Tested Content and Video Marketing Techniques for Small Business

In digital marketing parlance, content is king. Good content is indispensable to effective marketing in the digital world; the reason content is everywhere out there. Marketers need content in their websites, social media handles, for their email marketing campaigns, brand design and content marketing strategies. However, an effective content must not only have good quality, it must also have context. Before creating content therefore, you must keep your audience, the platform you are using, your brand, and the customer experience in mind. That is about the best way to create quality content that has context and gets the best marketing results.

Content Marketing Techniques

With the right content marketing techniques, you can plan on pleasing your audience consistently with high-quality content, by way of the following content marketing methods.

Blogging

Marketers usually create content and market it through their blogs. That is blogging which is about the most popular content marketing technique out there. Through your published blog content, you can start generating recurring traffic to your own site. That is the kind of content that serves multiple purposes for your business, particularly for:

Driving organic traffic
Troubleshooting for customers
Building your brand authority as a thought leader
Serving content for paid traffic, and
Providing helpful content for users

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is about the best way to expose your brand to new audiences by guest posting on other blogs. This you can do through a mutual blog-post exchange with other brands, pay to contribute, or even by just providing valuable free content to another website. What you choose to do depends on the relationship you establish with other businesses/brands/popular blogs. It is all about better exposure for your content. If your guest-blog host is hugely popular with a large following, that’s great.  It gives you a great platform to better spread awareness for your brand. The key to guest blogging is to provide plenty of value first then plug is your business later.

Podcasting

When compared to other forms of content marketing techniques, podcasting appears to be a relatively new content marketing strategy. As an effective marketing technique, it does not appear to be too saturated yet. You can package influencer interviews, specialized how-to expertise and suchlike great info for your audience in podcasting form. If you are packaging influencer interviews, getting your first big interview is usually the hardest part. If you manage to get a good one, the snowball effect can keep your momentum going for quite a while.

Gift Content

Depending on the product you are marketing, you can create some free content as giveaways on your website. Your website visitors can have these gifts in exchange for their email addresses which you need to build your email list. Such free content could be in form of an eBook, access to a guide, a checklist, or even some discount coupon. Just make sure to offer some valuable things to your audience in exchange for their email addresses. On your website, you can then create landing pages and signup forms to promote your content. Next move is to drive traffic to these pages. If the pages are well optimized, they will help your conversions to new leads and even sales.

Video Marketing Techniques

Smart marketers can always find affordable ways to incorporate video into their small business marketing strategy. This is because of the high effectiveness of video marketing. If your marketing videos are well shot, they could make all the difference between your customers choosing your product or your competitor’s. Most times, such videos might really be all a buyer needs to buy your products outright or sign up for a free trial.

Here are a few highly effective and budget-friendly ways you can use videos in your small business marketing program:

Product Videos

Marketers use product videos to explain more about the product/service they are marketing. Through these videos, marketers can clearly outline how the product works, why it’s helpful, use cases, and even its salient and useful features. These videos tend to act like premieres to exciting movies. If well shot, videos should be exciting enough to grab viewers’ attention and make them to click a link to learn more about the product/service, make a purchase, or sign-up for a full-fledged demo.

How-to Videos

Marketers create how-to videos to practically teach their customers how the product/service they are marketing works. Whatever the product is, most buyers always want to know how they can use it to do for them what the marketer says the product can do. A proper video demonstration of how a product works can actually entice buyers to buy the product. Marketers like to create such videos to show customers how to for instance assemble a piece of equipment they are selling. That practical demonstration is usually more helpful to buyers than any Manual of Operation no matter how beautifully written.

Reviews and Testimonials

Most online shoppers usually trust customer reviews. A very high percentage of online shoppers read online reviews before making their buy decisions. Reviews are more in text form while Testimonials if in video form tend to get better attention. With Testimonials, you get to control the narrative and use them on any platforms or channels you prefer. You may choose to collect just short one-liner testimonials for your website/blog. Long case-study testimonials are best suited for your YouTube and social media channels.

Video Advertising

You can market your business with video on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Some of these videos could be short in-stream skippable video ads, non-skippable bumper ads, overlay ads, or display ads. For best results, you can experiment with different ads formats to see which resonate most with your audience. You can then choose the ones that get you the best returns on your marketing investment then build your marketing strategy around them.