Effective content marketing for business is one of your best marketing strategies to spread the awareness of your brand and gain the trust of your customers. There’s one problem, content marketing is a difficult and time consuming task. Here’s how to make content marketing a little easier as a local business owner.
Review Existing Content
To start, let’s take a look at your existing content. If you want to know whether your content marketing could use more work, carry out the following observation. Search for the products or services that your business offers online.
For instance, if you are a HVAC company in Los Angeles, CA, search for HVAC companies in Los Angeles, CA. Does your company website appear on the first page of the search results? If your company is nowhere to be found on the search engine results pages, then you need to upgrade your content marketing strategy.
In this article, we will break down the best content marketing strategies that will help to grow your small business. Check them out below.
Set a goal for the content
If you want your content marketing to generate results for your local business, make sure that you set a specific goal for each piece of content. Setting a goal allows you to determine the type of content you need to create and your expectations from the content.
Some of the common content marketing goals that will help generate more leads and conversions for your business include:
Customer engagement
A great customer engagement goal is setting a target for the number of customer engagements that your business will receive. For instance, a customer engagement goal could be to receive 10 email newsletter signups from potential customers in 90 days.
Brand loyalty
You can aim your content marketing goal towards building more brand loyalty by measuring your referral customers. For example, aim to raise the number of customer referrals by 10% in 6 months.
Employ new recruits
If you want to grow your business by adding more team members, you can set a goal to increase the total number of applications by 5% for the next 3 months.
Brand awareness
Do you want more people to know about your business, especially in your area? A brand awareness goal will provide a fruitful content marketing strategy. You can set your brand awareness goal as gain 100 new followers on Instagram and Facebook in 6 months.
Build brand authority
Customers are likely to purchase from you if they feel that your brand provides them with valuable information and that you are a thought leader in your field. Your goal to build brand authority can be something like improving the number of links or shares of your website by 10% over the next 6 months.
As you can see from the above goal examples, content marketing is not just about generating more sales leads for your business. When planned well, content marketing can help to take your business to the next level and give you a competitive edge against other businesses.
Identify your target audience
If you want your small business to grow, you need to identify your ideal customer so that you can create the best content for them to consume. We recommend finding out your ideal customer’s pain point and creating content that provides solutions based on the pain point of the potential customer.
For example, why would your customers need to buy your products or services? How will your products make the lives of your clients much easier?
Also, if you are on the internal marketing team of a business, we recommend creating a buyer persona for your potential clients. Start by answering questions like:
- What is the age of your ideal customer?
- What is the level of income of your ideal customer?
- Which type of content is your ideal customer likely to consume?
- Does your ideal customer use social media platforms?
Knowing the above details about your ideal customer will help you market the right content to them. For example, if your ideal client is 60 years and above, Facebook is more likely their preferred social media platform compared to TikTok and Instagram. Therefore, you will receive more leads and conversions from a Facebook ad campaign compared to an Instagram ad campaign.
Build a presence on social media
If you want your business to sell its products more actively, we recommend building a social media presence in case you don’t already have one. Create a page on at least two social media platforms for your business e.g. Facebook and Instagram.
Facebook has 2.93 billion active monthly users while Instagram has 1.44 billion active monthly users. This shows you that you cannot just rely on your website alone to attract potential customers. Thousands of customers that are in need of your products or services are scrolling on social media right now. You just have to ensure that your content appears on their screens at the right time.
In order for your business to attract more customers on social media, you need to ensure that you are speaking to a very specific audience. Not everyone on social media is in need of the products or services that you are selling. Therefore, when posting content on social media, do not address everyone in the audience. We recommend addressing only those who are already interested in the services and products that your business provides.
The best way to address your specific target customer on social media is by using the following strategies:
- Aggregate your existing consumer data in order to identify sites where your ideal client spends most of their time.
- Visit the social profiles of your competitors to check the platforms where they have the most active clients.
- Make use of free tools such as Google Analytics to learn about the consumer behavior of your ideal customers online.
By finding out the above information about your ideal customers, you will be able to create content that appeals to them and draws them to your business.
Hire expert content writers
Finally, the best way to improve the content marketing strategy of your small business is to hire expert content writers that know exactly what your target audience wants to read about and which platforms to post on.
Also, if you are too busy running your small business and you do not have an internal marketing team to take care of content marketing, outsourcing content experts will prove very effective for your business. We have content marketing experts who can grow your small business into an authoritative big business brand over time.
Content Marketing for Small Business
Remember to use these tips and tactics to begin effectively building content for your business.
- Review Existing Content
- Set a Goal for Content
- Identify Your Target Audience
- Build a Presence on Social Media
- Hire Expert Content Writes
With these guideing principles, you’ll be growing your small business online in no time. For help or questions, reach out to us anytime.
