This is a guest post from Elizabeth Walker at Meegle.
We all know how important it is to market your local business online. But what exactly is content marketing for small business?
Read on to discover what content marketing is, its numerous advantages, the goals it can to achieve, and how to get started for your own small business.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 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.
In other words, it means marketing your business with the use of relevant content. This helps you attract your target audience and bring in more traffic to your business online.
On an essential note, the content you create should be in line with your company and relevant to your target audience’s needs.
You don’t need to concentrate on your products and services constantly. Instead, curate content that targets your audience’s problems.
Content marketing methods
As a smart entrepreneur and marketer, you always have the task of keeping your budget in check and making wise decisions for the growth of your small business.
But, thanks to technological innovation, content marketing strategies for small businesses are available and ready for you.
Under this section, you’ll find five powerful content marketing ideas for small businesses. There are a lot of marketing methods, but we believe these are the first tactics you should use for your small business content marketing.
Blog posts and articles
Source: Campaign Monitor
In everything you do, there’s always the question: Where do I start? And, for content marketing strategies for small businesses, the written content is your obvious starting point.
Make use of your blog posts and articles to boost your small business marketing. With the data you have at your disposal, aim to curate content that presents new information to your audience or that solves their issues.
However, if you’re having problems coming up with fresh content to write about, you always have the option to ask your customers what they’d like to know.
The internet is incredibly vast, meaning your content has to be specially curated for your audience. In other words, aim to write content for every niche that buys from your store.
It may be hard, at times, but with proper data and SEO research, you can begin to understand what questions your customers have and how you can help.
Not sure where to start researching? Use our Resources Hub to begin your data dive.
Infographics
If you’re tired of showing statistics and numbers on your blogs and articles, you may want to try another one of the available content marketing ideas for small businesses: infographics.
This type of content makes statistics easier to digest. Infographics make numbers appear more colorful and enjoyable to read and are more manageable to share than a bunch of texts.
What’s great is that you don’t have to do all the hard work with the design. Either you let your resident graphic designer come up with the idea or do it yourself with the help of hundreds of free infographic templates available online.
Your infographic works best if you give it a searchable title incorporated with relevant keywords and remember to cite your references for the data you used.
Don’t forget to include your business name and website within the infographic, as content marketing for small businesses requires branding content.
Need examples? Check out our custom-made infographics.
Interactive forms
One way to keep your potential customers stick to your website is to create interactive forms and tools within your content.
Doing that helps you generate more leads for your business. While your web content should always contain a CTA, your content works better when it requires development or urges potential customers to do something, and interactive forms help you achieve that.
Even though contact forms on landing pages are proven effective, they still don’t keep your website visitors engaged with your content for a very long time.
If you happen to be an online booking site, a calculator helps your visitors know how much they’re going to need to spend buying with your business.
That way, they don’t have to leave your site to pull up their calculators. Or worse, look for another business website with better content.
Podcasts and videos
For small businesses to survive in today’s fast-paced industry, marketers must adjust their content marketing strategies and come up with innovative ways to produce and distribute content to their target audience.
With the rise of the popularity of mobile devices, you should consider creating content that’s as portable as they are.
You can do just that with the use of podcasts and videos. These two can bring you more followers and increase engagement with your fanbase. You can make these files available on on-demand sites like iTunes or Spotify for podcasts, and Youtube or any social media website for videos.
Tips
Below are tips that some of the successful small businesses of today are applying to their content marketing.
Know your target audience and understand their needs.
As a business owner, it’s your job to understand your target audience. Your small business won’t taste success in the industry if you don’t know who your target market is and what they need.
The same goes for content marketing, knowing your target audience is crucial in creating a solid foundation for your content. It prevents you from wasting time coming up with content that’s irrelevant both to your line of business and your audience.
Conducting in-depth research on your target audience is a great idea to make sure you understand them and their needs.
Once you get a hold on understanding your target audience, it’ll be easy for potential customers to find you. That’s because you figured out the content you’re going to produce that hits home to your audience.
But always remember to avoid being hard-selling in tone with your content, as it’ll undoubtedly turn your customers off.
Give them what they want.
Source: Campaign Monitor
After you’ve come to understand what your target audience needs, the next best step is to give them what they want. As a small business owner, you know that it’s not about you.
Doing small business marketing means making it more about the customer and their needs.
Thus, you have to give them solutions to problems and answers to questions that are relevant to your business, and they’ll likely come back for more and do business with you again.
Originality is best.
Producing content can be hard at times, but keeping it original can take you miles ahead of the competition. Take pride in everything that your business does and show it to your target audience through your content.
Formulate a sound small business marketing strategy that would allow you to showcase everything you could offer to the market, and be original as you can be.
Create well-crafted content.
Source: Campaign Monitor
In every blog about how to do content marketing, it’s always preaching about creating a well-crafted content: It’s part of what makes customers interested in your brand.
Quality content means being original, informative, honest, thought-provoking, and actionable. If you lean on these five qualities when you’re in the process of curating content, then keep going—you’re on the right track.
Wrap up
A wise small business owner and marketer should always remember that there are a lot of ways that you can utilize your content and come up with various content marketing ideas for small businesses.
You have to dig deep and show everyone what your business is made of. It’s also essential to curate meaningful content that keeps your brand attractive to your target market.
Never be afraid of trying out new ways and innovate your content marketing strategies like making infographics, podcasts, and videos, as opposed to doing everything in text only.
Author Bio
Elizabeth Walker is a Marketing Outreach Specialist for Meegle and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing Management. She writes articles with essential tips on digital marketing and helps small businesses achieve their business goals through their SEO and social media campaigns.