Utilising content marketing is a great strategy for small businesses aiming to be heard above the noise of their bigger competitors, without having to spend up big.
Content marketing involves creating and sharing valuable content to build trust and credibility with your target audience, establish yourself as n expert, and ultimately drive profitable customer action.
If you are a small business owner with a limited budget, it makes great sense to develop and implement your own content marketing strategy. In this blog I’m going to show you how, including 6 ways to come up with content topics, and 5 free ways to promote your content once it’s created.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
What is content marketing?
What are the benefits of content marketing to your business?
How to create quality content
How to come up with useful content topics
Deciding on content type
Other content creation considerations
How often should you create new content?
Free ways to share your content
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing involves sharing valuable content that appeals to your targeted audience – that is, your ideal clients. This content may be blog posts, videos, podcasts, eBooks, infographics, case studies, and more. The key is to provide useful information that appeals to your target audience, educates them, and helps them solve their problems or achieve their goals.
Content could be delivered via blog posts, by newsletters, social media posts, as a webinar, a podcast, and in other ways. SEO techniques are often used to draw prospective clients to content that resides on a business’ website.
What Are The Benefits Of Content Marketing To Your Business?
As a tool for attracting new client leads, content marketing is proven to work. According to research by Demand Metric:
- 70% of people would rather learn about a company through articles than via an advert.
- 82% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content.
- Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and, per dollar spent, attracts approximately 3 times as many leads.
All that adds up to a huge marketing opportunity for a limited cost. For small businesses, content marketing helps land sales by:
Increasing brand awareness: By creating and distributing valuable content, you can reach a larger audience and build brand recognition.
Lead generation: By offering valuable content in exchange for contact information, you can generate high-quality leads and build your email list.
Establishing your expertise: By providing expert insights and knowledge through your content, you enhance your standing in the eyes of your potential clients.
Improved SEO: By creating high-quality, keyword-rich content, you can improve your search engine visibility and drive more organic traffic to your website. Your content can also attract backlinks, which further enhances SEO.
Higher conversion rates: By building trust and credibility with your audience through valuable content, you can increase the likelihood of them making a purchase or taking a desired action.
How To Create Quality Content
To achieve these aims, you need to ensure your content is of high quality – that is, it is actually of service to your target audience. This is particularly important for SEO purposes as search engines will only rank websites highly if they consider the quality of the content to be good. Churning out mediocre quality content will not give you the SEO boost you desire.
It’s important you get your content right. So how do you do that?
How To Come Up With Useful Content Topics
The first step is to come up with content topics that are most useful to your audience. There are many ways to do this:
1. Identify commonly asked questions that you hear from prospective, or current clients, and create content that answers these.
2. Ask your customers what type of content they would like to see from your business, or what their biggest pain points are.
3. Monitor social media platforms for trending topics and see if there are any relevant discussions that you can weigh in on.
4. Stay up to date with the latest industry news and events and see if there are any topics your audience would like to hear about.
5. Look at what your competitors are writing about and see if there are any gaps in their content that you can fill.
6. Use Google Trends to see what topics are currently trending and if they are relevant to your business.
Next, couple this with keyword research, that identifies popular topics and questions related to your industry or niche. The ideal content topic is one that both informs your target audience AND centres around keywords with high search volume (and low competition for that keyword).
Deciding On Content Type
Once you’ve got your list of topics, consider how you’ll deliver your content. For example, will it be via blog posts, video, podcasts, webinars, infographics or another method?
It makes great sense to create a library of content that uses various methods. This is because different people have different learning styles, and like to consume content in different ways. Have a think about whether your target audience is likely to have a strong preference for a particular delivery method, or whether a variety of types is more likely to benefit.
Keep in mind that you can repurpose the same content in different ways. For example, a video can be transcribed to form a blog. Key points discussed in a podcast can also be presented in an infographic. This is a great way to create more content without too much extra effort, and to appeal to as broad an audience as possible.
Also consider how you prefer to create content. It’s all very well planning on creating a series of blogs, but if persistent writer’s block gets in the way, you may be better sticking to recording video, to ensure you get the content created. Don’t forget you can also outsource the bits where your natural talents (or lack of time) fail you.
Other Content Creation Considerations
You should also keep in mind the following:
- Your content should be original and unique, not copied from other sources. Put things in your own words, in a voice that resonates with your target audience.
- The content should be optimised for search engines by including keywords in a natural way. No over-stuffing! Always keep the audience in mind, not just the search engine.
- Content should be regularly updated to keep it fresh and relevant. When you do update, be sure to re-share your content.
Make sure your website is structured in a way that makes it easy for users to navigate and find the information they are looking for – on both desktop and mobile devices.
To make your content easily scannable, ensure that you use headers for written content, place markers for videos, and list start times for topic chapters in podcasts.
How Often Should You Create New Content?
This is a bit of a ‘how long is a piece of string’ question, and there really is no one-size-fits-all answer. There are a few things to keep in mind.
If you are aiming to use content marketing as a way of boosting SEO, many businesses with a large SEO budget will create fresh content once a week. However, this may not be manageable for the average small business. For you, a timetable of 1-2 times a month may be more feasible.
Consider, too, how often your audience wants to hear from you. If you are sharing bite-sized content, such as infographics or mini-blog posts via your social media, they may enjoy reading these weekly. On the other hand, if you’re emailing links to lengthy blog posts, chances are your readers will get annoyed or not have time to read everything each week. Monthly may be preferable.
The final piece of the puzzle is this – how often can you produce content and still ensure its quality? You will quickly lose your audience, and won’t enhance your SEO, if all you are producing is bad content. Only produce quantity as long as you can do it with a certain level of quantity!
Free Ways To Share Your Content
It’s not enough to write great content – you have to get it out there. There are a number of ways you can do this, without having to pay. Try the following:
1. Social Media
Write posts for all of your social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) to introduce your content and engage with your followers. Keep in mind the tone and type of post that works best for each channel, and share on each channel more than once. It’s a great idea to re-share older, relevant content every few months, in between introducing new content.
2. Email Marketing And Newsletters
Introduce and include links to your latest content in your email newsletters to subscribers. Remember to always provide relevant content, and not blast them too frequently, so they don’t hit that unsubscribe button!
You can also add a link to your most popular or recent content at the bottom of your email signature or newsletter.
3. Guest Blogging And Podcasts
Reach a new audience by writing guest posts on other websites, or appearing as a guest on a podcast, and link back to your own content.
4. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Ensure content pages on your website are optimised with keywords, meta descriptions, and header tags, so they rank higher in search results and attract more organic traffic.
5. Community Building
Engage with other experts and potential clients in your industry by participating in online discussions and communities, and share your content where it’s relevant. Do this with care, so you don’t come across as spammy.
Content Marketing – Let’s Go!
By having a sound content marketing strategy, your small business has a chance to stand out against bigger competitors without incurring high costs. It is important to ensure you’re producing quality content, that is easily understood, and in a format (or formats) that work for your target audience.
Even if you start small, adding quality content over time will help increase sales leads, improve your SEO, and make you look great to your prospective clients. Give it a go!
Lack the time or know-how to create your own content? If you’re a small service provider in Australia, Keep Up Copywriting can create quality content for you, with SEO friendly blog writing, lead magnet creation, emails and business whitepapers. Get in contact to find out more.
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