Top Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

If you are a small business owner and you market online, you need content marketing tactics to help your business build a strong online presence and to attract customers. Content marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies that help to bring that about. Small business owners do not just need to write good quality, educational and informative content, they must widely promote it multi-channel on the web to make it effective. These here tips can help small business owners to write and promote the right content that gets results.

 
Know your Audience

You must know your audience well enough to be able to write and promote to them the kind of content that will make impact on them. If you want your content marketing strategy to help your business, be sure you know your audience well enough. First, you must build an ideal customer persona that you are trying to reach with your content/promos. Next is to identify where this ideal customer can be located, the salient demographics, shopping patterns, order sizes, expense sizes, and how you can put your business before them. Next is to figure out how to best target this audience cost-effectively to get good results. With this information, you can better curate each of your advertisement or piece of content to have maximum impact on your audience.

Be Active on Social Media

Lately, for many small business owners, social media has become a very important and dependable tool for their digital marketing activities. Through social media, business owners can build a very valuable community of friends/followers which they can segment for effective marketing purposes. Sharing info on social media is easy and a good piece of content can easily go viral to the overall benefit of your marketing efforts. You can only get the best results from social media if you are active on it. What this means is that opening a social media account and having your profile on it cannot help your business much. You must stay active and engage your community to get good results. Answer comments and messages, and create content that encourages your audience to join in the conversation. This you can do by regularly posting quality content in form of photos, videos, blog posts, infographics etc on the most popular platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and others. You must however observe their community rules fully if you want to get the very best from these platforms. 

 
Hire a Marketing Agency

Allowing a professional digital marketing agency to handle some of the marketing activities of your business can free up quality time for you to manage the business properly. Such agencies don’t only have the experience; they also have the resilience to run things in the long term to get the best results. They usually deploy a variety of skill sets and strategies to put your business out there in the minds of prospective customers and customers. If you have the knowledge and skills, you may be able to handle some digital marketing tactics in-house yourself. But, many of these tactics could be more effective when carried out by an agency with specialized knowledge and skill-sets backed by experience. When compared with the results your business will get, the fees you pay the agency can be well worth the while in the long term.

Word of caution: Deal only with agencies that have verifiable case studies, reviews, and testimonials to back them up and they come highly recommended by businesses/persons they’ve worked with in the past.

Diligently Track your Leads

Good online analytics tools can help you with leads tracking if you want to optimize your digital marketing strategies. With these tools, you can easily chart where your leads are coming from and which marketing channels are worth investing more of your time and resources. With diligent leads tracking, you can determine which strategy is delivering the best results and through which channel. You will also know which leads are converting better to customers and which customers are doing more business with you. This info helps you to periodically reassess what you are doing, continue with what is good, rejig certain things or discard others completely.