Content marketing is a powerful way to help small businesses gain more customers and grow. Though for content marketing to be successfully executed it needs to have a strategic approach, which is focused on creating and distributing valuable, unique, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain audiences.
To help your small business get the most out of the content marketing efforts on your website, take a look at the following five best content marketing strategies for your website.
5 Content Marketing Strategies to Consider
Identify Your Target Audience
Content works best when its targeted for a specific audience. Rather than blindly creating website content without considering who your business’s target audience is, spending time identifying your target audience and thinking who will benefit most from your products or services and therefore whom you are creating the content for, will ensure the content you create on your site is more engaging and relatable for your target audience.
As Jennifer Yesbeck, marketing manager at Alexa writes in a blog about targeting in marketing:
“Speak directly to a defined audience. Marketing messages resonate more deeply with audiences when readers can relate directly to the information. Brands that have a large, varied market of customers often struggle with creating marketing campaigns that speak directly to their audience.”
Make Good Use of Visuals
The age-old saying “a picture tells 1000 words” bears truth today, and none more so than in the world of content marketing. Accompanying great visuals, whether it’s pictures, videos or infographics, with quality and engaging text, is one content marketing strategy for your small business’s website that should not be overlooked.
That said, one image stuck at the top of a blog won’t suffice and the content on your website should be regularly frequented with stimulating imagery.
As Neil Patel, co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics, informs in an article about Content marketing:
“Throwing a stock image at the top of a blog doesn’t cut it. You should add relevant images throughout the article. Try to keep the user’s engagement high through the whole piece of content, not just the introduction.
Create Content that is Sharable
Another vital content marketing strategy is to make the content you create on your small business’s website shareable, with the aim to make it go viral. Generating content that encourages others to share it will inevitable drive higher volumes of traffic to your website. And higher percentages of traffic means greater leads and sales.
In a post on the official SEMRush Blog, David Leonhardt of The Happy Guy Writing Services rightly states:
“Increasing your content’s social media reach can be done in many ways. In fact, it should be done in many ways.”
Create a Content Marketing Plan
Every effective and successful content marketing campaign should start with a content marketing plan. This vital content marketing strategy for your small business should ideally include mapping out potential blog titles and topics for the forthcoming weeks and months.
Include any guest blogging targets, where your content gets posted on external website to help your small business reach a wider audience, on your content marketing plan. A content marketing plan might also include the writing and distribution of press releases that focus on any news your business might have, such as launching a new product or taking on a new employee.
Such content can be an effective way to enhance your online presence and generate greater traffic to your website.
As Boney Pandya, a passionate online marketer who heads up the marketing efforts for WebNet Hosting, notes in an article on Small Business Trends:
“Press releases are a great venue for creating quality online content and developing links and avenues of sharing information.”
“Press releases not only give you quality content for Google to pick up on, they give you back links and the chance to fit in keywords related to your business venture within the text of the press release.”
Use Social Media to Share Your Website Content
Rather than merely writing a new blog and publishing it on your website or creating a new landing page and forgetting about it, share your fresh and engaging content to as many followers, fans and friends on all your social media channels. As well as using the more obvious social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, post regular content on as many social avenues as possible including LinkedIn and Google+.
As SEO and digital marketing expert Jonny Ross of Fleek Marketing advises in a blog titled ’30 Places to Share Your Website Content for Maximum Impact’:
“Like every social media channel going, Google+ is at its most effective and influential when you’re actively using it. Posting regularly is the key to the Google+ castle and, as ever, interesting content is the king. Continuously creating appealing, shareable images, posts and videos is vital to interacting with and growing your target audience.”
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