You don’t have to produce all your own content.
Having recently completed a project for a group of Driving Schools in Melbourne it was clear that the majority of business owners struggled to find quality content for inclusion on their websites.
Despite the best intentions of engaging their potential customers, attempts at written and visual content falls short of the mark on most sites. The 3 main issues are:
- A perception that they need to entertain everyone who visits their site.
- A lack of skill in producing imagery and video.
- An aversion to including shared Public Domain content.
The message to the group of business owners was to focus on their core goals and limit visual and text content to only those that moved their site visitors to their goal.
Website Goal – a site visitor books a driving lesson appointment.
- Tactic – Make the website more personal and ditch stock imagery.
- Tactic – Build social proof and make the most of your client feedback.
- Tactic – Realise that a Contact Form is NOT a booking form and get real online scheduling integration.
See the full review in this related post >>
Stock imagery use in the Driving School niche is rife and the same pictures of young people holding up ‘L’ plates appear on multiple sites. Several driving schools have great Facebook pages where simple pics of successful learner-drivers are shown but they are not linked back to their main website.
There are a few driving school sites that are doing a great job in displaying general informational videos. While the quality may not be as slick as professionally produced videos the DIY clips portray a great sense of personalisation which really does help build trust. However for businesses that lack the time, skill or equipment there are ways to take advantage of video content that is perfectly legal to share. The important thing is to assign credit to the original source to keep everyone happy.
An example of this type of content is a series of videos put together by Vic Roads designed to be consumed by learner drivers and their supervising driver (usually a parent). These videos have a safety theme and should be compulsory for all parents and drivers and savvy Driving School operators should consider adding them to their sites.
See the full Vic Roads Supervising Drivers and Learners Playlist
While this example is specific to Driving Schools just about all small business could find shareable content based on their industry.