5 Content Marketing Ideas for Small Business Success

Content marketing has revolutionized the way businesses big and small engage with their target audiences. If you’re new to the marketing world:

Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience, with the objective of driving profitable customer action, according to the Content Marketing Institute.

In other words, it’s the process of using blog posts, articles and graphics to engage with your audience and drive sales.

Once you’ve created content that’s relevant to your target market, which ensures that they engage, share and find it valuable, you have to do the marketing part. There are a variety of ways to use content marketing to reach the right people. Here are five that small businesses should think about.

Geo-Targeting

You can use analytics and purchasing data to target specific customers based on zip code and purchasing activity. This allows you to more effectively promote a regionally specific content piece on Facebook or send a mass email to customers located in a certain area.

The clothing company, True Religion tested geo-targeting with their customers by sending emails to areas that possessed more than one True Religion store. True Religion saw 65,000 emails opened with a 2.5 percent click-through rate and a 1 percent in-store conversion, proving that geo-targeting has the ability to double the results of marketing methods.

Geo-targeting your content marketing efforts is a great way for small, local businesses to attract clients in one particular area.

Platform Specific

Not everyone is on every social media site.  Your target audience  likely leans more toward one or another based on age, gender, social group and more. This means it’s important that you determine which platform this is and cater your content to that audience and platform. Relevant content on the wrong platform will not be successful.

Digital marketing specialist Holly Rollins explains why being platform specific is important:

“Gone are the days where one carefully crafted message will reach the masses. With the increasing number of social platforms available to businesses, content must be platform specific and a presence must be built on each channel. Businesses that embrace these changes and build relationships with niche leaders will see a significant return on investment for content marketing.”

I’ve seen this difference first-hand when doing work for an education blog. I quickly noticed that “Google Apps for Education” content did better on Google+ than Facebook, getting 50 or more +1’s with each share. One the other hand, “teacher meme” articles were hugely popular on Facebook (to the tune of 20K+ reach), but fell flat on Google+.

Infographics

Infographics (IGs) help your customers visualize data-based information in an easy and pleasing fashion. IGs often include charts, diagrams and eye-catching imagery and can be used to show your authority in an industry.

Forbes reports that 62 percent of business to consumer (B2C) marketers use IGs. As a small business, you can easily create high-quality graphics with websites like Infogr.am, Piktochart or Venngage.

Video Ads

Video is quickly becoming the fastest growing areas of content creation and marketing. Why? As reported by GoAnimate, there are a number of reasons:

• 92 percent of mobile video viewers shared the video with others.
• Videos on the homepage are shown to increase conversion rates by 20 percent or more.
• 52 percent of marketers say video has the highest ROI of all content they create.

As a small business, you can create video quickly and inexpensively. Once finished, you can use it in a variety of areas. A great video marketing flow might look like the following:

• Create video.
• Add to YouTube.
• Add to appropriate landing page.
• Set up YouTube video as an ad.
• Share on Facebook and boost or set up as Facebook ad.

You can learn more about YouTube video marketing with this tutorial from Like Minded Marketers.

Mobile Optimization

When creating content, it’s important to keep in mind how your target audience will be viewing that content. Handheld technology is very prevalent. And it’s probable that your clientele could be checking their emails or browsing the web on their smartphones rather than a desktop.

In fact, recent research revealed that 56 percent of millennials prefer using their mobile phone rather than their desktop for purchasing. Mobile optimization was also a significant factor in Google’s 2015 search algorithm. Ultimately, if people can’t easily access your web content on their mobile devices, you will lose valuable traffic along with the attention of potential customers.

Check your mobile website to assess it’s current state. While most WordPress templates are mobile-ready, they need some manual tweaking to look right on devices other than desktops.

As the marketing industry evolves, content marketers will continue to connect, educate and engage their audiences while increasing brand awareness and positioning themselves as industry leaders. Use these ideas to take advantage of content marketing and attract new customers.