Five effective content marketing ideas for small businesses
Want more exposure and awareness for your small business? Here are five effective content marketing ideas for you to try.
When small-to-medium sized businesses bring to life highly-creative content marketing strategies, many great things can happen. From molding the voice, image and reputation of the brand to generating traffic and new leads, solid content marketing can often have profound implications for local businesses.
Because most small businesses lack the creative talent and in-house personnel to consistently produce great content, allocating time and resources can be a challenge. They can also find it hard to come up with new and engaging ideas consistently.
If this sounds frustratingly familiar, don’t worry. We’ve put together five highly-efficient, small business-focused content marketing ideas that are well within reach for most people.
1) Harness the power of visual content
Many content marketers are under the impression that they need to create in-depth articles and videos to make their content marketing efforts worthwhile. And while such content can be valuable for SEO, simple and easy-to-make content can be effective in many ways.
Now that virtually everyone has a smartphone in their pocket, capturing photos and videos is widely accessible. This why so many successful bloggers, vloggers, and influencers solely use visual content to market their brands.
Memes, photos, GIFs, and short videos are just a few examples of shareable content that can easily get spread on social media. For more tangible inspiration, think outside the box and come up with creative visual content that strikes a chord with your local audience.
What’s stopping the local plumber from creating a short video that helps homeowners troubleshoot common issues? Such content could easily be posted as a blog with little new copywriting required.
2) Videos don’t need to be professional-grade productions
Piggybacking on the previous idea, you don’t need a professional production team to create half-way-decent videos. By simply using your mobile phone, you can capture the video content you need to achieve your primary objective.
With that said, it’s wise to define the true purpose and objective behind your videos (or any content marketing initiative for that matter.) Simple videos can be an engaging means to reach social media users on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But short, simple videos might not yield the quality needed to produce high ranking YouTube videos.
Strike a balance within your means of creating content and what objectives you seek to accomplish behind each post. If you seek to become a thought leader in your industry, consider using video in conjunction with other forms of content (articles, infographics, studies, surveys, etc.) to own up to your authority.
3) Be newsworthy
In Adam Stetzer’s post on Search Engine Watch titled 7 Outstanding Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses, he shares some great points about “newjacking”:
“Writing content around trending topics, or newsjacking, help provide valuable content to people actively looking for it. Twitter has had trending topics available for a while, and Facebook introduced trending topics earlier this year. For a more local view of trending topics, Trendsmap provides an intimate view of trending news overlaid on a map with data from Twitter.”
Depending on the type of business, producing content on news and local stories can be an effective strategy. This approach also very accessible, as newsworthy content can be easily published on the company blog. It can also help support your company’s SEO efforts.
Try addressing different sides of a story, add a layer of personality, or take a more controversial stance to enhance the uniqueness of the content.
Who knows? Maybe with the right approach your content can get picked-up in Google News.
4) Repurpose content in different ways
As alluded to above, to truly be an authority in your given space, it often takes more than creating a winning blog post. Reinforce your leadership by repurposing your work into multiple formats.
By repurposing information in different forms, you can save time, optimize for digestibility, and keep content marketing costs at a minimum. As a few common examples:
- Turn a long-winded eBook into a series of short blog post.
- Create an infographic and/or video highlighting key points of an article.
- Extract data from study or report to create an infographic.
- Summarize a popular podcast into a punchy blog post.
Sure, repurposing content isn’t quite as awesome as producing new content. But it’s certainly efficient. Likewise, if you’re inspired by a great piece of content produced elsewhere, think about how you can put a unique spin on it to call your own.
5) Showcase your USPs
What makes your business unique? What are your USPs (unique selling propositions)? These are not just the products or services you offer, but the added value that customers can expect when they work with you business.
Don’t be afraid to shamelessly promote your USPs as part of your content marketing strategy. This approach can be as simple as modeling-up an employee to showcase some new inventory on Instagram, or taking a brief video reviewing high-margin products you wish to push.
Do what makes sense to you and what’s within your capacity to do consistently. At the end of the day (or year) it all comes down to consistently producing value-driven content that resonates with your audience.
Banner image credit: Juan Alberto Garcia Rivera
Tyler Tafelsky is a Senior SEO Specialist at Captivate Search Marketing based in Atlanta, Georgia. Having been in the industry since 2009, Tyler offers vast experience in the search marketing profession, including technical SEO, content strategy, and PPC advertising.
Photo by Christin Hume
This post was selected as one of the top digital marketing articles of the week by UpCity, a B2B ratings and review company for digital marketing agencies and other marketing service providers.
