Which Formats of Content Drive Leads and Enquiries for SME Businesses?

The challenge with communicating your business’ products or services to a potential buyer is that buyers today absorb information in short snippets. This could be while on the go on a mobile device, or on their PC at their office desk. Advertisers therefore need to have variety in both the way they get their message across and the channels they use to get the message in front of these buyers. As an SEO agency, POLARIS works with clients to optimise content across a range of formats for SEO purposes.


For SME businesses, written content is the easiest to produce and publish. It’s quick to create; anyone with relatively good writing skills can do it, and it’s a straight-forward means by which business owners can share their in-depth product knowledge.

1. Blogs

Blogs can be utilised to educate an audience at any stage of the sales process, so it essential that you think about your sales process as a whole; split it out and list the questions or information needs a prospect may have (e.g price, how long to get the service, guarantees etc), and then produce content across this list.

2. Infographics

If you have budget or design resource, you could try and get some factual data together which can be represented in a graphical format. The only challenge with infographics is that the data does need to be interesting otherwise it won’t generate any interest! If you have data of interest and can produce an infographic, this is a great format to utilise for prospects that are already aware of your business and have given you their email address for marketing purposes (opted in - keep GDPR compliance in mind). This could help turn a warm prospect into a hot prospect by giving them some evidence-based information around success (e.g the number of basement flats that suffer from damp and require damp proofing services).

3. Video

Video is a great way of sharing content since it allows you to portray your message in a highly effective format. Whether you want to grab a camera and give a quick overview on a topic yourself or get a videographer in to cut a professional shot showcasing a happy customer, video can be created and uploaded to your website or YouTube channel and then used at the end of your sales process to give that final bit of confidence to a prospect.


To organise a content marketing initiative, we recommend small businesses firstly use our content schedule template (a free resource from POLARIS), and complete it with your target:

• customers
• locations
• products or services to sell
• customer information needs

Once complete, you can then work out who is going to produce the content (yourself as the business owner is most effective, diary permitting), in what format and how frequently. Next, make sure you do more than just get it uploaded to your website. Ask your SEO agency to outreach it to relevant websites or run an email campaign to send it to your opted in GDPR compliant database.