A WordPress Agency with depth.
Imagine a world where you ignored marketing and focused your efforts on writing and sharing the best and highest quality content for your visitors? That sounds nice … and different.
Modern “Content Marketing” (sic) has largely grown out of 2nd-rate SEO in recent years, as old-style SEO marketers struggle to come to terms with a changing search-engine landscape and are responsible for a lot of the crap that is written on the web.
It feels that digital marketers are caught up in a process-driven marketing loop which is responsible for the ugly digital landfill dump that some corners of the web are starting to resemble. And reasons why are fairly obvious: If your content plan revolves around some flaky magical theory (old-school SEO folks do like flaky theories) then you’re going to produce boring content designed for search engines and not for people.
Yes, I am sure that if you blindly follow the “Informational/Navigational/Transactional Model” (or whatever variation is flavour of this week) then you’ll make short-term gains. Hell, you might even dominate the search results for a while – but is that sustainable? Probably not.
If you base your brand around bland, informational and intent-clouded posts containing 350 words then you’re not going to last. Besides, do you really want to look like every other one of your competitors who are all pursuing the exact same strategy? How many search-driven companies have you seen come and go over the years? (Exception: If you are after a quick buck it’s a good approach, or if short-term revenue is more important than long-term profit.)
So what do we write about?
We’re a WordPress Agency, true, but that doesn’t define us, nor is it the reason our clients chose us in the first place, or stay with us today. What we are is much deeper than simply being an agency; we’re about values, beliefs, innovation, standing out, thought leadership, collaboration, openness, future, values, transparency, honesty, fairness, culture, friendship, support and pragmatism.
So this is what we write about. And we do sometimes write about features, but we anchor the content to one of the core meanings. Content planning for us is not about gaming the search engines it’s about producing unique, insightful and interesting content.
We are, however, aware that we have a strong presence on Google et al so we’re careful not to destroy that – we adhere to best practices and also make sure that we broadly stay on topic, but not always!
When we plan our content, we think about the visitors to our site and what they’d like to read and learn. Each falls into one of three types; those that know us well (clients), those that know us a little (hopefully engaged to become clients) and those that don’t know us from Adam (first timers). Whilst each of the segments have different outcomes and journeys there are some consistent themes and messages that need to come across.
They need to feel confident we can do a good job, they need to relate to our values, approach and attitudes and finally, they need to understand what we do and what we don’t do.
To make this connection we talk openly about how we work, our attitudes and culture and we’re honest about what we do as no one can or should try to be all things to all men. We strive to make people feel confident about what we stand for, not simply that they may spend money with us one day.
Talking about product features plays a limited part in this, unless the feature conveys a story or a value. And by way of exception to prove the rule: 100% client satisfaction is a feature of our Peerless WordPress Support Service, but conveys way more than a number, it illustrates fanatical attention to client satisfaction that, in most cases, would be unrealistic to expect from a supplier – and also differentiates us from other, less fanatical, WordPress companies.
So I fibbed (a little), we do sometimes write about features, and even WordPress features, but that’s not why we write nor is it the key message – we write about our values and those of our clients.
