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Secrets to Small Business Content Marketing
What is your content marketing strategy for your small business or non-profit?
When I started writing my first book several years ago, I realized it was a wonderful opportunity to share the most valuable lessons I had learned over twenty+ years in various marketing and sales roles. The book project ended up taking way longer than anticipated, but after four years, I was a published author!
Content marketing is not only essential to helping to increase your website's search engine optimization (SEO), it is also a chance to share your expertise!
Content marketing is defined as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
SEO is the process of making your site better for search engines. Google instructs website owners that they are looking for pages that demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) defined in more detail below.
Expertise: Focuses on the context of the content providing an expert outlook. It looks at the expertise of the page of contents, not the website’s content as a whole.
Authoritativeness: Focuses on the authority of the website’s content and the strength of the domain. These rankings arrive from external signals such as qualitative links from other relevant websites and brand mentions across forums and social media channels.
Trustworthiness: Centers on the trustworthiness of the content in relation to the trustworthiness of the domain. Google is looking for your website to provide a good user experience and void tactics that manipulate appeal by catering to morbid curiosity, titillation, or outrage.
One of the key ways Google suggests to improve E-A-T is to provide content that's timely for current interests, tells a story well, or provides unique insights. Additional ways are to include high-quality and large images in your content and avoid tactics to artificially inflate engagement by using misleading or exaggerated details in preview content (title, snippets, or images) to increase appeal, or by withholding crucial information required to understand what the content is about.
Providing timely content weekly can be daunting for small business owners and non-profit professionals who do not consider themselves writers or are pressed for time. I've provided a few secrets below to help those just starting out or others to be more consistent.
Have a content marketing plan. Take some time to outline the type of relevant content you want to share, frequency and mediums you will use such as email, social media, blog, etc.
Set a weekly goal. Some experts suggest 3 to 5 blogs per week are needed to increase SEO. Most small businesses I know have too limited resources to share at that level, so I recommend setting an initial goal to write and share at least 1 blog per week.
Share what you know. Share your knowledge that is relevant to your target audience. This not only helps them but also demonstrates your expertise.
Leverage video. If writing is not an option for you, take a short video and post it on your website or on social media. Or you can create a YouTube channel and share those links in blogs, via email or on social. In many cases, short concise videos will get higher impressions than just words.
Share Other's Content. You can augment your own weekly blog by investing a small amount of time researching areas relevant to your target audience such as the latest trends or hot products. Ensure your sources are credible before you share their content and always give appropriate credit.
Most importantly, you need to consistently create and distribute content that is valuable and relevant to your target audience to drive profitable customer action.
Looking for more information on writing a weekly blog, check out my Small Business Blog infographic!
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At It's All About the How Marketing Consulting we offer expert marketing support and practical tools to help improve your brand awareness and results. We can help with all aspects of your small business or non-profit marketing needs from developing strategic marketing plans to weekly blog content. You can reach us at itsallaboutthehow@gmail.com or check out our website at www.itsallaboutthehow.com.