Shared Best Practices for Business Building

Small businesses often want to take on basic photography themselves. Over the years we’ve noticed some common mistakes, and some simple things that people can do to greatly improve the imagery around their brand. In this episode, we cover concepts around composition, lighting, focus, depth of field, landscape versus portrait, and other uses for your photography to help you build your business. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/casey-bourque/message

What do I write about? Just do a Google search using a search phrase that your ideal prospects might be asking about. If you scroll down the page you’ll see a section entitled people also ask. There a series of questions and if you hit the toggle button the answers and a link to a website will appear. As you do this, more questions appear. These are awesome questions to answer on your website and help your website move up and search rankings. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/casey-bourque/message

It’s time to Audit The Contant on your website, and figure out what your audience will care about, and what they’re not going to give a shit about. Let’s get rid of the stuff nobody cares about, and replace it with high value, helpful, compelling content. It’s not as tough as it sounds. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/casey-bourque/message

Many companies write blog articles, then simply post on social media with links back to those articles. While this may serve to help drive traffic to your website, it doesn’t usually do a lot in the way of building awareness and actually driving consumption of that content. Be mindful of the mix of your posts in terms of back link kind of posts, versus posts that bring portions of those articles for users to consume directly on the platforms themselves. It makes the content really easy for people to consume, and increases the chances that they’re going to see it and read it. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/casey-bourque/message

Brand building is all about improving your reputation. Building trust, and authority helps people know that your company is worth doing business with. The problem is, it’s a very long-term play. It takes a long time to build up a good reputation. If your company is overvaluing short term sales metrics, perhaps monthly or quarterly revenue numbers, your marketing and sales teams are going to have a really difficult time committing to Brand building. They will inevitably fall back into a direct sales approach, which conserve to sabotage the long-term health of the company. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/casey-bourque/message

A backlink is when one website links to another website. It’s kind of like a recommendation in real life. The bonus is that backlinks are seen by Google as they evaluate the trust and authority of all websites on the web. The better and more back links that your website has, the more important it is in the eyes of Google. Because Google only cares about the experience of their users, they are going to rank your website higher if it is seen as being more helpful, authoritative, trustworthy in the space that their users are searching in. Back links are a super important, yet often misunderstood area of search engine optimization. Learn more about Search Engine Optimization --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/casey-bourque/message

It’s common for businesses, if they are paying attention, to see new opportunities to win business. Maybe you have a new service offering, a new target demographic, or maybe you’ve identified a new trigger that would compel someone to start looking for a certain product or service. Don’t just list the new product or service on your website. You’re going to want to produce helpful content around the questions and challenges your target audience is concerned about. This will help you to build trust and authority in that particular space, eventually drive organic traffic, and help you win business. Here's a plan for content creation.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/casey-bourque/message

We always recommend Canva for our smaller clients, or those who are interested in taking on some graphic design work themselves. There is a free version that allows you to use templates and launch professional grade graphics pretty quickly and easily. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/casey-bourque/message

Social media is difficult for companies that do not have any customer centric content living on their website. On the other hand, businesses that commit to producing longer form evergreen content on their website are able to amplify this content on social media very easily. Social media becomes the avenue for bringing information into the places where your audience prefers to consume that content. Here's an article about which social media platforms to use.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/casey-bourque/message

Producing great content isn’t always easy, but at least the format of your content can be. We want to introduce your topic by telling them what we’re going to tell them (intro). In the body of your content you’re going to tell them (make your points). In the conclusion or summary, you’ll tell them what you told them (takeaway). It sounds redundant, but this format is ubiquitous. Both search engines and humans love it. Simple format for every article you write.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/casey-bourque/message

We know that we need to identify with our customers in order to create compelling content. Despite this fact, many companies default to talking about themselves. “We offer this service, we sell this product, we’re expert in this”. A better approach is to understand what questions, challenges, problems, ambitions that your ideal customers have, and then address those in your marketing materials. This helps you build trust, deliver value, and grow authority in your space. It’ll also set you apart from your competition, because most companies aren’t doing this. Audit your existing content as to whether or not you’re using first person, or second person in your language. If you’re seeing a lot of “I/we” in your messaging, then you’re probably talking about yourself too much. If you’re using a lot of “you/your” in your language, you’re probably doing a better job of identifyingWith the perspective of your audience. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/casey-bourque/message

This podcast is a curation of all of our agency experience in serving as an outsourced marketing department for companies in all sorts of industries. I want to share what’s working well (and what isn’t) so that you can make more informed decisions and fast track towards best fit solutions for your own company. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/casey-bourque/message