Content Marketing Guide for Small

Businesses

What is content marketing? Content Marketing will give your website more exposure than ever before with people who are actually interested in your industry. There is one thing all businesses have in common – they need customers to keep afloat. The marketplace has changed a lot in the last few years and there are a lot more ways to get your business out there. If you are promoting your business online, you need to do everything you can to attract new customers. Content will play a huge part in your success and this guide will show you how.

Getting Started First of all, you will need a plan. Before you write a single word of content you should have some idea of how often you’re going to post content, you should try to post content on a regular basis. If you personally don’t have the time then consider hiring a copywriter.

Your plan Aim to include these key content strategy elements:

•Your core message

•Your target audience

•Desired behaviour of your audience

•The channel you are going to use for your content

•Timing and frequency of your content

Thinking of good content Can’t think of any content? You’re not alone. Even professional writers get stuck sometimes. You need to think about your target audience, what are they searching for? You need to convince them that they need your product or service. For example why not post a blog called ‘Benefits of ________’ or ‘Why do I need ________?’ You can get a general idea by looking at what your competitors are writing.

The importance of keywords and search terms

The vast majority of users will reach your site via a search engine. They do this by searching a term into Google and Google will return a list of pages optimised for they term or keyword. There are a number of tools online that will help you to find out what keywords your target audience is using to find businesses, products or services like yours. The Google Adwords Keyword Planner is one tool that can offer real insight and help you to match your content to the keywords that are being used by potential customers.

The bare essentialsAt the very least your site should have a homepage, about us page and a contact page. The home page should capture everything your business does in a nutshell or a synopsis of your products or services. Content should be to the point, punchy and peppered (not littered) with some of the keywords you researched previously.

Pages you should consider adding:•Services•Products•Reviews•Blog•Case studies•FAQ•Help•Free stuff (everybody loves free stuff!)

Reaching out on Social Media Facebook – run competitions, hold opinion polls, share company news, showcase products, share blog posts with a wider audience, respond to feedback in real time.

Twitter – retweet relevant and interesting tweets, share industry or company news, make use of the hash tag, keep up with the latest trending tweets and current affairs

Pinterest – this is a great way to showcase your products, put together a mood board, create image collections or grab your visitor’s attention in a more vibrant and interactive way

Other content marketing techniques:

Guest posts – posting on another blog is a great way to attract traffic back to your site, especially if the site you are posting on receives lots of traffic in the first place. Many blogs ask for high quality posts from guests and whilst you might have to stick to some guidelines, you can pretty much choose the topic you want to write about. Choose high quality sites that are relevant to your brand, services or products.

Press releases – got some exciting news to share? A press release is a great way to shout from the rooftops. You can choose to publish your press release on your website or you can hire an agency to write and distribute your press release for you.

Offline content – offline content is still very effective and still has an important role to play with many small businesses.

Measuring your results Obviously, you will want to see if all your hard work is paying off, luckily there are plenty of tools to help you measure your success. You can set up Google Analytics on your site and check how many visitors different pages have.

Why not allow people to comment and like your blogs? Comments and likes can be a great currency for bloggers and will give you a general idea of progress over time.

Perfecting your strategy With the information you collect from your results you can ditch the stuff that isn’t working and concentrate on what is.

It’s an exciting time for any small business and by embracing content marketing and getting your message across, you can ensure you get ahead of your competitors and firmly in front of those who matter.