As your agency no doubt has a website, you know how important it is to populate it with content that attracts and engages potential clients who visit it. Approaches to creating content that helps your site stand out and facilitates your marketing efforts are virtually infinite, as different combinations of educational and entertaining material can help pique visitors’ interest, leading them to further consider what you have to offer.
The best content strategies take many variables into account, including your industry, your goals within it and how your solution can meet your target audience’s particular needs. Of course, your competition is likely playing the same “long game” of using content to draw prospects to their sites, so how will yours be different? Here, 14 members of Forbes Agency Council share unique ideas for using content to differentiate your agency’s site from those of your competitors.
Forbes Agency Council members share content ideas to differentiate an agency’s website from competitors.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Provide Real-World Guidance
Provide actual, real-world guidance based directly on your customers’ experiences. Instead of a bland promotional narrative, describe a question or situation that came up with one of your clients and what your recommended advice was. Your audience members may be dealing with the same challenge, and they will think of you again next time a question arises. – Eyal Danon, Ignite Advisory Group
2. Highlight Your USPs
Analyze your niche and relevant, service-specific search queries, then focus on what your audience wants to know. Provide the answers to what your target audience is looking for by highlighting your unique selling propositions in the content. This tactic ensures that you deliver value to your clients and differentiates your services and unique capabilities to help your agency stand out from the competition. – Ajay Prasad, GMR Web Team
3. Make A Good First Impression
It’s all about first impressions. Make sure that your welcome landing page immediately draws in your potential customer and entices them to want to take a deeper dive into the rest of the website for various products and services. – Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne LLC
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4. Stand Out With Content By Giving It Away
Give potential clients something they can use right then and there. We do national surveys and publish the findings. When the client goes back to their current agency (that has no information), we slowly win. Give them content ideas and show them how to create a story. – John Davies, Davies Public Affairs
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5. Anchor Messaging And Visuals Around Definitive Concepts
Our agency is defined by our finance-based marketing approach and client growth results. Since this is our primary differentiator, we anchor our website messaging and visuals around defining these concepts. To bring validity to our team and approach, we also show several real-life client case studies to illustrate the services we provided and how we helped them scale their e-commerce revenue. – Tucker Matheson, Markacy
6. Make Prospects Want A Digital Presence Like Yours
There’s only so much you can do to stand out from the crowd. As a Web and graphic design, Web development, and digital marketing agency, we rely on showcasing our expertise through our company’s digital presence. When a prospect lands on our site, they’ll see a beautiful, fast-loading, intuitive website, and they’ll want the same for themselves. Our motto is “standing out by simply doing our best.” – Dejan Popovic, PopArt Studio
7. Focus On Subjects Your Competitors Haven’t Covered
Do online research in the areas of your expertise. Find ways to answer questions clients have asked, or educate your audience(s) on subjects that are not already heavily covered in the content your competitors provide. For example, you can do this by focusing your content on your particular point of view or industry skill set. Providing examples of how your ideas have worked for clients is helpful. – Megan Devine, d.trio marketing group
8. Use Visuals To Attract And Retain Visitors Longer
The human brain is hardwired chiefly to absorb visual content, which makes vivid images a more efficient and effective type of content. Therefore, we often try to stand out among competitors with visual content. First, this attracts attention and evokes emotions; in addition, it makes people stay on your page or site longer. Together, these things help rank you higher in search results. – Dmitrii Kustov, Regex SEO
9. Know And Maintain Your Voice In Every Piece
Our tone reflects our values and style. We also keep the tone consistent across every message, visual and social post. Always have a distinctive voice that is clearly identifiable as your brand’s. We are a very visual agency and recommend to any company to be brave, be loud and, above all, be true to you. Know your voice, and reflect that throughout every piece of content. – Julia Linehan, The Digital Voice PR Agency Ltd
10. Mirror A Simple, Everyday Feed
We moved away from a rich, image-heavy site and consolidated almost all content into a simple stream of posts. Rather than being bombarded with video or some cool HTML5 animation, seeing simple updates that mirror an everyday feed just works for our visitors. There’s always something new to share, and if folks are interested, they can choose to explore. And they certainly do. – John Geletka, Geletka+
11. Reflect The Personalities Of Your Experts
We always build content that reflects not just our expertise, but also the personalities who provide it. Our employees and culture are essential to our success, so when we write, for instance, marketing guidance, we always include direct commentary from the people who know it best. If we can convey the humor and humanity that go into each project, we give an accurate picture of what it’s like to work with us. – Tellef Lundevall, Accelerated Digital Media
12. Integrate Brand And Culture Into The Same Conversation
Our agency is built on the conviction that brand and culture should be fused and integrated into the same conversation. That idea continues to be our true north. Rather than be generalists by spreading our content across the spectrum of branding- or marketing-related topics, we aim to drill deep on the culture and brand connection to help others further develop their knowledge on the subject. – Ted Vaughn, Historic
13. Derive Your Content From Search Data
People will only pay attention to the content on your website if it answers the questions they have. Therefore, take time to check out the questions users are asking search engines and create content that answers these questions. By accurately answering people’s questions, your website will see new traffic and definitely stand out in the crowd. – Candice Georgiadis, Digital Agency, Inc
14. Share Your Personal Story
Sharing my personal story of why I decided to start my agency 20 years ago helps me to differentiate myself. I have also included a section on my giving-back initiatives, something that I am very passionate about: making the world a better place than I found it. This is effective because no one else has your story. Each story is unique, and sharing yours will allow you to attract the right customers. – Adrian Falk, Believe Advertising & PR
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Author: Expert Panel®, Forbes Councils Member
