When it comes to content marketing, small businesses always seem to be left behind or slow to adopt new methods that corporate marketers for large companies practice. As time passed by, SEO has changed and evolved a lot and it has become quite clear that SMBs need to include help guides, how-tos, ebooks, and comparison guides to stay in the game and compete with the bigger corporations in ranking. Should your content be written in-house or outsourced to a content company or some freelance writers, you are bound to run out of ideas for new creative content. But guess what? I wrote this article with the sole purpose of providing you with a few content marketing tips.
Without further Ado, I will get right into it. My first suggestion on creating outstanding content will be to
Create A Content Calendar
Creating a content calendar to document your content strategy is one of the very first steps to take before you proceed. This ensures you stick to your timing when creating content.
This is often overlooked by a lot of marketers. When it comes to content creation, it takes a lot of time and effort so you need to plan how it is going to be done. Getting a calendar to schedule how your post is going to be made is very essential. You set a time limit as to when you want to create, publish and share your blogs.
Check For Social Trends
Social media is very important when it comes to content. You can be pointed in the right direction if your research is done right. You get to know what is trending and what people in your space are reading and interested in. That way you get to educate them the right way and be certain to get a lot of readers visiting your pages. Writing on trending topics is a good way to gather a large following. Providing people with exactly what they want is key.
By simply visiting platforms such as Twitter you can find out what is trending in your space and the involvement. Facebook has also introduced this feature and in an article by TechCrunch you get to see why each topic is trending as well. This has been around for years so there has been a lot of improvement done to this feature and you should find it helpful. You can add a touch to these trending topics by picking a side on whatever is in the discussion, do you support a particular view or are you against it? If you have a different view of the story you can write on that as well. Mix all this up with some videos, images, and infographics as well.
Check What Works For You
Before you proceed to do your research and visit other blogs or website to check what is working for them, find out what works for you. Visit your Google analytics page and webmaster tools to see how your previous content performed after sharing. Did people read these blogs, how long did they spend on your page and in case you had a call to action(CTA) in there somewhere, how many people clicked on the link? These are metrics that are important and will help you with strategizing your next blog.
Check for the top trafficked pages and search queries on your site to see what content and keywords performed the most and the keywords used to locate it. It is important to understand these trends to help you with the topics and strategies that have worked in the past and avoid those that did not.
Conduct Surveys
Your understanding of a topic in your niche is enough information for you to come up with some pretty good content to address these issues. By doing so you become a source when customers are searching for important information in your niche. Getting feedback from your audience is another way of getting topics to write on.
Make Use Of Visual Content
Though a lot of focus is based on text when it comes to SEO, visualizing your content is key. This is because the visual content is more appealing to humans when reading than seeing a whole lot of words to digest. Readers seem to be more engaging with visual content as a large percentage of information coming to the brain is visual. That being said, content with a lot more images such as Gifs and infographics get more views than blogs that have no images at all.
One other thing about visualizing your content is, they become easy to produce, creating an infographic on a topic that has already been researched can relay the message much easier and faster to readers than breaking it down to lots and lots of words. By simply adding lots of images and Gifs, you keep readers engaged and they keep scrolling through the content.
Engage In Video Blogging
If we are talking about visualizing content then we most definitely need to include videos. You can easily create high-quality content by creating amazing videos talking about your products or services. You can also speak on other related products, businesses and even give helpful lectures on how to operate and use some of the products you provide to your customers. Starting a video blog is neither expensive nor time-consuming, you can create short engaging videos that can easily be digested by your target audience. These Vlogs do not need much editing and can sometimes be shared directly without having to edit at all. Having video content embedded into your blogs as well is also helpful and attractive to readers.
Revamp Your Content
You can always go back to your old articles and blogs to change a few things here and there, change some images, add some videos and then reshare the content to your readers. By simply putting together a couple of old blogs that you have already written or mixing up a supplementary blog post and you have yourself a brand new blog for your audience to digest. You can also simply update old blogs with new tactics or formulas that may have been changed along the line and this is also helpful for your business and readers as well.
Conclusion
Content marketing is an important aspect of SEO and works by engaging both your new and existing customers. Always encourage your readers to share your content as you are a small business and now building up your brand. Things will be tough along the line when it comes to reaching out to a large audience but keep working on your content and sharing it out there. Follow industry leaders and see what works for them when it comes to their content strategy. Consistency is key, so keep writing and sharing your content