The 4 Best Content Marketing Tips for Your Small Business
If you’re a small business with a limited marketing budget, paid advertising opportunities are often not possible. Luckily, there’s another way to promote your products and services – and it’s even better. With an ability to generate three times more leads than traditional marketing while costing 62 percent less, content marketing is quickly becoming the preferred marketing strategy by small business owners.
To experience the best results from content marketing, you need to do it right. Follow these four content marketing tips to take your small business to the next level of success.
What Is Content Marketing?
Unlike traditional marketing, content marketing is a marketing technique that aims to do more than explicitly promote your brand. This long-term strategy focuses on creating, publishing, and distributing content to grow brand awareness, improve engagement, and ultimately, increase business profits.
There are over 100 content marketing examples, with some of the most popular ones being blog articles, infographics, and social media posts. Regardless of the format, all content marketing has one thing in common: to build trust and rapport with your ideal buyer and eventually convert them into customers.
Content Marketing Tip #1: Develop a Content Marketing Strategy
To help the process go as smoothly as possible and achieve the results you want, you need a content marketing strategy.
Strategic content marketing considers your business goals, your target audience, what problem you’re trying to solve, and what makes your product or service unique.
Think about what type of content you want to create and the best channels to reach your audience. Use a content marketing calendar to keep you on-track with themes and topics. To ensure the work gets done when it needs to, have a publishing routine or outsource the work to a professional.
Content Marketing Tip #2: Create Your Content
Researching, writing, and editing an interesting, informative article take a lot of hard work. Thankfully, once it’s written, you can reformat that content in numerous other ways to appeal to more audiences and increase brand visibility.
From infographics and social media posts to e-books and podcasts, the possibilities are endless for repurposing the content within your article.
One of my best tips that I do with my own content marketing is to repurpose my Instagram stories into Pinterest Story Pins. Story Pins are the newest feature on Pinterest and have been increasingly popular with its users in increasing brand awareness & engagement.
Story pins are perfect for business owners, bloggers, and content creators who don’t yet have a blog or a website. If this is you and you are working on starting a blog or a website, hurry and start posting your repurposed content on Pinterest!
One of the best benefits to story pins is that a) they do not have to link to a URL and b) they don’t go through the indexing process as regular organic pins do, therefore, they are seen as a ‘live’ feature in Pinterest which increases your impressions & interactive engagement.
Images are a great way to present a lot of information in a short timeframe and can attract people who would otherwise scroll past your article. For example, take your key points and create Pinterest pins to help build brand recognition in an aesthetically pleasing manner. The visuals can be as simple or complex as you want – and these free lifestyle Pinterest templates can help get you started.
If you are curious as to how to optimize your images for Pinterest, check out my blog post I written here.
Content Marketing Tip #3: Pay Attention to SEO
To create the best content, you need to understand your target audience’s wants and needs and then showcase how your small business can provide those requests.
Keyword research helps make this happen. By knowing what types of queries are occurring on search engines, you can create content that has a chance of showing up on results pages.
Ubersuggest, Google Analytics, and many other search engine optimization (SEO) tools are available to help you conduct keyword research. Forum sites such as Reddit and Quora also provide invaluable information regarding trending topics in your industry.
Typing keywords into search engines such as Google, YouTube, and Amazon can provide even more popular topics to use in your content. Just remember to avoid keyword stuffing – instead, include these strategic words thoughtfully in your content.
Content Marketing Tip #4: Build an Email List
By visiting your website, people have shown a clear interest in your products or services. It’s now time to retain those prospects!
Developing an email list is a great way to continue cultivating your brand’s relationship with site visitors. And it’s not that hard to do, either! Simply add a subscription form to your website that requests visitors to leave their email address. Offer a newsletter, a downloadable e-book, or free templates in return and consider implementing a series of drip campaigns.
If you need more tips on what offers you can create to build your email list, head to this blog post where I provide you with 20 Effective Lead Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Email List.
Sending regular content to your email prospects helps drive traffic to your site, builds a loyal brand following, and improves conversions. Just be careful about how you do it. All email marketing should meet any relevant legislation such as Canada’s Anti-Spam legislation and follow best practices. For example, avoid sending too much content as this can annoy potential prospects and create the opposite reaction of what you’re looking for.
The Bottom Line
There’s no doubt about it: content marketing takes a lot of hard work. Although the above tips will help set your business up for success, experiencing the best results requires a long-term commitment. But when you put in the work, you’ll experience amazing benefits – with minimal financial investment.
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