Stories are so critical to who we are and what we do. In business, being able to share your professional journey is essential to building customer engagement, great relationships, and setting your business apart from the pack. 

But having big ideas and stories to tell is only part of the equation, you need to have the time and ability to articulate them, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. It can be frustrating when you don’t know the best way to convey your message or you don’t have the time to flesh your stories out properly. Check out copywriting services that provide strategies and other methods for creating quality content for your audience.

This was the case for Lindsay Stewart, founder of Star Dynamic Property Investments. He knew the importance of content marketing and what it could do for his business, but he couldn’t find the time and admitted that he didn’t have the writing experience to best express his thoughts in his blogs and newsletters. 

“At the end of the day, content is just as critical as the business but I was struggling to get any traction,” Lindsay explained, acknowledging content as the powerhouse it is for generating leads and converting clients. 

Lindsay would sit in front of a blank word document for hours trying to generate ideas or pen down the ones he already had, often to no avail. “It was like pulling teeth,” he said. 

It wasn’t until he found out about the content creation industry that he realised generating original content for his business was possible (without the headache). 

“I didn’t even know that something like Story League existed. I didn’t know we could go to a company that could help me create the content,” said Lindsay. “Once I knew that this kind of service was available, that’s when I reached out to have a chat. Apart from hiring an internal marketing person full-time, I didn’t know that was even an option.” 

Lindsay has now been working with us for 18 months and has been very happy with the services and the work we provide him, saying that he “looks forward to many more years together.”

Brilliant ideas but no time to tell good stories

While Lindsay was attempting to write his own content, he was also juggling the rest of his business operations as well. His hands were so full dealing with his customers, talking to suppliers in the U.S.A, managing pay-per-click advertising, and taking care of his staff, that he rarely had a moment to generate long-form content ideas as thoroughly as he would’ve liked. He stuck to shorter-form content like his ‘musings’ or he wound up pouring too much time into writing newsletter content. 

“One of the biggest issues I was facing was that I was trying to do everything to keep some sort of content going. I wasn’t doing too much in the way of long-form blogs at all. I’d been sending an eNewsletter once a week for quite some time. But that was pretty much the vast majority of my content,” Lindsay explained.

This difficulty he experienced was compounded by the fact that he wasn’t a big fan of social media, which is a huge avenue for marketing today because everyone is so plugged in. 

“It was just difficult—I’m no expert in that area at all. In fact, I don’t really enjoy social media so that made it harder to generate content. Coupled with the fact that I was trying to grow the business, content got pushed back. It became secondary to the rest of the business.” 

It would take Lindsay four or five hours to create an eNewsletter to send to his email list, sometimes waiting until the last minute to craft them because he simply didn’t have the time. He would try to block out time on Wednesdays to write but half the time he couldn’t get the right words down and would end up postponing it.

With Lindsay and his team relying on paid advertising, their established audience (about 6,000 people on Facebook) hardly heard from them because they rarely engaged. 

“The only content I was getting responses from were my ‘musings’ which were a couple of paragraphs long. Occasionally, I’d get someone who would say that ‘hey, that was a really good piece’ but that’s it. We weren’t getting any traction or organic leads from any social media platforms at all,” Lindsay explained. 

Refining and amplifying Star Dynamic’s expertise through content

When Lindsay reached out to us to see what we could offer, he was eager to get started, reasoning that there was everything to gain and nothing to lose with trying our content creation services out. 

“Once we knew what Story League could do, I was pretty keen right from the get-go to start. I mean, at the end of the day, what’s the worst that could happen? If it doesn’t get a lot of traction then that’s okay, we weren’t locking them in for a five-year contract or anything… We got a lot of good results and we’re still working together close to two years later,” said Lindsay.

Ever since then, Star Dynamic has been able to consistently share their ideas and get their stories out to the bigger world through a targeted content strategy. With our help, it’s possible for Lindsay to post two blogs a month with accompanying video scripts, eNewsletters, and social media captions. We also conduct interviews every month to capture and distil Lindsay’s ideas straight from the source. We want to make sure that we communicate Lindsay’s great ideas and translate them into powerful stories, because it’s his voice and expertise that people want to hear about. 

Outsourcing a content strategy was a good move on Lindsay’s part because he could focus on the business and leave the storytelling to us. 

“Story League makes it very easy… They do all the research, then flesh out and create all the blogs. I love the way they break it down to the long-form blog which we can post on our website and the social media content posts. 

“The advantage is we now have a large portfolio of blogs which we are constantly linking back to, allowing us to take snippets of that and continue to repurpose as new content. It builds Star Dynamic as an expert in the field because we’ve now got all this content sitting there on different aspects of our industry, including the market and mindset and investing. And we can refer back to all those things and use them as pieces as we go along, which has been brilliant,” Lindsay explained.

A thriving online presence and a significant uplift in organic leads

Now that Star Dynamic has a comprehensive collection of blogs and other content, they’ve enjoyed a significant spike in site traffic, social media engagement and organic leads. 

“From an organic standpoint, we’re getting a lot more traction now… More people are on our site and especially on our social media platforms, Facebook groups, Instagram, even Twitter which wasn’t really a target market for us but we’re certainly getting a lot more interaction with our posts that link to the blogs,” Lindsay explained. 

Lindsay observed that through creating content consistently, he was drawing in more clients. His goal is to have a 50/50 lead generation with organic versus paid ad leads, and Lindsay is certainly closing in on that goal, with 60% of Star Dynamic’s leads from paid traffic while 40% are organic.

Posting stories and sharing regular content gives people an understanding of your business and also how much skill and expertise you have in your industry. Now that Lindsay is getting those stories out there, it’s given his business proven credibility and authority in the market. It also gives people a reason to click back in and see what’s new.

And you never know where it might take you. One of Lindsay’s blogs, Should Australians consider investing in U.S. property? was published in Your Property Investment Magazine, positioning Star Dynamic even more as an authority in the industry and highlighting its niche market. 

Being associated with such a well-regarded magazine further cements Lindsay’s place in the market and expands his audience, bringing potential leads to the Star Dynamic website from a trusted source. 

“That was a real bonus for us, to have one of our blogs published in ‘Your Investment Property Magazine’ was just fantastic. Once again, that builds a lot of credibility within the marketplace and really does highlight us in a particularly small niche. That gave us a real leg up,” Lindsay expounded excitedly. 

Lindsay and his team knew that creating content and content marketing was a side of the business they were missing entirely, so finding a solution for that in Story League was a huge help. 

“Story League simplified the content process dramatically, which has been great,” said Lindsay. “I’d certainly recommend them to anybody. If you’re struggling to get content created, how they do it and the research that they do is fantastic.”

As Lindsay is approaching two years as our client, he’s said that he “wouldn’t change anything” and that he looks forward to our continued work together. 

At Story League, we want to help you tell your story and position you as a trusted expert in your industry. By telling your stories and making you a reliable voice in the market, we want to help you succeed and build your audience.