What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing strategy focused on creating and distributing relevant, consistent and valuable content to attract, engage, and retain the right audience. It is about educating your audience about your brand.
Why content marketing for small businesses?
Small businesses mostly run on a tight budget and spend less time and money on content marketing. But every small business needs a strong content marketing plan that will set the foundation for a long term customer base, brand awareness, and engagement.
Here are 5 simple and most effective content marketing ideas to grow your audience and convert them into clients.
After figuring out that you do need content marketing for your business, start easy with these ideas:
Make the most of social media
If your business is not yet on social media, you're missing out on a lot of opportunities to grow your business. It is the best platform to put your content marketing into practice.
There are over hundreds of social networking sites, and as a beginner, it might be overwhelming and complicated. So how do you get started?
Here are some tips:
- Pick the right social networking site, be it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or others. It's not necessary to be in all of them.
- Start creating content.
- Do competitor analysis and find out what is working for them. This will give you an idea of what type of content to start with.
- Invite your friends and family to follow you. Ask them to like and share the content you shared.
- If you have blogs published don't forget to share it on social media.
- Respond to any queries, comments, and messages. Build an engaging and exciting environment with your followers.
Start creating and publishing high-quality content
Focus on creating relevant content and make the process consistent. It is comfortable to start with articles related to your industry. Later add more content like infographics, videos, guides, case studies, quizzes, interviews, podcasts and many more.
Do a competitor and content analysis to identify the content that already exists or that lacks. Keyword research is a must before putting pen on paper.
If you want to gain traction, it is important that what you're publishing is well researched and non-plagiarized.
Video content for higher engagement
More than 50% of marketing pros worldwide name video as the type of content that yields the best ROI. The video marketing stats are staggering, which shows that video content drives the most engagement and conversion rate than any other type of content.
For small businesses that are prepared to spend a higher budget on content marketing, video is the type of content they should be focusing on.
The video content types you could create are awareness videos, interview, product demo, vlogs, how-to videos, product review, Q&A, live streaming and many more.
The challenge with creating videos is people will skip it instantly if the video fails to excite and engage them within seconds. So, whatever the video is about it must catch the eye of the audience within 5-10 seconds.
Launch a Podcast
Audio podcasts are an excellent way to connect with your company’s customers and prospects. Executed well, podcasts provide useful, informative, and entertaining content that people will want to listen to.
For small businesses, podcasts may sound a little overwhelming but if you’re a business in an industry that has a high customer value, then a podcast may be one of your most effective education and marketing tools.
The best podcast platforms in 2019 are iTunes, Spotify, Overcast, Castro, Google Podcast, Breaker, Stitcher and many more.
The best part of having your podcast is that people can listen to it wherever they are and whenever they want.
Create a high-quality mobile experience
People spend more time on smartphones for searching, reading and engaging in your content more than any other device. The mobile traffic is soaring each year as stats show 47.96% of the web traffic is generated through mobile devices.
In March 2018, the Mobile-First Index began to roll out. This meant that Google started to use the mobile version of a page’s content for indexing and ranking to make search results more relevant for mobile users.
Tips for creating high-quality content for a better mobile experience :
- Make sure the website is responsive
- Enhance the site load speed on mobile
- Write shorter and captivating headlines
- Use a clean user-friendly design
- Optimize for social media sharing
- Break up text with images
- Use AMP (accelerated mobile page) feature for a better experience
You probably have a long road ahead building the go-to content marketing strategy. The above bits and pieces of information will surely have a huge impact on your business.
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