For long, small business marketing strategy has been skewed towards paid advertising. A reliable customer acquisition formula relied by many small business marketing managers, over time this has become less effective. Reason, the high cost of per customer acquired in face of increasing competitive forces and addition to the common use of ad blockers.
This chart shows the percentage of internet users blocking ads in selected countries.
Small Business Marketing, Best Alternative
Brands that are today relying on paid outreach to get new customers may take solace in the best alternative to reach their current and new customers – Content Marketing. And it is not just blogs, but a whole lot of options for the smart marketer in here, that is effective in increasing audience engagement and building trust.
And yes, content marketing has now turned more attractive for small business owners with Aidasinc’s pay per customer acquired, performance linked marketing program. So as a business owner, you need not empty your pockets out on hiring, training and retaining content developers or marketers, but simply outsource the task to the agency team.
5 Content Marketing Tips For Small Medium Business Managers
LeadPath, the easy to use lead management system, has 5 great content marketing tips for small medium business marketers. Posting them for reader here,
- Know your audience and create content that your audience will find interesting
To get high engagement with your content, you need to get three elements right. These elements are the market, the message, and the media.
First, you need to study your audience and learn as much as possible about your customers or your potential customers. Then, you need to create content that will resonate with your customers or prospects. For example, if your audience loves dogs, then creating content about cats will most likely not get you very high engagement.
For this reason, you want to know as much possible about your customers and prospects. When most business owners think about their customers, they usually envision all kinds of people and think that their customer is “everybody.” In reality, this is rarely true because of the rule of 80/20. This rule says that approximately 80% of results come from 20% of causes. In business, it means 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers. It is possible that your customers and prospects live in certain geographic areas. Your market may also have gender, age or income commonalities. Your audience may have a certain level of education or be interested in your products during certain times of the year. You want to figure out who these 20% of active and interested customers are in your business and what they have in common and then create content for them. This way, you will be engaging your best customers and attracting prospects that are similar to your best customers.
If you have an untapped market or are beginning to do something new, this is the best way to grow: find the reasons why something is working and then do more of it, be it attracting more customers that are similar to your existing customers or creating more content that is similar or related to the content that your best customers find interesting.
- Use the platforms that your audience uses
Just like you don’t want to create content that will feel and seem unfamiliar to your audience, you do not want to use media that your audience does not use. Study your audience. Figure out where your customers are. Then, use the platforms that your customers visit.
If your audience is on Facebook, then use Facebook. If you are selling to busy professionals that mostly use LinkedIn, then create white papers, reports and other forms of content that you can distribute via LinkedIn. Trying to distribute the same content on Facebook instead of LinkedIn will be a mistake if your audience is not there.
At the same time, it is a smart idea to be sharing the same content in different forms. For example, you can share the same interview as an audio, as a video, and as text. The reason for it is that different people have different preferred ways of consuming content. Some people will not read but will listen to an audio while they are driving. Others believe that audio takes too long, but will read if you provide them with a transcript.
One of the concerns that you may have is thinking that sharing the same content in different forms will make your audience think that you are repeating yourself. This is simply not true. First, most people today are very busy and may even not notice a new post or video if you share it just once. Second, if the content is of high quality, they will simply skip it if they realize that they’ve consumed it before. When you come by a great video or article that you’ve read before, you will either re-read it because it was so good or skip it because you want something new. You will not get upset because you stumbled again across something that you really liked in the past.
- Have a strategy and be consistent
Most people today are extremely busy. When you start producing content, they may not even pay attention to it for the first few times. Also, no matter what media or medium you use to communicate with your market, engagement typically needs trust. The best way to build trust is to be consistent and to “show up” regularly exactly when you promised. There is nothing worse than promising a post every Tuesday and then creating a post once on Tuesday, once on Friday, then skipping several weeks because you are too busy with a different project.
If you do not follow a schedule when posting content, you may choose to alert your customers and prospects about the fact that they should keep an eye on their email or newsfeed. This way, your audience will know that, say, in three days you will be releasing a video for people interested in X. If you do send or post a notification in advance, you will get higher conversions or views because people are expecting the content that you promised them.
To be effective, this approach requires consistency and planning. You can’t use it if you are creating and posting content randomly. This approach can also quickly lose its effectiveness if you don’t deliver on your promises. If you tell your audience several times that you will be sending content and then you don’t deliver, the audience will simply stop paying attention. This is why both strategy and consistency are so critically important in every small business marketing.
- Choose topics that lead to discussions or shares
Your audience may be passionate about a subject or a topic, but if all you do is share information that looks and feels boring, no matter how useful it may be, you will not get high engagement with your content. For example, your customers and prospects may be interested in the subject of climate change, but if you all you do is simply share a long report about a scientific study with a lot of statistical data, set samples and calculations, you will probably not get a lot of engagement, especially if you share the report on a platform where people consume bits and pieces of content in small chunks and on the go.
How can you become successful and increase your engagement? You can use several approaches. First, you can split large pieces of content into smaller, digestible pieces. If someone finds a fact interesting and easy to understand, they will be more likely to share it with their friends or comment on it.
Second, you want to tell stories because it is much easier for people to relate to stories that have feelings and emotions surrounding them.
Third, pictures and testimonials can have a much bigger impact than simply words and things that you say yourself. What others say about your product, service or organization is instantly more trustworthy than what you can say even if you say it more eloquently.
- Be timely
Many of the marketing and communication channels today allow you to communicate with your audience instantly. You post something on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook, and your audience sees your post right away. Use this opportunity to comment and share information about current events, news, and announcements.
You will get high engagement if your audience talks about you. Therefore, it is very smart to insert yourself into conversations not only about your products or services but also about anything and everything your audience finds interesting, including current events to the news. You can do that by having an opinion, sharing your opinion and inviting your audience to participate in discussions. The key here is to be doing it quickly and to be timely.
How to Build an Awesome Content Marketing Strategy?
Many small medium businesses face varied challenges when it comes to content development and marketing. Although numerous surveys have indicated that content marketing can generate 3x more leads than can nurture stronger relationships with target audiences.
Is content marketing your challenge too? Help is here, with pay per customer acquired Content Marketing Solution. It relieves you of the multiple integrations and media frameworks while gets our experts to manage them for you. And because many businesses like yours, find the effort to invest valuable management time on rolling out integrated marketing communications a challenging task, we have that factored in too.
Plus it works independently, i.e. without interfering with your current marketing activities and yet gives you quantifiable, actionable and measurable results. And you needn’t worry about increased budgets, escalating ad costs, content development, execution, supervision, and related challenges that you expect from any new program or system. Being 100% white hat, legitimate marketing program , you pay for actual results that you want.
Need to know more?
Contact us for details and an action plan for your business.
And you may like to join us on Linkedin at our newly formed “Customer BuildUp Strategies Group” to Ask & Answer & Participate in the discussions. Feel free to share your thoughts, your queries and your feedback with us.