Bad content is hurting your business. Technical specifications do not motivate people to buy your paint. The customer doesn't care about the VOC or specifications like Polyurethane modified Alkyd Emulsions... they want the smell, the touch, the colour. They want their senses to be inspired.
Your potential customers probably aren’t as passionate about paint as you are. In fact, we too have limited knowledge about this complex multi-pigmented substance.
However, with eight years of experience writing content for the largest brands in Europe, we have tested and measured the effectiveness of thousands of articles, documents, blogs, brochures and point of sale content.
We may not be paint experts - but we are experts in people who buy paint. Here are just a few tips we’ve discovered along the way…
Are you just a speck of paint online?
Unfortunately, what worked in the 90s won’t cut it anymore. Nowadays, one measly website is not enough of a digital presence to attract sufficient attention.
Having one website overloaded like a packhorse with all your content is not user-friendly. Sadly, it’s more likely to frustrate your potential client than provide the paint solution they need. It’s too much to process too soon, requiring too many clicks. Easier to just click back to Google and try someone else.
Up-to-date paint companies know that they have to be digitally diverse.
Paint inspiration requires its own website, and the technical specifications, application and the purpose of each product (amongst other things) do too. Each needs its own space to grow. Having one website is like a bird’s nest of information, whereas numerous specialising websites are like birds flying in formation, sending your brand to greater heights.
Clients, not chemical engineers
A common mistake we see paint manufacturers making is the assumption that customers are interested in the chemical composition of paint. They’re not.
Would you buy an item described as “milk, sugar, cocoa butter, cocoa mass, vegetable fats (palm, shea), emulsifiers (E442, E476) and flavourings”, or would you prefer a slab of chocolate? Your content should not read like a description of the periodic table.
Nobody really cares about viscosity, volatility, alkyds, low VOC...it may as well be ABCDEFG and the rest of the alphabet.
The ABCs of good content is that it must be relevant to the customer. Colour? Cost? Will it last? Easy to apply? How long to dry? You get the idea.
Search engine seeks clever, vibrant content
At a party, we instinctively look for engaging and interesting people to talk to. People, with a colourful character that appeals to us. Nobody wants to be cornered by someone uninteresting, speaking technical jargon we don’t care to understand. It’s the same with a conversation about paint.
Like us, the criteria for SEO has recently become more discerning and sophisticated.
The new search engine stars know they must do more than merely peddling content with the company’s name written repeatedly in bold and capital letters. That doesn’t work anymore.
Search engines can and will filter out engaging, well-written content and give it prime digital real estate. They then relegate anything dull and overly technical or repetitive to the place where weak content goes to die.
Evergreen beats ‘in-season’ any day
We make evergreen content so that people can read about your products all year long. This keeps your product top of mind so when they want to paint they will think of you first.
Unlike the paint itself, communication about paint shouldn’t dry out.
Good paint content can’t be seasonal or have a sell-by-date. That’s because people buy paint practically anywhere, at any time, all year round.
Erik may only wish to paint his shed in the summer, but right now, in mid-winter, he’s decided to shop for it. In the same vein, Liz is only a few weeks pregnant but is searching for inspiration online to decide what colour to paint the nursery next year. It’s late, and Liz can’t sleep so the information she needs about paint shouldn’t either.
Listen rather than lecture
Nobody is interested in your mission statement or the organisation chart of the company. They need easy information about the product they need, they don't want to know the company's history.
You need to consider what they want, who they are and how your paint may appeal to them, even if they haven’t yet figured it out for themselves.
You can make suggestions and work with their responses but you can never dictate what they’ll want.
Your content needs to act as a guide and function like a conversation they’ll want to hear rather than a long boring lecture or list about paint they won’t care about.
The proof is in the pudding, not the ingredients
It’s not very complicated: If content does its job, it satisfies the customer and gets the paint sold. We enjoy a good dessert because it fulfils a need for something sweet and not necessarily because the ingredients are appealing.
Paint-selling content is clever, convenient and quickly satisfies the buyer’s need for specific information.
If someone rifling through your content struggles to find what they are looking for they will get it somewhere else. Help them to help yourself to more paint sales.
Contact us to add a paint-selling coat to your content.
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