By Joseph Dyson
In the rapidly growing and constantly changing world of digital marketing, trends keep coming and going. However, there’s one trend that has endured the test of time: content is king.
You see, the content you put out is central to the success of all your digital marketing efforts. Whether it’s SEM, PPC marketing or SEO – content marketing is a fundamental part of all digital marketing strategies. Just think about it for a second; how will you drive sales if there’s no content to describe your product?
Moreover, it also helps you build brand awareness and trust. Effective content marketing is what sets you apart from your competitors and enables you to generate leads and make sales. Whether you’re the owner of a small business or you’re running a giant corporation, leveraging content marketing is vital to your enterprise’s success.
So now that you have an idea of how important content marketing is, let’s take a look at some awesome content marketing strategies for small businesses.
1. Understand Your Target Audience
Researching and understanding your target audience is perhaps the most important strategy and one that you should spend the most time on. If you don’t have a thorough understanding of your target audience, you’ll just end up wasting money, time and energy on creating content that doesn’t offer much in return.
Here are some tips on creating engaging content that your audience will love:
- Request feedback from past clients
- Conduct online and offline surveys
- Learn using Google Analytics so you can understand consumers’ behaviors through analyzing web traffic
- Experiment with different types of content before finding one that truly works for you
2. Be Creative & Unique
There’s no shortage of content on the internet, which is why you’ll need to get creative and create unique content that grabs the attention of your audience and sets you apart from the crowd. The key to sharpening your content strategy is to be your own self and test out different things. You’re probably familiar with the old adage, “Rome wasn’t built in one day.” Well, the same goes for a successful content marketing strategy. Getting it right takes time.
3. Be Consistent in Creating New Content
Having just a handful of YouTube videos and a couple of blog posts on your website isn’t going to do much for you. Money, time and constant effort is what fuels a successful content marketing strategy. The more content you put out, the more authority you will build, the better you’ll generate trust, and the more conversion you’ll be likely to make.
4. Promote Your Content
What’s the point of engaging valuable content if no one gets to know about it? In fact, many digital marketing experts emphasize more on content promotion than they do on content creation. In my opinion, however, this depends on a number of different factors, such as the type of business, competition, etc.
Personally, I would advise that you place equal focus on both. Content creation is just as important as content promotion. You don’t want to be spending your time and resources on promoting invaluable content too, right? Another important thing is to make sure that you distribute your content across a multitude of platforms – whether its search engine, podcasts, social media, etc.
5. Include Visual Components
If there’s one thing those of us in digital marketing circles are sure of, it is: People. Love. Visuals. You see, our brain processes visual information much faster than it processes written words. This is the main reason why images have been used in content creation and advertising for ages.
As content marketing has evolved, new visual strategies have emerged. Infographics have proved to be a particularly successful visual content marketing strategy. They’re easy to digest, and provide information in an interesting, visually attractive manner.
6. Leverage Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
While paid ads can be used to enhance the online accessibility of your content, even paid ads need some basic SEO to achieve maximum results. In fact, small business SEO is essential to creating a long-term strategy that effectively reaches your target audience.
To put it simply, search engine optimization is utilizing keywords in your content that will enable the search engine to find it when those keywords are searched. You should target a specific keyword with each content piece you create. Devising a proper SEO strategy is crucial to a successful content marketing strategy.
7. Use Podcasts & Videos
Podcasts and videos are one of the hottest trends in digital marketing these days. In fact, it is forecasted that by 2022, 82% of all consumer internet traffic will be comprised of online videos. So incorporating videos and podcasts in your content marketing strategy is a good way to differentiate yourself from your competitors and receive more ROI.
Featured photo credit: Depositphotos