In today’s age of ubiquitous connectivity, many small businesses have implemented a variety of digital marketing efforts to attract new customers and increase overall sales. Unfortunately, results can vary significantly because tools are only as good as the expertise of the person using them.
The temptation to make use of up and coming trends can create inefficiencies whenever small business owners try to be a marketing “jack of all trades and master to none”.
Here are 5 content marketing tactics that small businesses can use in combination with SEO and Social Media to win and keep more customers.
1. First Off: Content Marketing and Blog
A blog offers numerous social and SEO benefits. Blogs are very effective as the hub in a “hub and spoke” social media content model. The spokes of that model might be Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Foursquare, YouTube and other social media sites your customers are actively using.
Blog posts can focus on topics of interest to customers as well as answering Frequently Asked Questions. Create categories for each area of focus in your business to serve as an editorial guide.
Schedule posts in advance to save time and encourage staff to promote the blog and make comments.
2. Make Use of Newsletters and Email Marketing
Email marketing strikes back. Even though some more recent ways of reaching out to your customers like social media and mobile marketing get all the attention, and some people will even try to tell you that email marketing is dead, reality doesn’t agree.
In fact, with a strong emphasis on content marketing, email is more powerful than ever thanks to social media. Why? Because thanks to tools like CampaignMonitor you can write content once and have it shared through social media or emailed with its HTML version. Isn’t it nifty?
3. Build Your Network and Establish Trust
Getting mentioned in the local trade publications and business media can boost credibility, awareness and directly generate new business.To help make that happen, make a list of local business publications, editors and writers as well as popular bloggers. Inquire with those websites about contributed articles or guest blog posts. Content off of your own site gives you exposure to a new audience and the author bio links back to your website.
You can use services like Help a Reporter Out (HARO) to establish your credibility within well-known media.
Visit industry blogs and make comments that add value, then follow up with useful, more detailed information. Provide “hooks” that give insights and perspectives not normally thought of. Stand out and tell a compelling story. Follow up but don’t stalk!
4. Create an SEO Friendly FAQ
An effective resource center/FAQ will be keyword optimized, easy to share on social media site using embedded sharing widgets like Share This and attract links from other websites. Keywords + useful content + links = search engine dominance.
You can use tools like Zendesk to create advanced, insightful and SEO friendly resource center.
5. Get Insights From Social Media
In the way that customers expect a toll-free number, blog, and website, they’re beginning to expect the companies they engage with to be social. That means companies should be having a presence in the social networks that are most relevant to customers. Spending a small amount of time consistently on relationship building and interaction can go a long way towards developing a community.
The key is picking the right platform. It might be a Facebook Fan page, LinkedIn group, or a niche forum. Try out a social media monitoring tool like Bottlenose to get an idea of which social platforms might be good places to engage with potential and existing customers.
Measure – Analyze – Improve
If you are going to be successful at getting your web pages to rank well in the search engines, it is extremely important to analyze the quality of keywords and their relation to generated traffic and conversions. Being able to rank for a popular keyword can spell the difference between making money with a website, and essentially pouring money down the drain.
Written by Karol Pokojowczyk.
Originally posted on colibri.io