This online strategy could transform your small business
Yet many small-business owners, who excel at the nuts and bolts of operations, stumble when it comes to marketing.
If you are seeking high-impact, low-cost marketing success, online content marketing can be a game-changer. Do it well, and you can build your brand, bring in new customers, solidify the loyalty of current ones, improve sales and even attract quality employees.
So what exactly is “online content marketing,” why does it work and how can you make it a win for your small business?
Compare and contrast
A simple comparison of two common scenarios can illustrate the answers to two of those questions, the “what” and “why.”
In scenario one, you pay a popular entertainment website a substantial amount of money to display your banner ad on its homepage under set parameters, such as at certain times of day or when a user in your geographic location views the page. That’s traditional advertising and its obvious limitations are mounting. Increasingly savvy consumers are more tuned in to the fact that an ad is a hard sell, one they can easily navigate away from with the click of a mouse button.
Scenario two: You write a how-to blog post on an issue of interest to your target customer, providing pithy insight into the matter and specific, achievable advice for how the reader can address that issue in his or her own life. Your post contains repeated mentions of a set of words that a potential customer might use when searching online for your product or service. The information you provide is so exciting and useful that readers tweet about it and post links to your blog on Facebook. The only cost involved is your time (or the cost of a contractor) to write the post.
That is online content marketing, and it takes many forms from posts on your company’s blog, Google+ or Facebook page, to exclusive information about deals and discounts tweeted to your Twitter followers, to feature articles placed on lifestyle websites.
In a nutshell, online content marketing works because it reaches both current and potential customers where they live online, and provides them with useful, engaging information. We know from HubSpot that 89 percent of the 240 million Americans who use the internet every day search online before they make a purchase. Win their attention and their loyalty with interesting, relevant information, and you win their business as well.
How to win
“Sold!” you say. Now how do you do it?
Online content marketing is fluid, and changes rapidly and constantly. Strategies morph and materialize daily, and what’s new and hot today may well be old news tomorrow. Still, certain tools and principles have emerged as enduring. One of these is SEO (search engine optimization).
Simply stated, SEO is about writing your online content in such a way that it appeals to the complex algorithms that search engines use to decide where a given web page will rank in a list of results when a user searches for information that may be pertinent to your web page.
In recent years, Google’s ranking algorithms have placed new emphasis on the quality of content. Now, in order to optimize your content, you need to keep two key factors in mind:
Keywords are king when it comes to SEO. The term “keywords” refers to the text consumers are most likely to type into their browser search window when looking for a product or service. Knowing how your current and potential customers are searching can help you tailor your content. Include those search terms in your online content marketing, and the search engines will know to pick up your content and include it in results for searches that use those keyword phrases.
Quality is queen. Online readers aren’t the only ones tired of poorly written, uninspired and useless content that is nothing more than thinly veiled advertising. Search engines are rejecting junk content as well. In addition to smart use of keyword phrases, your content needs to be well written, interesting and useful in order to engage humans who are the ultimate targets of your marketing efforts.
The opportunities for online content marketing are vast, and it’s important to take advantage of as many of them as possible. Some of the most common and useful types include website content, blogs, e-newsletters, feature articles and social media. Creating and distributing content through these channels will greatly expand the reach and power of your marketing efforts.
Of course, there’s plenty more to be said about online content marketing than could possibly fit into a single article. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of resources for learning more about the topic. You can find advice, trends and news on many sites. Here are a few to check out: contentmarketinginstitute.com, blog.brandpoint.com and blog.hubspot.com.
