21 Content Marketing Tips For Your Small Business

In the business world, there are majorly two types of businesses, and they are:

• Large businesses
• Small businesses

Large businesses are backed with good financial resources to carry forward their marketing plans through both traditional and digital channels. So, they don’t have much of an issue when it comes to promoting their products and services; they have all the sources at their disposal. It is a challenge when it comes to small business who have a limited budget. When the budget is limited, the marketing strategy needs to be smart, and so should be the ROI. Every penny invested in marketing should give great returns and to achieve an incredible ROI, one needs to innovative and understand how to employ the tactics of content marketing and digital PR.

Content marketing is the only marketing left

Seth Godin

Here are 21 content marketing ideas for your small business that can help you market your products and services to your niche audience.

1. Have an Online Presence

Today, almost the whole globe is online, and so would be your consumers. To interact with your customers in the digital world, you need to have an online presence as well. One of the best things to do is to have a website for your business. The website should act as an informative source to your customers about your business. It should tell them about the products you sell and the services you provide.

Once the website is made, you need to make a blog for your business, a Facebook page, a Twitter handle, and an Instagram account as well. Your website should be well designed and must reflect the business you are into, the whole game revolves around the way you present the entire content on your website and if your website is user-friendly or not.

2. Draft a Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is huge and exploring it can take no less than a lifetime. There are a lot of marketing channels, so are the tactics, and it is up to you to decide which marketing channel and which marketing tactic work best for you. It is essential since you need to focus your resources on getting better results and due to this very reason, you need to have a marketing strategy in place. For that, you need to determine a suitable social media channel that perfectly suits you, your business, and your customers. Once you do that you need to get a basic outline of the types of posts you would be putting and the frequency of posting.

The social media channels you will post, the types of post, the frequency of posting, and the audience you will target- Align all these four into one document and your content marketing strategy is ready.

3. Make a Unique Identity

From your online presence to the types of posts you put, you should carve a unique identity for yourself. When you have a different approach and a unique online persona, it becomes easier for your audience to recognise you. Building an attractive and sound presence in the digital space doesn’t come easy, you need to be persistent and frequent with the posts you put on social media platforms.

The posts must pitch your message frequently and on all major social media platforms that sync with your business. As per studies and observations, the posting frequency on Facebook should be five to ten times a week, on LinkedIn once in a day, and daily five tweets on Twitter. This is a general insight; you can figure out in the course of time what amount of posting works best for you.

4. Inbound Marketing- Educate your Customers, Not Just Promote

If you ever been a social media user, you will know, how distasteful promotional content looks. Understand this basic consumer behaviour when you are promoting yourself through your social media handles. You need to add value to the life of your customers to gain value from them. Value comes when you feed customers with information, information mixed with promoted content is the best recipe to create attractive content. It not only educates your customers but also makes them aware of the product.

5. Understand Search Engine Optimisation

To play long term in the content marketing scenario, you need to understand how SEO works. SEO is search engine optimisation where you make your content optimised for search engines so that they can get through them, understand them, and rank them as per their quality. There needs to be a certain neatness to your content for a search engine to go through it otherwise no matter how good your content would be; it won’t rank well on Google search.

To keep your SEO intact, you need to ensure that your website is mobile friendly, all pages of the website should work fine with optimised loading speed. Also, the content you post should have relevant meta-tags and description.

6. Make your Website Mobile Friendly

The usage of smartphones has increased considerably in recent years, and it is bound to increase in coming times. More and more people are consuming content through their mobile phones, and that makes it essential for you to make your website and blog mobile friendly. When it is mobile friendly, it becomes easier for mobile users to consume your content and know what you have to say to them.

7. Engage with your Visitors

Content marketing is not just about providing information and feeding promotional content to your customers. Your website is a platform where you can clear the doubts of your customers and queries of convertible leads. So, always engage with them every time you get a chance, and build better relationships with them. The objective should be to make your customers brand ambassadors for your brand. Doing so will add a lot of credibility to your brand, and it gives a testimony of how impactful your customer service is.

8. Focus on Making Real Fans

There are several people out there who lure people selling them fake followers, don’t be one of them. Social media is not about followers; it is more about engagement. I have seen social media accounts with 10k followers and just 100 likes on their posts. It is not a good trend indeed unless there is no real conversation involved, there will be minimum to 0 lead conversion.

If most of your followers are gained through unethical means, no matter what content you post, hardly anyone would engage. Moreover, if social media algorithms detect this behaviour, the reach of your posts would be lowered further. So, honesty is the best policy, focus on being authentic and making some real fans. Without that making noise on social media is of no use, it will fall on deaf ears.

9. Create Unique Content

Content is the driving force for any marketing campaign. It is with content users engage, and unique content is the primary requirement for a good marketing campaign. You can create content in interesting formats like infographics, blog posts, images, videos, and newsletters. What you need to understand is to stay strictly with your niche and not to deviate from it. You cannot create content on entertainment industry if your business deals with the food industry. It would be just a waste of efforts and resources.

10. A High Converting Landing Page

Landing pages have always existed on the internet for years, but with brands in the digital space looking to get some serious business, high conversion landing pages have become a necessity for businesses. Understand the whole process of how a landing page works and hire a good content writer and designer to make a perfect landing page for you that can generate leads whom you can turn into customers.

11. Follow the Pareto principle (80/20)

20% of efforts produce 80% of the results.

When you start content marketing, you shouldn’t start it all aggressive; it is necessary you measure the proper impact of your efforts. Marketing yourself too aggressively on all social media platforms can lead to initial burnout. Lesser but focused marketing can yield you better results than marketing that caters to all forms of the audience.

When you start marketing, observe the engagement of your content and social media channels are making. Check, which social media handles are giving you better traffic and engagement and also select activities that churned out the maximum engagement for you. Whatever works for you, invest in it more, and get better results.

12. Project Yourself as a Great Employer

If you have plans for expansion, invest in marketing your workplace as one of the best in the industry to work. Hiring is an ordeal task, and you would surely need a team of talented people who can do the job for you. This is the reason why employer branding becomes necessary for you. Focus on creating the best career page and company blog, also imitate Google when it comes to showcasing your work-culture to the world.

13. Set your Long Term and Short Term Goals to Get Better Clarity

As a small business, scaling fast should not be your goal. You must think long-term and plan accordingly to tackle all the challenges that may come along and avoid mistakes. Having long-term goals and objectives gives everyone in the team clarity towards what direction they need to move.

14. Have a Process in Place to Measure the Impact of your Marketing Campaigns

Unless and until you don’t have a process in place, you cannot execute a marketing plan effectively. Be it the in-house marketing team or any third party agency who is handling your marketing campaigns, you should have a process, a set of expectations, and marketing goals in place, without that things, wouldn’t be properly aligned, and it will get tough for you to measure, track, and better your efforts.

15. Keep a Record of Customer Interactions

The response of customers is significant when it comes to determining the response to your marketing efforts. Their opinions matter and can give you a fresh perspective on your marketing efforts. At the end of the day, you are marketing yourself to your customers, and this is the very reason their reactions matter. So keep a note of all the customer interactions, and mapping that can guide to form better marketing tactics and strategies.

16. Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the highest ROI generating online strategy. You can continually build your email list, send weekly newsletters, product offerings, and helpful insights to your customers making a healthy inbound relation. Through this, you can nurture your customers and pitch your offer to them when they are ready. Moreover, email marketing is low cost but gives you the best returns on investment.

17. Create Short ebooks

The blog posts you publish on your blog, collect them and refurbish them into a small e-book. Make it available for free or for a small fee across all social media platforms; it will help you to establish your niche in the industry. Becoming an expert in the industry will help you convert more leads into your customers as it becomes easier to convince them.

18. Video Marketing

Creating videos in your niche where you are showcasing your expertise is one of the best ways to establish your expertise before your audience. Having a youtube channel or going live through Facebook and Instagram is one of the effective ways to video market your business. Videos are a great way to convey a holistic message as they use audio as well as visuals creating a broader impact in the mind of the users.

19. Explore Other Social Media Platforms

Apart from major social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, explore platforms like Quora and Reddit which are majorly more of Q&A forums. Write on Quora and Reddit; answer questions related to your niche that further establish your expertise which can lead to lead generation from these forums as well. If your answers are convincing enough to establish your expertise, it would be enough to convert your readers into your customers.

20. Keep Updating your Internal Web Pages and Make them Better

What do you want to do when customers land on your websites? What will be their call to action? Keep these two questions in mind before creating the landing pages for your website. Use Google analytics to understand the path of your customers; it will give you a good overview of the traffic your website is generating and how much time users spend on it before bouncing off. Keeping a low bounce rate is essential for lead generation, and it is only possible when you have a website that is user-friendly and has clear call to actions(C-T-A) on every page.

21. Have Better Tools and Automate Mundane Tasks

Being a small business you must be surely running on a limited budget but investing in better tools is a long-term investment that can make you more productive. Moreover automating mundane tasks can save a lot of your time you can utilise to focus on making your work better.

A limited budget should not limit your marketing. Invest in these 21 content marketing tips and see yourself transform into a brand in online space. If you cannot do it yourself, hire a marketing firm to do that for you.

Originally published at www.bbntimes.com.