Is your content marketing strategy enough to attract and keep the attention of loyal, passionate customers? As a small business owner, you understand the grit and grind that comes with promoting your brand. Even established small businesses may struggle to compete with neighboring chains and their seemingly unlimited marketing budgets.
In modern times, a quick glance at a phone screen can entice or deter a customer from your business’s doorstep. The top Yelp review, the first page of Google, and even the home page of your company’s website are enough for someone to form an impression of what your brand represents.
If you want to improve your odds of standing out against the Internet noise, simple and effective content marketing strategies can grow your company’s presence online and grow your consumer base along with it. Here’s a guide to help you get started…
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing uses specific and targeted content strategies to attract and retain a flow of customers. The key word here is content, which could be a number of media forms, including articles, blogs, e-books, webinars, social media posts, videos, or any other relevant materials that you are actively creating and releasing to consumers.
In today’s saturated market, creating unique content that grabs customers’ attention through the Internet’s rabbit hole can be a challenge.
Why Should I Invest Time and Effort into Content Marketing?
- Consumers have twice as many interactions with brands on mobile than anywhere else.
- Personalized content performs 42 percent better than non-personalized content, according to HubSpot
- 70% of marketers actively invest in content marketing
- Companies that post 16 or more entries a month enjoy 4.5 times the amount of traffic as companies that only upload 0-4 posts.
Digital and content marketing is the strategy that will keep your business alive and expanding. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or a beginner at content marketing, the outline below will provide key strategies to drive traffic to your website and engage your audience.
EASY CONTENT MARKETING OUTLINE
What Does My Target Audience Want?
Your customer should engage with your content and think “Wow, this company really gets me!”
Consider what your target audience needs, then show them how your small business can provide it! Effective content marketing appeals to the target audience’s needs, problems, interests, desires, senses of humor, morals, or aesthetics. So, make understanding the customer your top priority.
Why Your Small Business?
Now that you’ve grabbed a customer’s attention with your exciting content that aligns with their interests, you’ll need to prove that your product or service is the best in the business. After all, if a customer can hop on Amazon and find something like your product that does the job and has good enough reviews, they may be swayed towards another brand. What makes your product or service unique? What drives your business and keeps your customers coming back again and again?
Since most small businesses depend on a loyal consumer base, it’s important to remind them why they need your product or service.
Consistency is the Name of the Game
Creating quality content that is consistently posted drives engagement and increases sales to happy customers! Remind your base why they chose your business over and over again with relevant content. Show them that you keep current on the latest trends and research in your field. After all, your company is living and growing just like your audience. Consistently producing digital content that appeals to your audience is a learning game. What was interesting in your field yesterday may not be a novelty today, so you must be aware of how your base’s interests are constantly changing!
Timing and Social Media
Most digital marketing experts recommend posting at least once a day, but the time of day that you post can be a great advantage to your marketing strategy. Knowing your audience means knowing when your audience is online, as well as the social media apps they use the most. When are they online, and where are they spending their time scrolling?
Track your campaigns and analytics on social media to understand where your audience is engaging with your content.
Social Media Tips
Facebook allows for long-form content, like articles or blog-style pieces. Older audiences may be more likely to engage with Facebook posts than other forms of content. In fact, the share of the Silent Generation using Facebook has nearly doubled.
Twitter appeals to younger audiences. Humor and wit generally do well on this app, with 35% of users between ages 25-34 and 30% between 18 and 24.
LinkedIn is a popular social media platform for working professionals, and can greatly help your brand network with other companies or prospective new hires. What’s more, salespeople who share content on LinkedIn are 45% more likely to exceed their sales quota.
Instagram is great for visual content like graphics, quotes, company “stories,” or even short videos. 140 million people in the United States are Instagram users. Two-thirds of worldwide users between 18 and 24 use the platform multiple times per day, and users aged 35 to 44 still log in at high levels. Nearly one third of the highest age bracket (55+) use Instagram multiple times per day.
YouTube
This platform allows channels to post videos. Animatics, informational videos, and even influencer content can help attract audiences to your brand. Once you have a solid base of subscribers, they will automatically be notified whenever you churn out content! Best of all, people of all ages consistently use this popular platform.
TikTok
TikTok mostly attracts younger audiences, but a surprising number of adults have been intrigued by the user-generated video clips that range from wacky material to trendy dances. 60% of users are Generation Z, between the ages of 18 and 24, while 26% of users fall between the ages of 25-44.
The Holy Grail of Digital Marketing: SEO
Let’s be real. When you search for something online, how often do you venture beyond the options listed on the first page of Google? (They say if you need to hide a body, hide it on the second page of the Google search results.) SEO, or search engine optimization, will help get you out of the weeds and onto the front page of search results.
Search engine optimization is the process of improving your company’s online visibility for relevant web searches. In other words, SEO makes your website easier to find and, therefore, more clickable.
With people conducting trillions of searches through an expanse of endless marketing content, how can you ensure that your small business will be among the top results? After all, over 25% of people click the first Google search result, with that percentage steadily decreasing the further one travels down the page.
Basic SEO Rules
- Unique, attention-grabbing page titles
- Relevant and interesting content
- Good spelling and grammar
- Including keywords (relevant terms your consumers search for)
- An SEO-optimized, streamlined and visually appealing website
These simple tips will help drive traffic to your company’s website, which, in turn, boosts the algorithm that increases your search engine visibility.
Content Management
Make a plan to produce, post, and track the analytics of your content. With a system in place, you will have concrete evidence of the efficacy of your content strategy, allowing you to manage it accordingly. Many social media apps have content analytics embedded, but you can also use applications such as WordPress or HubSpot CMS to publish and measure the results of your content.
Common Digital Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
Duplicate Content
Boring or duplicate content won’t drive up traffic. In fact, it may actually hurt SEO! Spend time researching trends that are related to your product or service. As a small business owner, you should strive to be the resident expert in your field, but even experts need to stay current! Peruse popular blogs, search the first page of Google for your key content words, and check out your competitors’ pages.
Only Using One Form of Content
No one likes to read big blocks of text. You could spend hours on the most engaging blog article for your website, but no one will bother to read it if it looks like a dissertation. Breaking up your content to make it visually interesting is the most underrated way to drive up engagement. Photos, infographics, videos, bolded quotes, GIFs, and simple paragraph breaks can draw the eye through your content, making it easier to read.
Overlooking Mobile Users
People have twice as many interactions with brands on their cell phones than anywhere else. Your mobile website design should be just as navigable as your standard website. Either create an app for your business, or optimize a mobile design for the most lucrative web visits!
Professional Content Marketing
It takes time and organization to create a content marketing strategy that works. Each step in your content and digital marketing journey will help generate awareness of your brand and target leads so you can watch your small business grow and grow. If you don’t have time to manage your own content marketing, leave it to us.
At D-Kode Technology, we can help you fine-tune your strategy to get the results you need. Let’s talk! Give us a call at 925.332.1315 to schedule a free consultation. You can also click here to drop us a line.
