Is your small business practicing content marketing?
If not, you could be missing out!
Today, content marketing is an essential building block in a notable online presence – for businesses at every level, not just enterprise. Small businesses can greatly benefit from it.
In addition to helping your brand build authority, great content marketing also promotes brand awareness, boosts your SEO, and labels you as an engaged and unique brand in the online world.
From plumbers to SaaS companies: everyone can benefit from content marketing!
Small Business Content Marketing: Defining How it Works For Your Small Biz
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Today, content marketing is everywhere on the web.
You see it daily on social media, in blog posts, in white papers, and in the various ebooks, videos, and images brands create to interact with their customers.
Used by brands ranging from Proctor & Gamble and Microsoft to small-town dog grooming businesses, content marketing is one strategy that works hard to build online recognition. What’s more, it’s popular.
According to Neil Patel, 60% of marketers create at least a single piece of content every day. It’s also effective: content marketing leaders enjoy year-over-year site growth that is 7.8x higher than content marketing followers.
Instead of pitching customers a sales message or tracking them down and asking that they by your product, content marketing focuses on value first. By working to create something that’s valuable and helps customers answer questions and solve problems, content marketing allows brands to stand out from the “content sea” and communicate with their customers more efficiently.
Why Your Small Business Needs Content Marketing: 5 Reasons
If you’re running a small business, you have a lot to think about. From hiring and managing employees to developing your product to providing all-star customer service, life is busy! That doesn’t mean, however, that you can afford to skimp on content marketing.
Today, it’s easy for small businesses to be run over by larger enterprises or online companies. It’s tougher than ever to cut through the noise, and that’s where content marketing comes in. Ideal for helping small businesses communicate directly with and to their customers, content marketing shifts you from an obnoxious brand just looking for a sale to a helpful friend with the customer’s best interests at heart.
Here are five top reasons you need content marketing in your small business right now:
1. Content Marketing Increases Brand Awareness
If customers forget who your brand is and what it does, you can kiss success goodbye. In today’s world, it’s difficult to be a successful company unless you cultivate brand awareness. How do you do this, you ask? Through content marketing.
When you publish new content at regular, predictable intervals, your customers come to trust your company and rely on it to provide value and relevance. This, in turn, helps your brand become a household name and ensures customers will remember you the next time they need a product, good, or service.
2. Content Marketing Boosts Your Authority
Here’s an example: there are five dog-grooming businesses in your town, but only one has a blog that publishes helpful information on everything from how to stop skin itching in older dogs to how frequently you should bathe puppies. The other has no content.
Which do you think customers will choose?
If you guessed the one with the blog, you’re right. When brands demonstrate their expertise through content marketing, they become more attractive to their customers. This, in turn, helps boost sales and conversion rates.
3. Content Marketing Drives Customers To Take Action
One of the most important aspects of content marketing is that it inspires customers to make a move. Through compelling calls-to-action and helpful answers, great content helps tip customers over the edge and encourages them to take that next step – whether it’s scheduling an appointment or making a purchase.
4. Content Marketing Helps You Earn New Customers
Say you publish a blog that several of your existing customers like and share on their Facebook pages. From there, their friends and family see the blog post and read it because someone they trust recommended it. These people learn more about your brand and get answers to their questions through the post. The next time they need pet grooming, they remember that place their friend shared the post from, and they call you up.
By creating shareable content, you make it easier to attract and convert new customers. What’s more, you increase the likelihood that existing customers will see your content and enjoy it, which is pivotal to creating a recognizable brand.
5. Content Marketing Boosts Your SEO
Did you know that every page you publish is another opportunity for Google to index your business? The more content you create, the more you uplift your SEO. Here’s how that works:
According to Search Engine Land, SEO has four key elements:
Finding out what customers want and delivering it.
Re-targeting customers, even after they abandon your site.
Providing special offers for customers who “Act now.”
Developing better content that is more appealing to customers.
While meeting those four objectives might seem like a long shot, content does it effortlessly. In addition to building trust and authority in your given industry, great content also makes it easier to take control of your relationship with your customers and ensure it’s a symbiotic one.
In this way, content marketing supports and uplifts your SEO efforts, and makes them much more successful than they would otherwise be on their own.
Small Business Content Marketing: 7 Actionable Tips to Incorporate Content Marketing in Your Small Business
Now that you know “why” content marketing matters so much for small businesses, let’s talk about how you can start incorporating it into yours. Here are some top tips to get started with small business content marketing:
1. Optimize for Local SEO
If you have a local company with a brick-and-mortar location, you need to be optimizing for local SEO. One of the most critical aspects of content marketing for small businesses, optimizing for local SEO is a great way to appeal to your local customers and increase local appeal.
It’s also a great way to make sales, considering 50% of customers who conduct local searches on a mobile device visit a store within 24 hours, as do 34% of customers who search on a computer.
Not sure where to start optimizing your content for local SEO? Creating location-specific pages is a smart move, as it’s easy to focus them on geographical keywords and use them to help your customers find exactly what they need.
2. Hire Professional Writers to Improve Content Quality
If you’re not exactly Hemingway, it’s okay – you don’t need to be. Lots of companies succeed without an expert writer at the helm. Their trick is simple: they hire expert writers to help them. Even if you’re not a master with the pen, it’s unlikely anyone is ever going to take your company seriously without professional, high-quality writing in your social media profiles, blogs, and web-pages. As such, it’s smart to hire professional writers to improve the quality of your content.
This is especially true now that companies in all industries and specialties are creating more content than they ever have before. If you want to keep up, it’s essential to keep up not only with the pace but the quality of your competitors. Hiring professional writers is one of the smartest ways to do this and give your content marketing a boost all at once.
3. Start Publishing on Social Media More Frequently
A great social media strategy goes hand in hand with good content marketing. Here’s the thing: even if you’re not active on social media, other brands are, and that tricky little addition to their content marketing may well help them outpace you. As such, it’s essential to find ways to keep your brand active on social media. Today, the social web is growing faster than ever before, and simple things like sharing your unique content, curated posts, and relevant industry news on your profiles can help you stay on the bleeding edge. It may also earn you additional customers. If you need some help managing your social presence, look into hiring a social media manager or content team.
4. Start Blogging
Blogging is one of the fastest and easiest ways to improve your content strategy and take a stronger approach to content marketing. It’s also one of the best ways to earn customers. According to Impact Branding and Design, 47% of buyers view 3-5 pieces of content before talking to a sales rep, which means the more content you have, the more likely it is they’ll call your company. What’s more, marketers who blog earn 67% more leads than those who don’t.
With this in mind, start and maintain a company blog. The functionality is built right into most content management systems, and you don’t need to post every day. To start seeing results, shoot to post once or twice a week, and up the frequency as your readership grows. If you need help, you can always outsource your writing to a professional team or a freelancer.
5. Connect Your Content Platforms to One Another
Want to simplify your content marketing? Here’s an easy tip: integrate your various content platforms with one another. For example, if you host a blog on WordPress, you can integrate it with your LinkedIn and Facebook pages to make sharing and distributing your content easy. Not only does this remove content marketing steps for you, but it also helps ensure your best content is going to all your platforms, all the time.
If you have more platforms you’d like to connect, use a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule posts to your various social media profiles, from a single, convenient dashboard.
6. Consider Publishing a Paper Brochure
While it may seem like paper publications have fallen out of vogue, they’re still a valuable content asset, and they can help your company build up brand recognition and sales. The tractor company John Deere was arguably the first brand to use paper brochures as a form of content marketing, back in 1897, when they launched “The Furrow,” a simple magazine that helped farmers learn about the industry, how to care for crops, and which approaches would be most successful that season.
If you’re interested in publishing a paper brochure, or any type of print content, don’t let yourself get too carried away in thinking it’s complex and challenging. Just like a digital publication, print publications work best when they’re relevant, valuable, and exciting to consumers.
When you stick with those guidelines, your print content will do just fine.
7. Start Developing Infographics
You know what most businesses aren’t doing? Creating infographics! If you want to stand out in your industry and develop some seriously shareable content that can get you noticed on the web, infographics are the way to go. Not only do they perform better on social media than any other type of content, but they’re also intensely valuable to readers, and not that tough to create.
If you don’t feel comfortable creating your own infographics (using one of the web’s free tools), it’s easy to hire a content company to create infographics for you. Heck, Express Writers even offers infographic creation services! No matter what you choose to do, infographics are a great way to make a splash in content marketing and get your money’s worth, right off the bat. They also make your brand look professional and unique, which is essential for small businesses!
The Case for Content Marketing in Small Business
Small businesses face a unique set of challenges today. In addition to battling larger, online companies with more resources, many of them are also struggling to adapt to the digital age.
Fortunately, one of the easiest things you can do to overcome these challenges is to start adopting content marketing.
Designed to create authentic interactions with customers and position you to perfectly provide value, content marketing is the “only” marketing left for the digital age. To learn more about content marketing, or to secure world-class content for your small business, visit our online Content Shop today.
Pictures say a thousand words, so the right image can mean a lot more power for your content strategy. Words, of course, are the foundation, but images can add the appeal you need to boost it to the next level. Do you find yourself more prone to click an image or a word? Most people would answer with an image, funny meme, or even a personal picture from their own galleries.
Applying Your Content Strategy: The Various Types of Visualization
Take inventory of the sites you enjoy browsing: do they have a lot of pictures you can scan through quickly or paragraphs of text to read? When you are reading the news online, do you click on the headlines or the pictures that catch your eye? On average a user will click a picture almost double what they will click just words. How are you using that to your advantage in content strategy? Don’t say you just put up pictures and hope your audience finds it; if that’s the case, you’re missing out on traffic, big time! Just as you strategize the words you write, it is important to plan for your photos. According to Allison Carter of Raven Tools, images aren’t just for social media.
Okay, so now that you know images are important, what exactly can you use to draw in your audiences?
Stunning PowerPoint Presentations
These are not limited to boardrooms or classroom presentations anymore but rather you can use these to communicate with your audience. The design on your slides should look professional. It is the first impression your followers will see so make it a good one. Be careful to not make the slides too busy with various fonts, mismatched colors, or overstimulating animations. The grammar and spelling in your slides should be correct. This can be the perfect opportunity to incorporate graphics and images within the slides. Even when users are sliding through the information, it shouldn’t be all text. Slideshare is a great platform, and if you have an expert create your presentation in a niche market, it’s not hard to go viral on Slideshare itself.
Creative Creative Infographics
By going beyond a spreadsheet or chart, these types of graphics can incorporate content with visual art. Use both text and creative images to get your point across. The primary benefit of an infographic is that it can be shared across various platforms where pictures are the main focus such as Instagram and Pinterest. Each graphic can state a whole blog post in just one picture. It is a very effective way to send a message using colors and words, marketing your brand. Think outside the box when it comes to creating your infographics. They are a popular resource these days so set yours apart from the others out there with unique designs, readable fonts, and clever styling.
Cool Images
Plain and simple, pictures speak volumes. Mike Parkinson of Billion Dollar Graphics has data to show that over 93 percent of communication is non-verbal and people process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Images of any kind will add depth and details to content. Using images like clip art, photography or illustrations, your content can come alive and become a memorable work of marketing that is remembered by the readers. Keep in mind with images you should use professional images of high quality but not distracting images. When placing an image, it can break up text to give the reader a break from large blocks of text.
The Ins and Outs of Images in your Content
Just putting an image into your blog or content strategy is like inputting a keyword just for the sake of density. The word or phrase may not make any sense in the context, yet writers frequently practice this kind of keyword stuffing. Images follow the same principles. If it doesn’t make sense, find something else. There is a huge number of free pictures and graphic tools available online so you should never be without graphic options.
The traffic generated by sites like Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and even Twitter and Facebook is based on these sites’ ability to attract visual users. By scrolling and searching through pictures, users can quickly identify if they want to continue to your site or profile.
Labeling your image is one tool that many users neglect and it can harm their web traffic. Did you know the search engines can read your photos when you label them? Of course, the searches can’t see your photo but they can read the titles. Every photo on your site should have a creative title so along with properly placed keywords, pithy titles, and labeled pictures, users can find your content quickly. Upload photos and avoid just using preview windows on social media pages as users can scroll through and never actually click on your links.
Great content doesn’t just appear. Powerful content is strategized and planned so that each topic has a purpose and value in the marketing of a brand. The right amount of words, style, and timing are crucial to the content truly hitting its mark with consumers. Whether you have a personal brand or are working to promote a commercial brand, your content determines the success. Is that enough pressure for you to create amazing content? Don’t get overwhelmed with these types of requirements as you are probably more capable than you know of making this happen.
Strategizing & Planning for Your (Successful) Editorial Calendar
Getting Started with Great Content
It’s no secret that planning helps promote success and one of the simplest tools behind a great writer is a content calendar. Do world-renowned chefs just cook whatever they want for their guests? Do athletes exercise and train in a haphazard way? No way. Those who are experts at their craft, make a plan. In writing and content creation, an editorial/content calendar is the way to achieve this. It doesn’t have to be complicated but any type of plan will work. Before you start planning, take a minute to analyze your writing. Here are some things to consider:
Why do I write? – this will guide you to determine the style of writing. If you write for fun, think about fun topics. If you write for current trends and news, think about recent conversations you’ve had in your sphere and jot down those topics. If you write for informational purposes, read as much as you can about the markets and keep your ears open for juicy stories and details pertaining to that topic.
How often will I write? – every writer starts off their plan with lofty goals. “I’m going to write three times a week” or “I’m going to have my team produce a new blog on a daily basis.” Be realistic with your writing routine and keep in mind if you or your team produces a lot of content in a week or two, it can be saved and spaced out.
Will I add media to the pages? – this isn’t a huge deal but if you have to take the time to search for pictures, word art, or other media to go with every piece, you need to have enough time and sometimes monetary resources to purchase the media. Some websites will only hold a certain amount of pictures so if you are constantly implementing media to your blogs, it may clog up your site or cost you extra.
Benefits of the Editorial Calendar
Now that you know you want to write and why, it can be tempting to just make a note on your phone’s notepad as topics come to your head. This is a form of brainstorming and it can be helpful but in the end, this “willy-nilly” approach to your content strategy will not be effective. Still not convinced, what if you saw facts about why a calendar will be invaluable to you:
You and your writers can work ahead. Just like in school, when you knew an assignment was due and you wanted to go out with friends that night, you could study ahead of time and still get a good grade. The same is true with an editorial calendar. Your content can be done ahead of the holidays, during downtime, and can be changed as necessary.
Your content strategy will be current. When you plan ahead, your content can be moved around. For example, if you are writing about the similarities of the Superbowl and business success, you may want to plan it for January/February time frame when the game actually occurs. More people can identify with it during that time and may even find it through an unrelated search.
You can measure the content success. As with any list or documentation, referring back to it can give insight on your marketing plans at that time. If you can look at your content titles, media used, keywords that were successful, it could be duplicated for another campaign. Past success and failure can be measured when there is an editorial calendar to guide. According to Beth Kanter, this is the main key to successful blogs and marketing. It allows team members to collaborate and also to work on the same page with topics and marketing tools.
Setting up the Calendar
Don’t make it complicated. Think about your editorial calendar like a menu for the month. Mondays you are offering one thing, Tuesdays another, and so on. Check out Contently’s blog with very useful tips about this. It can be helpful to have a brainstorming session to establish the tone and writer for each of the various topics. Some writers work better with other topics than others so finding that niche for you and your team is crucial.
Set up the calendar as a way to keep everyone organized and moving forward; your writers will appreciate it and in the end, will probably stick closer to the deadlines. After all, what good is content if it doesn’t get out on time?
Have you ever wondered what sets a press release apart from an ordinary article? What makes them so special and how do you format a press release to serve its purpose? In order to achieve the goals set forth by a press release, it can be helpful to know what it is supposed to do in the first place. While there are many good press release examples, there are also plenty of poorly written ones.
A Press Release: The Start Of An Amazing Content Strategy
When writing a press release, there are several goals you should keep in your mind in order to stay on course with the word count and purpose.
1) Write the Right Type of Headlines.
Too many times a writer may say something like, “Samsung to Unveil a New Product” and while that title isn’t the worst title ever, it doesn’t draw the reader in. What if the reader doesn’t recognize Samsung as a provider for the electronics they use? You may encounter people who will associate Samsung with TVs but in reality, you are writing a press release for an innovative new phone. The audience will glance over the release and move on if they are looking for a new phone. Try a headline like this instead, “Samsung Launches never before seen Features in a New Phone.” This type of headline gives the reader an exact idea of what to expect when they continue reading.
2) Provide the Necessary Info Quickly and Succinctly.
No guesswork and no digging. You wrote the press release to disseminate information, yet sometimes the press release can leave the reader wondering where to buy the item, when it will be released, what to expect, and even who is responsible for the release. This works for the release of a new item, opening of a new venue, and even the announcement of a new hire. Maintain the fine line between giving away all the information and luring the reader in to read the website, in depth feature list, and obtaining more information. You want the reader to be alerted to the news item but to also desire to find out more.
According to several journalistic sites, the shorter the press release, the better. Keep it under 400 words. In fact, you will probably be forced to narrow it down if it comes in over that word count. Short and sweet will get the point across and not consume the reader who just wanted to know the quick version of the news.
3) Make it Fun!
When constructing a press release, it is vital to keep in mind the purpose is to release news, but the balance between interesting and professional can be met when you learn the correct way. A fun headline, quirky quotes, and even humor about the past can bring the audience into the story in a humorous manner.
Consider writing a headline that twists the words around to create an angle that will be clicked on such as: “Brave Mountain Lion Fends Off Group of Hikers” instead of “Hikers Injured Fleeing from Mountain Lion.” There are other examples where the author has sensationalized the headline a bit but the article itself still has the facts and necessary points to make it a worthwhile piece. Check out some of the controversial and eye-grabbing headlines on the Mirror.
4) Create Headlines, Sub-headlines, and Other Techniques To Help The Reader Skim.
Not only will this help the reader glean the necessary information, but also it can give the reader a quick idea if this is an article they really want to read. With so many authors writing misleading headlines, the sub-headers can assist in the overall goal of the piece for the legitimate press releases. By making the release digestible for the reader in a tablet form or even on a cell phone screen, you are ensuring the maximum amount of exposure. When was the last time you got a link for an interesting article, clicked on it through your phone, and closed out of it based on the fact that your screen was full of text that didn’t let you scroll through it quickly?
5) It Should Be Worthwhile Reading.
The Internet is not called the “Information Superhighway” for nothing! It isn’t called the little dirt road of information but rather denoted as the biggest mode of transportation, and your press release can get lost in the midst of all the options. Not only will there probably be other articles on the same topic but some will have graphics, charts, and crazy pictures to go with it. What will yours have? If a reader can get the main idea through skimming bullets, headers, and quotes, your press release can be the one referenced in their encounters throughout the day. Not only will they use your information and possibly spread your link, but you can have the satisfaction of knowing the public is learning about this news worthy item through your work.
6) Quotes!
Use quotes—but only the ones that matter. If the company is opening a new store, hiring an exceptional new employee, introducing a new product, it is safe to assume they are happy with it. So by stating the obvious, “the team is happy with the news,” you are wasting good space and the reader’s attention. Would they really be announcing the news if they hated the new hire or were embarrassed by the new release? Probably not, so steer clear of the obvious so as not to offend or annoy the reader base.
You’ve probably read some great press releases examples in your search on the web. One of the best ways to create that catching piece is to go back and read the ones that caught your eye. What was it that made you continue reading? The title, the headers, the pictures, the easy to understand terms, or the way the reader engaged you throughout? By emulating those features, you can write an outstanding piece with the potential to go viral within hours of posting.
