Making the Most out of Your In-house Creativity for SEO

It always amazes me that businesses fail to use the talents at their disposal to further online marketing efforts. If you have a team of writers or have an amateur filmmaker in your ranks, why not put those skills to good use? We use contacts and networking to drum up interest, so it makes sense to apply similar principles to marketing.

Most companies are worried about wasting time and resources unnecessarily; after all, you don’t want to take your eyes off of what you do best in order to focus on what could perhaps be seen as more frivolous endeavours. However, the value of content is now on the rise. If you are serious about marketing online, then you have to be producing sharable material. So whether you create your own YouTube channel or contribute to industry blogs, exposure is very much the name of the game.

So what should you do?

The first step is to identify what skills you have at your disposal and how best to use these. It’s rarely advisable to go from doing nothing to attempting to take over the world overnight, so building a content marketing strategy is a good idea. This way you can see what works for others in your industry, where you are likely to get most traction and whether your ambitions are actually viable.

Let’s take video production as an example. A lot of businesses from a variety of industries are now using this as a way of spreading their message and gaining notoriety within their sector. It has a number of potential benefits besides just getting a few views here and there, as video content (if properly optimised) can rank within search results and can also lead to future possibilities. It also gives you something new and different to promote through social profiles elsewhere.

This form of integrated marketing can really pay dividends over time as you build your profile, audience and portfolio of work. With articles linking to videos which then link back to your site, you can set people off on a path of fully branded content. This builds trust (assuming that content is of a high standard) and will help to establish your business as an authority in the eyes of the search engines.

However, any form of content will take time to produce and, particularly in the case of video, you will also need the necessary equipment to make it appear suitably professional. I think this is possibly the most important thing to remember and keep in mind before doing anything online. If you don’t maintain standards and publish content that you’re proud to put your name against, then it can come back to haunt you. This shouldn’t scare you off, but it ought to be a reminder that you need an editorial process as well as a creative one.

It would be a shame to see in-house skills go to waste, so if you’re planning a marketing campaign make sure you don’t forget about the precious resources at your disposal. Remember, nobody knows more about your business and industry than your staff, so if they have a penchant for writing or filmmaking, don’t let this go to waste. Come up with a strategy and start improving your global visibility and individual profiles.