Starting an Online Business: Simon Reynolds, VP Marketing at Airtasker

Making attractive and engaging content is challenging for most businesses. Simon Reynolds, VP Marketing at Airtasker, gives his top tips on creating engaging content using customers for inspiration and having a system for your content.

How to Hack Content to Get People Talking About Your Business

Airtasker is a two-sided marketplace — customers who post tasks, and Airtaskers who complete them. Maybe you’ve used Airtasker for odd-jobs around the home or office, like weeding the garden or assembling IKEA furniture. Because Airtasker doesn’t limit the types of tasks that people can post, we have seen some unique requests crop up, including flying to Paris to pick up sunglasses and hosting the Hit107 breakfast radio show.

When we were creating our content strategy, we wanted to write content that would help our users better understand the platform. But finding interesting stories that connect with your community, hiring content writers, and optimising your content for search engines to rank can be a drain on resources for small business.

Here’s how we created engaging content to get people talking without a heavy time or cost commitment.

Use your customers’ experiences for content inspiration

We realised that our own community was generating a trove of content with fun and creative posts. We just needed to surface these stories.

Creating engaging content around the tasks people post on our platform is a great way to showcase how people use our services. And, most importantly, earning money by using their unique skills — whether it’s radio jockeying, puppy sitting, or simply being a trustworthy individual to escort gold sunglasses to the fashion capital of the world.

Leverage the experiences of your customers as case studies, testimonials and social media campaigns. The best stories are true stories — from your customers!

Systematise content creation

When our team sees an interesting task being published, we post it to a channel on Slack, which is automatically inserted into a Google Sheet for our content team to review. We then publish these tasks and syndicate the content through our social networks, blog, newsletter and if it’s interesting enough, PR! This has enabled us to create an engaging content machine, which is constantly generating new interesting stories (even as you are reading this manual).

Quick Tips:

Growing a business with a limited marketing budget is a hard ask. Think of how you can use the content your users are creating to your advantage.

• Airtasker is a great way to find writers on demand. You’ll receive offers from local content writers ready to work for you.
• Images are key, make sure you’ve got some great images to capture the viewer and give them some quick context about what the content is about.
• Case studies are great for PR, create a Customer Relationship Manager of interesting stories or people using your service, as this shows how real people are using your service. And then you have a database you can call on if you ever get approached for a case study.