979 Renault 5TS champion.

Racing prowess certainly runs in the family, as he’s joined on the team by Jim Junior’s daughters Jade and Chloe.

Jade, 19 competed in the 2006 Ginetta Junior Championship, was one of only two female drivers to be awarded a Race Drivers Academy Scholarship; and won the Cosmo Magazine ‘Risk Taker of the Year’ award in 2006. Chloe, 21 has seen similar successes – most notably finishing 3rd in the 2008 Renault Clio Cup Scholarship.

Kevin Taylor’s also no stranger to the circuit having raced in 4 successive Renault 5TS Championships, finishing 3rd in 1995. He also finished 3rd in the 1996 VW Polo G40 Cup.

So understandably, we’re expecting big things from the E3 Sports team; the first round commences on 10th April and we can’t wait!

The track day launch was fantastic, and Kevin even took one of our clients for a spin – Mark Hare, MD of Bedford Insurance. Check out the video below:

When asked if he enjoyed the experience Mark said “I’ll be fine once I’ve changed my pants…”