You may have great services or products. You may have a good many clients already. But how do you attract new ones and how do you make sure people find you online?

Using vast amount on money on advertising is a losing battle for many. Unless you have budgets to fight with the big guys, you're better off talking about what you do best on your own website. But you've got to do it in a targeted, smart, and focused way.

In this article we look at how you can get increased visibility by publishing regularly on your webpages. This is often called content marketing. The right content for you depends on your line of business, the kinds of products and services you offer and who you're selling to.

Why content marketing works

Getting your team to write purposefully about your work for a specific target audience not only helps get your work out to more people but it's also a wonderful way for your team to reinforce and consolidate your knowledge and expertise. While this may not be an obvious point when you first embark on writing content, it is nonetheless most often a realisation that kicks in with the team before long. At Mission, we recently carried out an inventory of all the blogs and articles we had written in 2016, and we were, to say the least, somewhat surprised and also a little proud to see that we have written some 40 blogs and 11 white papers. We also realised that we had covered some areas of service offerings better than others, which enables us to re-focus in a smart way for 2017.

Yes, we are also super pleased to see that we have had a considerable increase of visitors to our websites . And as I stated above, even though web traffic was our main goal when we began our work, we realise now that well-written, relevant content has so many more benefits:

Benefits of content marketing

More visits to your website.
Higher ranking on search engine results.
Valuable information about your target audience through the use of smart CTA's.
Better understanding and awareness amongst team members as to what the company actually delivers (and it's usually a lot more than you think).
An invaluable archive of expertise that you can draw from in pitches, client meetings, etc.
A pool of recyclable evergreens that you can use across your marketing channels.
Written documentation of your expertise. (This is especially important in times of staff turnover and fear of competence drain).
Editorial work in a team can be great fun and works as team bonding.
Writing content means you need to stay alert and always find ways to make your services relevant for your target audience.
Producing a steady flow of insight proves that your company is customer focused, dynamic, and ready for business.

Have a system in place

Effective communication is about being relevant to your audience. In order to be that, you need to employ some tools before your start writing and publishing. At Mission, we find the following very useful:

Personas . Use personas or "archetypes" as a great way to mentally prepare yourself for your audience. The more specific you can be, the better it is. Create mood boards, give the personas names, whatever it takes. The point is to enable you to write in a structured way.
Editorial calendar . Use an editorial calendar to help your team focus their efforts and work while balancing clients' work and other projects. As we all know, we get busy from time to time so a calendar is a great tool to keep the team accountable.
Editorial meetings . Gather the writers in an editorial meeting. At Mission, we normally meet once a month when we analyse the impact of the recently published articles and assign new topics for each team member. These meetings are also a great place to discuss problems with articles your team members are currently working on. Keep the meetings focused and always make sure to communicate what is expected of team members at the end of the meeting.
Topic list . Assign someone in your team to prepare a list of topics that you can draw from. Topics should be tailored to your personas. At Mission, we save a lot of time having such a list as we don't all have to brainstorm when we meet and someone will already have prepared and helped the team a long way.
Measuring . Use Google Analytics to make sure you track traffic to your website and learn from the articles that perform the best. Remember to praise team members who have written especially well-performing articles.
SEO . Make sure to tag your work with correct meta data in order for Google to find what you write.