WhatsApp marketing in the UAE: Meta's rules, message categories and local law
Opt in, templates, messaging limits and UAE law: what a Dubai business needs to know before sending promotions on WhatsApp.
Read the articleMost content marketing plan work in Dubai begins at the wrong end. Somebody opens a keyword tool, exports a list, sorts it by volume and starts writing about whatever is at the top. Six months later there is an archive nobody reads and a quiet suspicion that content does not work in this market.
It works. It just cannot be planned from a spreadsheet of search volumes, because the pieces that move a deal are rarely the pieces with the biggest numbers next to them. Here is the approach that produces fewer pieces and more effect.
Start a content marketing plan in Dubai with what buyers ask
Sit with whoever answers enquiries and write down every question they have answered in the last month. Not the polished ones from a brochure. The real ones, including the awkward ones about price, timing and what happens if something goes wrong.
You will usually end up with between twenty and forty. That list is your plan, in rough priority order, and it took an afternoon rather than a subscription.
The reason this outperforms a volume list is simple. A question somebody asked you is a question that was blocking a decision. A term with high search volume may be asked by students, by competitors, or by people in another country who will never buy. In this market especially, a large portion of the volume behind a generic term belongs to nobody you can sell to.
Rank the list by two things: how often the question comes up, and how badly an unanswered version of it stalls a sale. The questions scoring high on both are your first ten pieces.
What each piece in a Dubai content marketing plan must contain
In a content marketing plan in Dubai the difference between a piece that earns attention and a piece that fills a slot is specificity, and specificity has to come from you.
A number you know. How long something actually takes, how many revisions a job usually runs to, what proportion of projects hit a particular problem. Nobody outside your business can write this.
An opinion you can defend. Pieces that carefully avoid saying anything are safe and invisible. Say which option you would choose and why, then say honestly when you would choose the other one.
The thing competitors leave out. Usually what goes wrong, what it costs when it does, and who is responsible. Being first to say it plainly is a durable advantage.
A next step that is not a sales pitch. A checklist, a question to ask a supplier, something the reader can use whether or not they ever contact you.
Google’s own guidance on content written for people first says much the same thing in different words, and the overlap between writing for readers and ranking is larger than most briefs assume.
Taking one piece a long way, and why most content marketing plans do not
The most common failure in a content marketing plan in Dubai is producing a good piece once and then leaving it alone.
A single substantial article is also: three or four short social posts, each taking one point rather than summarising the whole; an answer you send to the next person who asks that question by message; a section of a proposal; a short video where somebody says the same thing out loud; and an email to the people who asked you to keep in touch.
That is six uses from one piece of thinking. The alternative, producing six separate things, costs six times as much and usually says less.
The planning habit worth building is to decide the onward uses when you commission the piece rather than after it publishes. Our note on planning a month of posting covers where those shorter versions land.
Who writes it, and the honest options
Three arrangements produce a workable content marketing plan in Dubai and one does not.
Somebody internal who knows the subject. Best material, slowest delivery, because they have another job. Realistic output is lower than anyone estimates at the start.
A writer interviewing somebody internal. Usually the best balance here. Half an hour of a specialist’s time produces a piece that contains things only your business knows, without consuming a day of that specialist’s week.
An outside writer working from a detailed brief. Fine for explanatory material where the facts are public and the value is clarity.
An outside writer working from a title alone. This is the one that fails. It produces text that could appear on any website in the sector, which is the definition of content nobody needed.
Whichever you choose, somebody with real knowledge has to read the draft before it publishes. That review is where the specifics get added, and it is the step that gets skipped when a deadline is tight.
Measuring a content marketing plan the way buying actually happens
Page views tell you almost nothing about a content marketing plan in Dubai. Three signals tell you more.
What people say when you ask. Add one question to your enquiry form or your first call: how did you come across us. Record it. Over a quarter, patterns appear that no report will show you, because the piece that influenced somebody was often read a month before they made contact.
Which pieces appear before an enquiry. If you have recorded events configured for form submissions and calls, you can see which pages people visited on the way. Treat it as a hint rather than proof.
Whether sales uses it. The strongest signal available and the least measured. If your sales team sends a piece to prospects unprompted, it is working. If nobody internally has ever linked to it, it is decoration.
Anything collecting an email address brings obligations under the federal data protection law, so settle consent wording before the download gate goes up rather than afterwards.
A content marketing plan in Dubai for a first quarter
Concretely, at a pace a business with one part time person can hold.
The shape below assumes nothing is in place yet, which is the usual starting position.
Weeks one and two: the question list, the ranking, and the first three briefs. Weeks three to ten: one substantial piece a fortnight, each one answering a single question properly, each one with its onward uses decided in advance. Week eleven: look at what people asked you about after reading, which usually reveals the next three topics. Week twelve: fix the two pieces that nearly worked rather than starting new ones.
Six good pieces in a quarter, each used six ways, is a stronger position than thirty thin ones. It also leaves an archive you are willing to send to a client, which the thirty rarely do.
One caution about the second quarter. The temptation once the rhythm holds is to raise the volume, and the better move is usually to raise the standard instead. Go back to the question list, find the three questions that were too difficult to answer properly in the first quarter, and answer those. Difficult questions are where competitors stop, which is exactly why they are worth the effort.
What to stop doing
Four habits that consume a content marketing plan in Dubai without returning anything.
Awareness day posts. Unless the day genuinely relates to what you sell, these are visible effort with no audience.
Rewriting the same introductory article. Every sector has three pieces that everybody has written. Yours will not rank and nobody needs a fourth.
Publishing to a schedule you cannot sustain. A gap is less damaging than visible filler, because filler teaches readers that your material is not worth opening.
Leaving old pieces to rot. Updating something that already performs takes less effort than writing something new, and the fundamentals reward a page that stays accurate. Put a review date on anything containing a figure, a rule or a price.
Where to read next
For the service, content marketing covers how we run this, website copy deals with the pages rather than the articles, and email is where the people who liked a piece should end up.
If Arabic is part of the plan, writing for two audiences explains why translation alone usually disappoints.
Where the content is really documentation for a product you are building, a portal, an application, a system customers log into, the writing and the build need to move together. Codeeo handles that side in Dubai.
If you would like the question list built with you rather than by you, spend an hour with us and you will leave with the first ten topics in priority order.
