Content Marketing Today

Free Small Business Content Marketing Lessons from Microsoft

Microsoft makes your job easier thanks to its superb content marketing efforts.

Microsoft’s continually improving content marketing strategy empowers its Web visitors to improve their own marketing efforts significantly.  This is true whether you ultimately choose to use a Microsoft product or not.  Here are 3 important lessons you can learn from Microsoft:

1. If a giant with the clout of Microsoft believes a content marketing strategy is critical to its success, it is absolutely essential to those of us in much smaller organizations.
2. You can improve your online marketing by carefully observing and adapting the best practices of other related organizations.
3. If you can give away something free, that will bind your customers to you for the long-term, by all means do so.

Make sure that your website measures up to the best.

In the bad old days of marketing, learning from the competition might be a tedious and time-consuming process–especially if you were a small company doing business in a local or regional market.

Often, your local competitors knew even less than you about effective marketing.  On a national level, the only opportunity to get a look at your rivals’ marketing materials might be at a trade show or in a customer’s office.

Today, in the content marketing era where everything is visible on the Web, you can learn from the very best–not just locally but globally. And, that can make a world of difference.

If you are like most marketers at small to medium-size companies, you are time and budget constrained.  Your marketing team may be small or nonexistent.  You may not have access to world-class online marketing professionals.  But, by careful observation of the online efforts of expert marketers with you in your industry segment, you can emulate what works.

The first steps according to the excellent content marketing article on the Microsoft Office Live website.  The article suggests that you examine your competitors’ sites carefully to determine how well they work so that you can adapt best practices to your own web presence.  Here are the questions to ask, according to Microsoft:

1. What do I like about this Web site? What do I dislike about it?
2. Does the page hierarchy (also called navigation) make sense?
3. What information can I link to from the Home page? How is the information organized?
4. Do the categories and subcategories of information make sense?
5. How are the pages laid out? Are they using one or more columns?
6. Is the page easy to read? How does the page use headings, lists, and links?
7. How much information is on each page? Is finding information easy? Is the information complete?
8. Would a page like this be useful on my site? If yes, what would I do differently?

This article, and several related articles on the Microsoft  Office Live  website provides practical, put it to work content that even very small businesses can use to develop a website that works effectively.

Of course, Microsoft also wants you to use their products. So, many of their illustrations and step-by-step instructions show how to use their software effectively.  Nonetheless, relevant and valuable content comes first.  Only after that has been delivered as Microsoft lead down the path of signing up for an Office Live application. 

Even more interesting: the Office Live Web development application is absolutely free. Clearly their first interest is to get you in the fold and hope that as your needs grow, you will invest in more sophisticated Microsoft applications.