Is your business using content marketing tactics as a facet of your marketing strategy? It certainly is all the rage now, isn’t it? It seems marketers are falling all over themselves to increase budgets, increase volume, and decrease the value by making content marketing killer mistakes. And the goal is to increase website traffic.
Like any other business initiative, content marketing is a STRATEGY, not a tactic. And as such, it should be planned and executed with well-thought-out processes and procedures.
Have you noticed that the world of marketing is changing? And rapidly. Traditional media vehicles are losing effectiveness as people communicate in new and different ways. Mass audiences are fragmented into small segments. Developing a point of difference is harder than ever. These examples of content marketing demonstrate that many brands have certainly noticed.
It’s true that if you were one of the big players, with a big budget to match, you could conduct extensive quantitative research to understand what type of content consumers want to see. As an alternative, you could hire the biggest and the best agencies to create high-quality videos and flashy websites. Maybe you could have an army of people monitoring and responding to comments across all of your platforms. Fair enough.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have people who think of digital as a low-cost media channel: we can’t afford TV, so let’s just “do digital.” While that isn’t the full story, it is true that there is a lot you can do with a little bit of money and a whole lot of creativity and drive. Here are some easy wins in content marketing for small businesses:
Increase website traffic fast … reuse what you already have
Increase website traffic fast.
Before you go off spending money on photo shoots and producers and graphic designers, start by auditing the content you’ve already created. Most businesses (a) don’t have a good system to categorize existing content and (b) don’t use that content as much as they could. Make sure you’re making the most of the content you’ve already spent money on!
If you’re organizing a PR event, what are you doing with all the photos and videos? Are you keeping them for PR, or are you uploading the videos on YouTube, creating a Facebook album with your photos, and asking attendees to share their shots on Instagram?
If your marketing team is spending lots of money on a beautiful campaign video, can you cut out short clips to use as teasers? And what about all your content on previous campaigns – can you do a #throwbackthursday series? Can you ask your fans to vote for their favorite? Look first at what you already have, and only then do you need to start investing in new content.
Increase website traffic.
Increase website traffic … respond to questions
Unless you’re a completely new business, you are bound to have already a list of common questions that people have been asking about your brand or product, whether by commenting on your social network posts or by contacting customer service.
That already gives you a rich set of material that you can build on with content: you can re-write your product descriptions in consumer language, you can write blog posts with top tips, and why not create some simple how-to videos?
Speaking of how-to videos, Lauren Luke started out as a taxi dispatcher who decided to sell a bit of make-up on eBay, creating a few videos on applying make-up to increase sales. She soon built up millions of views and was selected to be one of the first official YouTube partners, and today she has her make-up line and a huge following. So there is hope for even the smallest of businesses!
Instant website traffic … study what works
Instant website traffic.
Great content doesn’t always come from long-term planning, and some of the best examples are the ones that are completely spontaneous. Oreo’s Superbowl tweet is a fabulous example. Sometimes, opportunities appear completely out of the blue.
When women started posting the #nomakeupselfie for cancer awareness, several charities like Cancer Research UK were smart enough to jump on the campaign and use it to drive not just awareness but also donations, raising £8 million in six days.
Listen to what’s already going on, monitor what people are talking about, and follow key influencers on social media. Which trends can you tap into? What are people already doing that is relevant to the service your business provides? Where do you as a brand have a right to play? Tapping into existing consumer behaviors will be much more efficient and effective than trying to change the world.
Crowdsourced content
GoPro is a product that lends itself to letting fans create content with it. Other examples where brands have curated content from fans include Burberry’s The Art of the Trench, a “celebration of the trench coat and the people who wear it,” and the#CoachFromAbove activity in which fans submit photos of their Coach shoes.
And it’s not just luxury brands: Asos created the #ASOSUnbox campaign leveraging Vine to engage users on a less than glamorous part of the shopping process.
Other ideas run a photo competition, take to the streets with a classic vox pop to get quotes straight from consumers’ mouths, or create a forum for your customers to talk about your products and share their tips. UGC (user-generated content) is both affordable and effective, helping you to build awareness and engagement, and to perform better in SEO. Start small and see how it goes.
Be bold and creative
One of the most iconic examples in the marketing world – for years, it was shared in each and every marketing presentation – is the Tipp-Ex YouTube experience. All they needed was a video camera along with an actor and a trained bear (okay, two actors and a bear suit). It was clever, it was funny, and it was full of benefits.
Another example is Ora-brush, which is, err, a tongue cleaner. A few years ago, they created a cheap and cheerful video called the Bad Breath Test, which reached 20 million views, built the brand’s social media following, and got the product stocked in major pharmacies. These results had not been possible with previous product campaigns with bigger budgets.
Who Are You Writing For? It’s time to take a good look at whether you’re creating content with your target audience in mind. Many business owners make the mistake of writing for their peers as opposed to their customers.
What is Your Customer Avatar? You’ve now made a commitment to creating content with your potential customers in mind. But do you know who your customers are, exactly?
How Can You Make Your Customers Lives Easier by Solving a Common Problem They Face? Typically, the first thing that comes to mind when we think about our business: is the features we offer to our customers, either products or services.
A web designer, for example, would probably consider features such as brand consultation, requirements analysis, design mock-ups, reviews and changes, and the final product. From the client side, we’d be focused on the product: a professionally designed site that aligns with our brand and presents us well to our audience.
As you take a deeper dive into your audiences’ questions, you can start to shape your content strategy. Effective content will address your customers’ pain points and help them solve their problems. It provides simple answers to their most pressing problems while solidifying the idea that you’re the go-to expert in their minds.
How Do You Keep Your Audience Engaged? By this point, you know who you’re writing for and the topics they’re interested in reading about. Now how do you capture their attention and keep them interested? A quick search online will reveal that certain types of content are popular.
Are You Providing a Call to Action for Readers? Will They Feel Compelled to Get in Touch? Last but not least, you want to make sure that everything you create has a strong call to action.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing strategies? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
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Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
The most significant way to attracting more visitors is by creating useful content that readers will consume and share. “Blogging, at its core, is about offering something of value to your audience,” says Dharmesh Shah, co-founder, and chief technology officer of the inbound marketing software company HubSpot
“Whether it’s a great story or useful insight to help your audience solve a common challenge, your aim should be to create content that people want to [read] and share.
Far too many people associate blogging with self-promotion, but that’s a common mistake. Your blogging strategy should be about building and cultivating an audience, and that objective is rarely achieved if you’re only talking about yourself.”
Some useful tips for attracting more visitors:
Attracting more visitors … use appropriate tags
Attach appropriate categories and tags to your posts so people can find them in the WordPress.com Reader. But be careful not to use too many tags — less than 15 tags (or categories or both) is a good number.
The more tags you use, the less likely your post will be featured in the Reader. Read more on tagging.
Read and comment on other blogs
Check out Discover to find great blogs and websites on your interests. Then, subscribe to these sites and get to know them a bit. When you read a post that moves you in some way, leave a comment. Read more on comments and creating online conversations.
Attracting more visitors … leverage social media
Make the most of social media by including “Share” on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Google+, and StumbleUpon buttons on your blog.
“The easier you make it for people to share your content with their network, the more likely they are to do so,” says Shah. “It’s a one-time investment to configure your blog to include these social media buttons–but the dividends pay off forever.”
Attracting more visitors … optimize your SEO
To make prioritizing your SEO efforts easier, we’ve isolated nine of the most important SEO ranking factors for you below.
Get traffic to your website_free.
There are 200 known Google ranking factors. The most important factors are related to the URL, inbound links, meta tags, the intent of a keyword, how your content is structured, how fast your page loads, and numerous technical SEO specifications that vary in importance based on the topic.
Some factors have a greater impact on your Google ranking than this one, but website architecture is the first thing you should get right upfront — especially when launching (or relaunching) your website.
By organizing your website into subdirectories, and having clear strings of text (or “slugs”) at the end of each URL, you’ll make it much easier for Google to understand who you are and what topics you want to be an authority on. (We’ll talk more about topics in just a minute).
Domain security
Notice the “https” at the beginning of the example URL, above? This is how Google identifies secure websites from non-secure ones. Hint: You want your site to be secure.
HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol — a virtual process that transfers information from a website to the visitor’s browser. HTTPS is the secure version of this protocol, and it ensures Google that the information it’s indexing is safe to the searcher. The “S,” as you’ve likely guessed, stands for “secure.”
Attracting more visitors … inbound links
Inbound links, also known as “backlinks,” are all the hyperlinks that direct back to your page from elsewhere on the internet. They can make a major difference in where you rank — even which number page you rank on.
Inbound links don’t work the same way if you’re simply linking to your blog post from another one of your blog posts. The influence of these backlinks comes almost entirely from outside domains.
For this reason, “link building” has become an important (but delicate) process for earning backlinks from other publishers. Some publishers, who have the same perceived authority, agree to trade backlinks from each other.
Topic authority
Topics are the bread and butter of your Google ranking — they help lay the foundation for the page authority you’ll need to rank highly over the long term.
In their simplest form, topics mean The more content you publish on a particular topic, the higher each piece of content belonging to that topic will rank in Google’s SERPs.
Topics might be more important in the long term than individual keywords, but that doesn’t mean keywords aren’t still a ranking factor. When done right, keyword optimization is one of the most important factors you can address in your website’s SEO strategy.
The earliest iteration of Google simply looked for the most instances of a keyword, phrased verbatim, in a webpage or blog post. This was known as “exact match.”
Today, “exact match” means something much different, and the website that carries the most instances of a keyword doesn’t rank the highest for that keyword. Rather, it’s the website that best matches the intent behind that keyword.
Because this is the information readers are looking for when they enter their search term, websites that serve it to them will receive more engagement by website visitors. Google then interprets this increased engagement as a good answer to the visitor’s question, ranking the URL higher as a result.
Content structure
It’s not enough to serve your website visitors the info they’re looking for. As more websites give visitors good answers, how that answer is structured becomes a major tie-breaker when ranking content under more competitive keywords.
The good content structure includes a variety of headers and sub-headers to make an answer easier for a person to digest and understand. It might also include bullet points, numbered lists, supporting images, and cited research — all of which help keep readers engaged with your content.
The more engaged a reader is with your content, the longer they’ll stay on your website — increasing what is known as their “session duration,” another relevant Google ranking factor that comes as a result of creating good content.
Attracting more visitors … meta tags
A meta tag sounds like something that is best left to a programmer, but meta tags are easy and often underused aspects of your content management system (CMS). They also happen to be linchpin SEO maneuvers to rank well in Google results.
Meta tags help Google identify the specific purpose of a page and what role each component of that page plays to the topic and target keyword. There are several types of meta tags that should be filled in, either with the target keyword or details related to that keyword:
Page speed
How to get more traffic.
Page speed refers to how fast your webpage loads when a searcher clicks on it from a Google search result. Several on-page factors contribute to how fast your page loads, but in general — the faster the website, the higher it can rank on Google.
In general, pages that load in less than three seconds are considered fast enough for their visitors.
However, this can vary based on the purpose of the website and the type of visitors it attracts. For example, e-commerce websites are encouraged to be a bit faster — fully loading in as little as two seconds, according to Google.
Different font types and sizes can weigh your site down somewhat, but one of the biggest causes of slow page speed is uncompressed images.
Websites with lots of heavy, complex types of media on the page can cause the website to take longer to load, and thus decrease your website’s page speed. Sometimes this is hard to avoid, but one thing you cancontrol is the file size of each image on the page.
Compress your images before uploading them to your CMS using websites like compressor.io or, for compressing images in bulk, tinypng.com.
The bottom line
Relax! It takes time.
Even if you do all of the above, you won’t develop a huge following overnight. Building a sizable audience of engaged and loyal readers takes time. Many of the bloggers you admire have likely been at it for years. Stick with it, and don’t get discouraged by a slow start.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of word of mouth marketing created by remarkable customer service. And put it to good use.
It’s up to you to keep improving your creative marketing strategies. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
