The Benefits Of User-Generated Content

User generated content (UGC) is a form of content marketing that is produced by the customer rather than developed and paid for by the company itself. It can come in many forms, from product reviews, guest blogs and social media posts to videos, competition entries or question-and-answer forums. It’s a great way of getting your clients to participate in a dialogue and feel ‘part’ of your brand, but there are many other reasons why it makes sense to use UGC as part of your online marketing strategy.

Here are just some of its benefits:

Cost-Effective: Firstly, one of the best things about UGC, particularly if you are a small company with a very limited marketing budget, is that it is generally completely free. After all, creating your own content can be time-consuming and costly if you are paying for copywriters so it’s great to have this supplementary option to draw on. Not all companies can afford to employ full-time copywriters to keep updating their website, but it’s essential you keep your content fresh. Why not, then, encourage customers to create some of it for you?

Building Client Trust: Customers love to feel that their voices are being heard by the companies they buy from. What better way to do this than to invite them to engage in a dialogue with you via your website. Actively encouraging them to post their questions and comments on your forums, or asking them to give feedback on your social media posts are just two ways to do this. In addition to bulking up your website content, you will find that you are much more likely to hold onto your customers if they see you and your employees as real people who listen to their views and respond to them.

Understanding Clients: By getting clients to enter competitions, complete surveys or post queries you can gain a better understanding of their priorities. Once you’ve done this you can think about ways to improve your service and product offering to really leverage every opportunity you have to win a bigger market share.

Improving SEO: The more varied your website content, the more search engine indexing and search visibility you will get for target key phrases. In short, you should look upon UGC as an essential part of your SEO strategy (and as we all know by now, every company with an online presence should have one of these). Also, since your UGC will often be linked to your social networking accounts, it’s the perfect addition to any social SEO campaign.

How To Improve Your Online Content

Today, the content that appears about your company online is your calling card. To a great extent, it is this that helps you maintain a good reputation. But if the content isn’t right it can also have quite the opposite effect, which is why you should pay a lot of attention to it. Obviously you can’t control what others write about you, but you can control what goes on your website, social media pages and so on.

If your current content doesn’t seem to be doing its job effectively, then here are some strategies you can look into:

Functionality: First and foremost, strong website content is nothing if you haven’t first made sure that it’s easy for users to locate what they’re looking for. Therefore, keep your website simple and easy to navigate without. Also, remember that more than 40 per cent of web traffic comes from mobile devices today so make sure your content can be properly viewed across all platforms.

User Generated Content: Not all your website content should be created by yourself. To make your customers really feel valued and a part of your ‘journey’ you should encourage them to contribute to your site. For example, you could encourage them to ask questions or pose problems which you can then respond to (and display your expertise at the same time). You could invite guest bloggers to write relevant articles on your site, which in turn could lead you to blog on other people’s sites.

Hire A Content Marketing Expert: If you really want to transform your online content then you should maybe think about investing some money in it. Why not hire someone who can dedicate all their time to this one task and work out a proper online strategy? After all, if you’re trying to do it all yourself you are naturally going to spread yourself a little thin and you just may not be able to get the best results. Even if you only hire someone on a temporary basis, you should begin to see a real difference.

Run Surveys: Try running monthly surveys or competitions and then posting the results. You will find this a good way to generate user-generated content. If you can, try to think of surveys that are likely to create a PR buzz – ones that, if the results go a certain way, other websites, magazines or newspapers may want to pick up on for stories. As well as publishing them on your site, you can send the results out in the form of a press release to anyone you think may want to publish them.

Tell A Story: Consumers related to a good ‘journey’, so the content of your website – your company background, how you have got where you are – should be a compelling story in itself. Try to make it unique: offer something that others don’t. But don’t overdo it with the word count – remember that it is quality that matters, not quantity. Your story will be more powerful if it is succinct and every word is weighed carefully.

What To Ask An SEO Consultant Before Hiring Them

If you’ve decided to outsource your SEO to improve your company’s online presence then it’s vital you hire the right person. If you don’t take your time choosing them then you could well end up with someone who doesn’t have enough expertise or just isn’t right for your business. If this happens you are essentially throwing away the money you spend on them. 

On the other hand, if you get it right then a good SEO consultant can greatly enhance your visibility and increase your customer base. 

With that in mind, here are just some of the questions you could ask a potential consultant to find out whether or not they’re what you’re looking for:

How Long Have You Been In Business?: SEO started in a rudimentary form in the 1990s when it was more of a niche specialisation. Nowadays you are likely to be able to choose from hundreds of firms. To whittle them down, therefore, it’s a good idea to find one with a good few years of experience behind them.

How Would You Improve My Company’s Online Presence?: This is a vital question to ask and the way that the SEO consultant answers it should go some way to telling you whether they are worth hiring or not. When you ask this question, rather than going into an incomprehensible spiel about their own methods and how they work, they should pay attention to what makes your company unique. They should be asking you what you want to achieve and then discussing ways they might help you achieve this which are appropriate to your own business sector and customer base. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ with SEO, and a good consultant should know this.

What Previous Results Have You Had?: Any consultant you talk to should be more than happy to provide you with details of previous satisfied clients so you can contact them if you wish to ask about the service they received. Conversely, it can also be a good sign if they are willing to talk about projects that did not go so well, and what they learned from this.

What Guarantees Can You Give?: This is something of a trick question, but it’s worth asking if you’re unsure. Remember that there can be no guarantees with SEO, so anyone who claims that they can get your website No.1 Google rankings or something equally unrealistic is lying to you to get your money. What they should be doing is suggesting and implementing ways to help you get the best from the Internet and showing you how to proceed in the future. 

How Do You Charge?: You need to be sure about this before you sign up to anything. Some SEOs will charge a flat fee for their services and others will charge per hour or per individual project. As long as you have agreed in writing exactly what you are paying and compared this with what other SEOs are offering you should be ok. Never go into this kind of business relationship without signing a fixed contract or you may find yourself being charged extra for ‘additional’ services.

Your Web Marketing Blueprint – Ticking the Right Boxes

Get it right and web marketing can bring any business the kind of success no other marketing method in the world comes close to. Today’s daily web traffic on a global scale is largely impossible to measure accurately – suffice to say it is gigantic and continues to grow by the day. And when you consider that tens of millions of these web surfers are looking to spend some sum of cash on something somewhere, you begin to realise the potential the right marketing strategies can have for you and your business.

Of course, getting it right isn’t an easy business in the first place – quite to the contrary in fact. There’s a good reason why the biggest brands on Earth spend millions on their web marketing efforts every year – hitting the nail on the head making sure it stays hit is a rather deep and intricate task.

But it’s not impossible and nor does it have to be out of the reach for any business. The secret? Well, it’s all about acknowledging all of the boxes that need to be ticked in order for a campaign to stand any real chance of success – something of a blueprint to follow along the way.

So with getting this elusive ‘it’ right in mind, here’s a quick introduction to said blueprint and the boxes you’ll need to tick if you want your campaign to succeed:

A Solid Plan

Right off the bat, a marketing plan with no solid plan in place is like a journey with no destination or directions…you’ll never get there. With planning comes structure and measurable goals you can actually reach – it’s effectively like giving yourself the recipe for success you can then follow one step at a time. With no plan in place, you’re pretty much opting for pot-luck and chances are it will never roll your way.

Optimisation for Search Engines

It has never been more important to stand out at least modestly prominently with the major search engine. If you can’t be found on Google, Bing and others of a similar calibre, you will miss out on about 90% of the web traffic out there…which is a lot. So whether you take care of things yourself or outsource to a third-part, you need strong and ongoing optimisation efforts in place to prevent your site being passed-over altogether.

Rediscover Email


If you quit email marketing some time ago because it didn’t work for you, quite frankly this means it’s you that got it wrong. In the right hand and with enough effort, a targeted email marketing campaign can be hugely effective on both existing and new customers alike. It takes time and effort to get right, but nobody ever said marketing online was going to be an easy ride.


Analysis and Action


Again you can do this yourself or bring in the pros, but whichever approach you take, it remains 100% vital to your success. It is only by conducting or commissioning full web performance analysis that you are able to identify what is and isn’t working, in order to give you the building blocks for your marketing campaign.

Spread the Word

If you think what you have to say is worth sharing, then share it. If you wait for folk to come to your site to read the good words, you’re selling yourself immensely short. So, make the effort to use social media, forums, newsgroups, blogs and so on to get your message out into the open and hook their interest outside your home turf.

Interact

And finally, there is really nothing in the world worse than a social media page, blog, forum or discussion group of any kind that’s 100% devoid of contribution by those that are supposed to know the industry or niche best…as in YOU! It is unfair and unwise to expect healthy debate, discussion and sharing to be prompted if you yourself aren’t willing to get fully involved in it yourself and perhaps steer the conversation in your own favour. From responding to comments to kicking-off discussions and right through to supporting the messages your rivals put out, interaction means everything and one-way communication channels have no place in your strategy.

Why You Should Hire A Website Designer

Every company needs a well-designed website – both in terms of how it looks and how it functions. If you’re not somebody who possesses design or web development skills then trying to do it yourself can be a waste of valuable time. With something as important as this, it really is best left to the experts. Remember that your website is the base from which you will build your online reputation so it has to create a good impression.

You may have been told that designing and building a website these days is a simple affair with all the tools that are available to you. And yes, it’s true that with enough time pretty much anyone can put one together. But whether it will be any good is another matter. To create a really impressive website that will wow your customers and build sales takes skill and experience. If you try to do it yourself it can be difficult even trying to figure out where to begin. Even something as simple as creating a link will take time, and if something goes wrong with any part of the site you probably won’t know how to fix it.

Aside from the probability that your website will be a mess if you try to do it yourself, another reason for hiring a designer is that it gives you the ability to focus on running your business. You can be making contacts and working out other practical details, safe in the knowledge that a professional is building you a site that will promote your business in a positive way. Spending unnecessary time learning how to build a website yourself in order to cut costs takes your attention away from what you do best.

Web designers will know how to make your site beautiful and visually striking – but perhaps even more importantly they will know how to make if function quickly and efficiently. This is important because if clients don’t have a good experience of using your site they are unlikely to return any time soon. A good website is a speedy website, and a skilled web designer will be able to optimise aspects such as images and other graphics as well as using file compression and many other practices to ensure nothing is slowing things down unnecessarily.

Bear in mind also that not only does your website have to look good and work well, you also need to optimise its visibility on search engines or you won’t get the visitor numbers you need. Search engine optimisation, or SEO, can be a complicated business for the novice so an added bonus of hiring a good website designer is that they will be able to take care of this for you.

Lastly, consider that, far from depleting your resources, hiring a web designer is actually saving you money long-term. For one thing, they will be able to do the work quicker than you could, meaning your website is up and running and ready to make your money sooner. Also, as mentioned above, a well-functioning site means happier customers who are more likely to come back again and again and buy more products from you.