In today’s age where technology plays a significant role in our lives, nailing down your content marketing and advertising remains as crucial as ever. This is especially true for small businesses who are looking to make a dent in the industry they’re in. But that doesn’t mean you should start pumping out low-quality, in-your-face ads on Facebook. Rather, you want to develop a strategy that helps garner more interest about what you have to offer.
There’s more to content marketing than just promoting a product/service. You want to inform your audience about what you bring to the table and how it can add value to their everyday lives. This way, you can create a brand image that’s reliable, consistent, and trustworthy in the eyes of your consumers. Not all content marketing strategies are created equal and it requires careful planning and consideration to get it right.
If you’re looking to grow your business, consider these 5 actionable tips that will help improve your content marketing and elevate your brand to the next level particularly when it comes to SEO and organic performance.
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Provide your customers with a solution to their problems.
Content marketing is about educating your potential customers on how your products/services can solve their problems. To achieve this, you need a good understanding of what their pain points are. What are their frequent complaints? What keeps them up at night? One way to gather information about this is to create surveys, poll your audience on social media sites, and hold market research groups.
Once you’ve identified their problems, it’s time to build a content strategy based on providing solutions for them. For example, say you’re running an indoor playground and your intended audience might be working mums who are looking to keep the kids busy during school holidays. You can create content and suggest activities during this period or you can concentrate your content marketing efforts to answer FAQs in an engaging manner.
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Create a funnel to help guide your customers.
Small businesses require a different approach from their content marketing as opposed to well-established brands. Your goal is to make your brand more visible to your customers and this can be done through a funnel. Take the time to provide free and valuable content for your audience so you can build trust and rapport. They’re most likely to purchase your products/services when they’re fully educated on what you’re offering.
Your sales pitches will likely be more effective when you have a funnel in place. Your funnel may begin with inviting your audience to a mailing list to grab a free ebook. Once they’re on the mailing list, you can send weekly emails that contain value-packed blogs. After a few weeks, you can finally hit them with a sales pitch and know you’re selling to warmed-up customers.
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Track your numbers
As they say, the numbers speak for themselves and this remains true for content marketing. Tracking your results allows you to measure your ROI (return of investment) and find out if you’re investing your resources the right way. Installing Google Analytics is a simple way of keeping tabs on crucial data, whether it be how well your audience engages with your content to how long they’re staying on a page on your website.
Consider tracking your click rate, unsubscribe rate, and open rate as well. That way, you can tweak your content accordingly to help improve these numbers. You can take a look at how well your videos are doing by checking how long before your audience stops watching them. This brings us to the next tip which is incorporating videos into your content marketing.
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Use videos in your content marketing strategies
While content marketing is mostly associated with blogs and newsletters, that doesn’t mean you should focus your efforts on purely written form. You can also use videos to relay your content and make it easier for your clients to understand your products/services. Webinars, video tutorials, and short-form social videos can be quickly digested by your audience and keep them interested as they learn more about your brand.
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Repurpose your content
You don’t have to pump out content like hotcakes to create an effective content marketing strategy. Sometimes, it’s as simple as repurposing your old content to improve your results. For example, you can take snippets from a value-packed blog post and turn it into multiple posts on social media sites or, extract the audio from a video and add it to your podcast.
You can also take short clips from your videos and post them as stories on Facebook and Instagram. Approaching your content marketing strategy in this manner allows you to focus more on quality vs. quality which translates into better results
Take your content marketing strategy to the next level
These simple content marketing tips will help small businesses generate more interest about their products/services. As long as you remain consistent with your efforts, the results will follow. Consider applying these tips to your content marketing and watch your results improve over time.
