Content Marketing For Small Businesses
Content Marketing is a buzz word these days but this style of marketing has been around for ages, TV commercials, radio ads, newspaper print basically content is what you have created to share with the world. Now with the social nature of the web and more and more people being on it people are paying more attention to content marketing because unlike before you cannot just create a print ad and hope the world will see it and be excited by it.
So now you need to ask yourself how am I going to make this content work, Are people going to want to share this story? and really think about the strategic place to publish your content. The ideal result with content marketing is to get your immediate audience to share your content with their audience.
How to get started
The most expensive resource when it comes to content marketing is your time? So make sure that you plan out exactly what content you are going to create and what results you would like to achieve. If you setup a good strategy from the beginning you will save time and money.
Using the right tools for the job is very important, currently the best tools to share your content is Facebook and Google plus. So setup an account and start sharing your content. A great way of share images with your audience is through social apps like Instagram or Pinterest. All these platforms are great tools to use in your content marketing strategy.
The Importance of Social Media
Using social media to get your content seen is a core part of content marketing. You want to get your content out there, you want it to get seen. Social media makes this possible because it is all about sharing. So make sure that when you are posting content on social media there is a link to your website in the image or the video and make sure what you are sharing is relevant to the audience your are sharing it with.
Community of like minded people
Build a good community or audience of people that are interested in your content because these people will be more likely to share your content. Start small and build your community up with people who know your brand and like what you do because if they like you they will share you with their communities. This is as simple as putting a “Like Us On Facebook” link in your email signature or add a +1 button on your website.
Outside the box
Do something unexpected for your industry or niche that will get peoples attention. A good example of this is Blendec where they create a video that demonstrates the Blendec line of blenders ability to blend unusual items like iPhones. The videos were uploaded to youtube and is still watched and shared by millions.
Get Published
Content marketing is all about updating your website or blog with fresh content regularly. If you upload content once then forget about it the search engines will consider your website to be stale and stop indexing it. The best way to keep the search engines coming back is to give them something new and the way you do this is to create and editorial calendar.
An editorial calendar is what you will use to plan your next weeks months or years of content. You need to think like a publisher, magazines always know what their next issue will contain before they publish it, so figure out what you want to cover over the next days and weeks and then use a spreadsheet to lay them out. Write down what content you are going to create, what platforms you will use and when you will publish it.
Negative Feedback
I have talked to customers about social media and content marketing and they have told me that they don’t want negative feedback about their company to be posted online. Negative feedback is part of the internet and part of life because no matter what you make not everyone is going to like it and how you deal with negative feedback on the internet is the same as how you deal with it in real life. Acknowledge it, deal with it by addressing it, if someone has a bad experience with your product or service talk to them about what they didn’t like a try and fix the problem. You might find that many people are have the same issue but just not saying anything.
If you can fix it, fix it, but you are not going to be able fix everything and people understand this but ignoring negative feedback is the worst thing you can do.
Measure Your Success
Figure out how you are going to measure your success and find out what is work so that you can maximise your efforts. This is especially important if you are a small business website and content marketing is the only form of online marketing you do. One way to measure is by sales, if you are getting more sales or customers through your door then what you are doing is working.
There are also tools that you can use like Google Analytics to measure traffic on your website. If your traffic is going up then find out what content is resenting with your audience. These tools will help.
If done right content marketing is one of the most effective way of marketing and what you do today will add value to your website for years to come.