For your small business to reach a wider audience you need to leverage content marketing. This is because it will help you connect with your target audience affording you the opportunity to offer valuable and relevant contents to them in exchange for their trust and loyalty.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the process of creating valuable contents for your target audience which may include blog posts/articles, videos, infographics, e-books, etc.,. It gives small business owners the opportunity to create value for their ideal customers by providing solutions to their needs, educating and enlightening them to mention a few.
While it is important for entrepreneurs to embrace content marketing, it is also crucial that they come to terms with the most effective content marketing strategies that will help take their businesses to their audience and increase their conversion rates.
10 Best Small Business Content Marketing Strategies
Know your Audience
As an entrepreneur looking to incorporate content marketing into your business, you cannot afford to push out contents without a clear understanding of who your target audience or ideal customers are. You must first conduct a thorough research on your target audience, looking into their demographics e.g., age, gender, status, profession, hobbies, etc.,. You might also want to investigate their psychographics: factors that influence their actions, the way they think, things that condition their view of life such as their values, beliefs, customs, norms, etc.,.
You need to gather relevant data on these aspects of your ideal customers lives before you hit that publish button. This is because if you publish contents on the internet without researching your target audience, you will end up with little to no engagements and you will reach a narrow audience whose interests do not coincide with what your business has to offer.
"Understanding your audience is key. Tailoring contents to their needs brings trust and loyalty".- Sarah Johnson, Marketing Expert
You need to do a thorough research on your audience in order to create more tailored contents that meet their needs, solve their problems as well as entertain them. For instance, a brand like TECNO, that specializes in the production of mobile devices will not create contents on how to gain admission into tertiary institution because it does not align with the needs of their target audience.
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You can use a variety of tools to conduct your research on your target audience like: Google analytics, Google trends, Qualtrics, BuzzSumo, Census Bureau, Make my Persona, and Statista.
Publish Only Valuable Contents
After figuring out who your audiences are and what they need, the next step to implementing an effective content marketing strategy for your small business is to create valuable and relevant contents. Your contents must provide value to your ideal customers.
This is why it is important to make sure that your contents go through a thorough brainstorming process so that you can come up with the best solutions to your audience's pain points and communicate it to them in a clear and concise manner. Your contents do not only need to provide solutions to their problems, they also need to educate your customers.
If you run a business in the skincare industry, you can dedicate your contents to providing easy-to-follow how-to tips for your audience. These could be through articles or explanatory videos that breakdown the complex procedures of using your skincare products. It can also offer natural tips to get a healthy skin—your contents must not only centre on what you sell.
"Content should aim to educate, entertain or solve a problem. Valuable content keeps your audience engaged". - David Lee, Content Strategist
Your contents should be able to get your audience to sit comfortably and feed on the information you have to offer which is why they must be carefully thought out and researched as well as creatively presented.
Level up your SEO Game
If you have made the decision to implement a productive small business content marketing strategy, then you must level up your SEO game. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is very important for any business that wishes to create contents and reach a wider audience.
By optimizing your website or social media accounts for search engine, you will be able to reach a wider audience. When you implement SEO techniques, your contents will gain the recognition of search engines and they will always be recommended when people search for information related to the kinds of contents you publish.
"Optimizing contents for search engines enhances visibility. Research keywords and use them strategically ". - Emma Carter, SEO Specialist
One of the most important techniques for optimizing your contents for the web is to conduct thorough keyword research. Keyword research is the process of sourcing for particular words that people are searching on the internet related to the kind of contents your create both short tail—one to three words keywords, and long tail keywords—phrases. When you research keywords that people are constantly searching on the web and strategically integrate them in your contents, you would be able to gain the favour of the algorithm and reach a wider audience.
Other helpful SEO techniques include: optimizing your meta description, using relevant hashtags, publishing quality and informative contents among others.
Publish Contents Consistently
One of the best content marketing strategies for small businesses is to create contents consistently. While there are no hard and fast rules for determining the frequency of content creation, it is important that small business owners ensure they publish contents consistently to engage with their audience.
Some brands may publish contents hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or even quarterly. The consistency of your output, however, depends on a number of factors such as:
- Availability of time and resources
- Nature of your competition
- Engagement of your audience
- Goals of your contents
- Size of your audience
When you have carefully considered these factors, the next step you need to take is to formulate a posting schedule for your contents. Find out what times your audiences are most active and devise a way to publish your contents around those times and be consistent with it.
" Consistency is key. Regularly publishing contents keeps your audience engaged and eager for more". -Mark Brown, Digital Marketer
You will be able to keep your audience engaged with your platforms and increase traction to help you reach a wider audience when you create contents consistently.
Social Media Engagements
If you want to truly engage with your target audience through effective content marketing strategies, one of the best ways is to invest in social media engagements. You need to create social media accounts for your business where you can engage easily with your ideal customers and publish helpful contents.
However, you cannot afford to burden yourself with the responsibility of creating accounts across all platforms as managing them will get you burned out. You need to conduct a research to know which platforms your audiences are more likely to be found. For example; Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, Telegram, Rumble, etc.,.
When you know which platforms your audiences are more actively on, you will know which media accounts to create and engage with your audience. If the responsibility of managing your business and handling your social media accounts pose a challenge to your productivity, you can always hire a social media manager to manage your accounts for you.
"Social media platforms offer an excellent avenue for engagement. Interact, Share and respond actively". -Lisa Smith, Social Media Manager
Engaging with your audience through social media platforms can help you establish a cordial relationship with your audience and create a more loyal following. Take it upon yourself to respond to comments, provide answers to questions and clarify them on issues they do not fully comprehend.
Prioritize Visual Contents
While blog posts and articles are important content marketing strategies for small businesses, you need to prioritize visual contents as they perform even better. Blog posts are majorly texts that provide useful and valuable information to your audiences, however, visuals are more appealing to them which is why you must prioritize them in your content marketing strategy.
Uploading contents like pictures of your work place or production process or videos: explanatory how-to videos, informative infographics is a good marketing strategy to keep your audience hooked and engaged. With the drastic drop in the attention span of people these days and the large amount of contents competing for their attentions, you cannot afford to base your contents only on informative texts.
You need to use captivating visuals that do not only seize your audiences attention but also feed them with relevant information as well.
"Visuals captivate audiences. Use images, videos, and infographics to convey your message effectively". - James Taylor, Visual Content Creator
Visuals can convey complex information faster than than text and such you should not neglect their relevance. You can mix both visuals and text in your content marketing process.
Collaborate with Others
While creating contents for your business' audience is good, collaborating with influencers, experts in your industry and other businesses in your field is a good content marketing strategy for small businesses. This is because by collaborating with them, you will get to expose your business to a new and wider audience.
You can pay influencers to help promote your business to their followers, you can also try to gain the favour of experts in your industry so that they can offer you the privilege of guest posting on their sites. Guest posting is the process of publishing contents on other people's sites and leaving a link that leads back to your own site. It gives you the opportunity to tap into their traffic and increase your contents' reach.
You can also partner with other businesses in the same field as you to work on projects that will benefit both of you. This is another strategy to tap into their audience and increase the visibility of your small business' contents on the internet.
"Collaborating with others broadens your reach. Guest posting introduces your brand to new audiences". - Rachel Green, PR Specialist
The best way to get the most out of guest posting is to ensure that you create valuable contents in your guest posts and present them in a unique way that will provoke the audience's to engage with your content and aspire to get more of similar contents hence following you to your sites.
Valuable Email Marketing
Email marketing is a productive content marketing strategy for small businesses. It is the process of creating a newsletter and informing your subscribers on latest offers and contents from your brand. Contrary to the opinion of some people, email marketing is still an effective marketing strategy and has helped many businesses over the years to engage with their audiences and increase their conversion rates.
To tap into the productivity of email marketing, you need to build a relevant email list. By relevant, I mean you need to build an email list of your target audience, people who are interested in your products and services and are also receptive to the kinds of contents you create. This will save you the agony of wasted efforts on a non-responsive email list.
You need to come up with a creative way to get your audiences to offer you their emails. Keeping in mind that they may already be getting tons of emails from many other brands which they may be trying to curb, you need to creatively devise a means to get their emails that they would not regret.
"Email marketing is a direct line to your audience. Deliver value through newsletters and exclusive contents". - Michael Adams, Email Marketing Consultant
You can offer them free e-books, but ensure it contains valuable and relevant information, or even offer a discount or a free webinar or any free gift that would not cost your business much in exchange for their email addresses followed by a promise to offer them exclusive contents and offers from your small business.
This will give you the opportunity to reach them on a more personal level and gain an increased number of engagements on your contents.
Repurpose your Contents
Monitoring the progress of your contents is a smart content marketing technique example. This is because it allows you to know which contents are performing well and which ones are not. It also gives you insight into which types of contents to invest more in and which contents to totally discard.
With that in mind, repurposing your contents is a great way to keep your audience engaged. Before you repurpose any content, track its performance overtime and only pick contents with a high performance statistics and repurpose them into e-books, webinars, videos depending on which format they already existed in.
" Repurposing content extends its lifespan. Refresh and update existing content to maintain relevance ". - Emily White, Content Manager
Repurposing your contents is a great way to foster engagement with your audience and their performances in the past will also provide a favourable premise for the repurposed content. Ensure that the content retauns its originality and value in the process of repurposing it and that it is as informative as possible.
Analyze and Upgrade your Contents
Evaluating the performances of your contents over a period of time is an effective content marketing strategy. This is because it helps you to ascertain the nature of contents to invest more of your energy in. It also helps you, as a small business owner, to upgrade your contents to meet up with the demands of your target audience.
This can also be done by monitoring your competitors to see which of their contents get a lot of engagements from their audience and look for ways to adapt your contents to follow such trends. This can help you broaden the reach of your contents and increase your customer retention rate.
"Regularly analyze performance metrics. Adapt your strategy based on what resonates with your audience ". - Daniel Evans, Analytics Expert
Analyzing the performance of your contents to understand what resonates better with your audience is good practice to avoid creating contents that get little to no engagements which may eventually turn off your audience and result in them leaving you.
These 10 content marketing strategies for small businesses examples will help entrepreneurs increase their brands invisibility and establish a strong brand authority in their industries. These strategies help small businesses accelerate audience engagements, increase their conversion rate and establish trust for them. While it is important for entrepreneurs to implement these steps in their content marketing journeys, it is important to use each one of them appropriately as over use or under use of any could be detrimental to the growth small businesses on the internet.
Check out Webfx's: 10 Effective Content Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses
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