Practical Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

In digital marketing, content is king. Content marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on the creation and promotion of quality content for a target audience. The reason it is now inevitable for small businesses to include content marketing as an indispensable part of their marketing plans. As for small business online marketing strategies, many rely on optimizing good content to enhance their online visibility through search and sharing. What many small businesses really need is to continuously create content that their audience needs. Such content that turns up if and when people search to solve a particular problem is it. If your content consistently helps searchers to solve their pressing problems, they are usually more inclined to trust you and to seek you out when they need help. By creating quality content therefore, it can help your business to clearly differentiate and distinguish itself if it explicitly shows people your expertise and business personality. This is the ideal scenario but many small businesses usually struggle to meet these ideals for varied reasons. These here practical content marketing tips can help small businesses out to overcome some of their content marketing challenges. 

Make Your Content Strategic

Not all content is valuable for search purposes. Content that is optimized with the right keywords is most desirable. It takes strategic writing to get that. Small businesses need to research the important search terms and keywords to use in crafting content that search engines can find and index. Write content that answers questions searchers ask when they search. When this content has the right SEO from the use of appropriate keywords throughout the content and even the business website, it benefits from good organic traffic from search engines.

Promote your Content

It is of no use writing a great content if nobody gets to see it. It is advisable to put all of your valuable content on your website and then promote and share it as widely as possible. That is how it gets the much needed attention and readership. You can promote your content by emailing it to your subscribers, sharing it generously on the right social media channels and encouraging your followers on these platforms to help in sharing it too. If feasible, you can syndicate your content to give it a wider reach.
 
Have a Content Calendar/Plan

Small businesses are usually more successful with their content marketing strategies if they market with simple plans and content calendars. Your content calendar can be so simple as to just contain a list of topics and dates to publish. It can also provide monthly themes, topics and what type of media you plan to use. That it is documented is what enhances its usefulness and effectiveness for marketing purposes. Small businesses that document their strategies are more likely to succeed in their marketing activities than those who do not. The plans and calendars they document are the real practical strategies that help to shape their content particularly when such plans factor in the target audiences, the type of content that resonates with them, the relevant topics, the channels of dissemination, and exactly where and how they intend to further promote the content for best results.

Market with Quality Content

It is no longer secret that many small businesses are producing a very huge amount of content online. For this reason, it is businesses that create the very best content who manage to get attention in the very noisy and crowded online market. What that means is that if you want to stand out and get some attention, the content you publish must not only be good, it must be unique, informative and authoritative enough to get you some attention. Great quality is the watchword if you want good results.

Create a Blog

Blogging is readily the most popular content marketing strategy among small businesses. If you know what others don’t know and will like to know, you can create a blog to share your info. From such information, you can create blog posts with great visuals and share them widely on various marketing channels including social media platforms. To avoid monotony, you can blog on a variety of topics in your business niche provided such topics are sufficiently educational and informative. Once you are able to create a great piece of content, you can repurpose it into different content types and share it on different platforms. How-to videos, step-by-step guides, podcasts and business quizzes are great contents that can help attract traffic to your business. Somehow, a variety of content delivered on different media types manage to keep people interested in what you have to say. If you choose the right piece of content for the problem you are helping to solve, you can better connect with people who need what you are offering.

Tell Interesting Stories

Story! Story!! Story!!! Yeah, many human beings really love stories. The way you tell great stories to people can affect them differently depending on the situation they find themselves. Great stories are stories about business challenges, booms and bursts and how businesses managed to survive their ordeals. Stories about great business experiences that can help others to succeed are good stories too. You can tell stories about why you chose a certain solution and how it helped resolve a customer’s problem in the past. Stories that help people resolve serious problems can make an emotional connection, build trust or provide a good motivation for people to do something great.

Have a Call-to-Action, CTA Button on Your Website

Online, people generally need to be encouraged to take some form of action. That is where a CTA button on your business website is very important. With it, you are directly inviting your website visitors to do something and it kind of elicits an immediate response if it is effective. CTAs are not just any call to action. To avoid a possible disconnect, your CTAs must always match what your content is about. They could be a call to watch a video, sign-up for email list, enter a contest, bid for a token gift, learn more about products/services or just to download a useful piece of content.

Outsource Content

No doubt crating quality content continuously is hugely tasking and time consuming. Marketers have found a way around this challenge. They now outsource content creation to someone else or to some agency that also help to distribute it. If you outsource, it is advisable to directly oversee the process yourself to make sure the content being created aligns with the vision and beliefs of your business. You can also work with a reputable marketing agency that specializes in inbound marketing to help you incorporate content marketing in search and social media activities. Even if you have plenty of content to share, what matters most is that such content must align with what your potential customers want and in what format they want it shared. It is only by so doing that the content gets the expected results.

Market with Email

Marketing with email is hugely effective if you already have a reliable and dependable email list. You must therefore build an email list first and use it to regularly share content with your subscribers. If your email list has quality and is reliable, it will enable you to reach interested subscribers on your terms even if they are in their thousands. It is by far easier to market to subscribers in your mailing list because they have already shown some interest in your business as against your social media audience who merely see your posts some times. If you have an email list and you regularly share content with them, it helps to put your business in their minds. Regularly sending them newsletters with helpful tips and special offers helps to keep your business visible and remembered and the offers therein can somehow encourage your customers to make their buy decisions.

Don’t Ignore Visuals and Formatting

Good content must always have clear visuals and formatting to enhance readability. When you post content whose text is in very small font sizes, it will certainly not be inviting enough to read. Such content is usually read with some difficulties if read at all. When content users who habitually scroll by in a rush hit content like that, it is usually not powerful enough to arrest their attention for a while at the very least. Naturally, human beings are are visual creatures. That is why good images, graphics and videos are very useful to help break up a text to make it easier for people to consume. When your content has good visuals and it is well formatted, it helps to enhance user experience.