Today’s digital marketing world is all about content. Sharing content. Sharing wisdom and knowledge of your chosen industry or business. Before we get into thinking about our small business content marketing tips, to help drive engagement, leads and ultimately sales, let’s think about what we mean by content marketing.
Oxford Languages define content marketing as:
“Content marketing is a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.”
There are many definitions of content marketing, but this one seemed to really clearly explain what we mean.
The benefits of content marketing
There are a couple of really key benefits of content marketing. The first being that 70% of your clients would rather read about you from an article rather than seeing an ad, before they make a purchase from you. Sharing articles will help you increase your brand visibility, answering your client’s questions and helping them understand what you do. As part of this process to, it also helps you to build trust and authority, if you answer a question for them, it can also show that you understand their challenges.
The other key benefit to content marketing is that it will help, support and underpin your SEO activity. Continually engaging with your audience and starting a conversation, will prove to the digital algorithms that you are also an authority in your specific industry.
Sharing 8 best small business content marketing tips
We now understand what we mean by content marketing and wanted to share our top tips to help you get started and ultimately, drive business:
1. Create a content marketing strategy. As with all marketing it is important to understand what you are trying to achieve with the activity that you are investing in. Start by defining your SMART business objectives, understand your target audience, what channels you will be using and how you are going to measure success. We explore this topic a little more in one of our blogs – 7-steps to create a small business content strategy.
2. Build an editorial calendar. As part of your content marketing strategy you would generally also include the planning of an editorial calendar. You would start by creating a plan of overarching themes to focus on across the year. This is important as you wish to ensure that all of your marketing channels are working together, to achieve your overarching business goal.
3. Repurpose content. As a small business owner you generally set up your business because you love what you do. If you are a florist, you want to work with flowers and create beautiful displays, not sit at your desk and work on your accounts, HR challenges or build your marketing. This is where content repurposing can really help. From one blog, for example you can create multiple social media posts and use it as the base of your newsletters saving you time, money and ensuring you are taking a coordinated approach. To find out more about how this works, check out one of our recent articles “8 ways to repurpose blog content.”
4. Create engaging content. This is really the ultimate aim of all content we create. We want our audiences and communities to like what they see or read and let us know. Don’t forget, in some cases, people see what you post or share, but don’t let you know that. There have been many examples where people have checked out Rimu, I have not known but they have just got in touch anyway.
5. Be personal. As with all marketing today, the more personal and relevant you can make it to your audience, the more likely they are to engage with you. This was a trend we noted in one of our earlier blogs this year, which was is to continue “2021 Small Business Marketing Trends“. With some media this can be easier than others. For example if you set up an email automation series, it is easier to set up a series of messages to be deployed, taking your clients on a journey.
6. Be visual. Generally most of us engage and absorb information through images, graphics and demonstrations. The old adage of “pictures speak a thousand words” has never been more true. Try where you can to share insight an knowledge, but also to include visuals or video to help illustrate what you are trying to say.
7. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Remember to think about SEO when it comes to content marketing – think about the audience you are targeting, their needs and what they are likely to type into a Google search. Make a list of potential keywords and search terms and work these (with careful consideration) into blog titles and opening paragraphs, website pages.
8. Track results. As with all marketing it is really important to realise what is working and what is not. With content this can be seen through likes, shares and comments in social media; comments on a blog and of course ultimately people picking up the phone to buy you product or service.
If you would like some help in drawing up your content plan for Q2, please go get in touch to arrange your no obligation discovery call.
Sources:
- https://neilpatel.com/blog/small-business-content-marketing/
- https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2020/11/23/content-marketing-trends
- https://nethunt.com/blog/content-marketing-strategy-2021/
- https://visme.co/blog/content-marketing-tips/
- https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2021/01/04/best-marketing-strategies-2021
- https://www.outbrain.com/blog/b2c-content-marketing-tips-small-businesses/
