7 Best Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

From a historical point of view, small business marketers have been relatively slow to accept content marketing strategies. But with SEO gathering increasing influence, small businesses have to learn some content marketing techniques to maintain their ranking in the industry.

Regardless of whether the content is created by oneself or outsourced to a third party, that kind of novel and creative inspiration will always run out. Here are our 7 Tips for creating great content for small businesses:

1. Make a content marketing calendar

Having a content marketing calendar can ensure that content creation is completed on time, but this practice is often overlooked. 61% of marketers said that their biggest problem is that they spend too much time on content creation. Only 44% said they have a well-planned content marketing plan.

The first step of creating a monthly content marketing calendar is very important because it can buy enough time for brainstorming, creating, and publishing content.

2. Find out what is currently doing well

While analyzing other sites for creative inspiration is important, it is also important to understand which characteristics of your own content led to success in the past. This requires you to add statistical code on the website so that you can know which article pages bring you the most traffic, how many people reach your page through keyword searches, and how much search volume is for each keyword.

Social data can also show the quality of the content. If you install social sharing tools such as AddThis, Share or Pinterest, and other sharing tools, you will be able to see the relevant share and click data.

After understanding these indicators, we can know which themes and strategies have performed well in the past, which can guide us in the planning of subsequent content.

3. Understand the hot topics on social networking sites

Social networking sites are especially helpful for getting real-time hot topics. The content written around these hot topics is more attractive, and people are more willing to read them. Twitter has shown a hot topic feature for a while, and Facebook also launched a hot topic earlier this year. If you want to check local hot topics, a trend map provides such a function (all data is based on Twitter).

Integrate multiple pieces of information into the content, create a controversial point of view or use videos and pictures from different angles to continuously improve the content.

4. Design a questionnaire

To help you plan, you can use a simple questionnaire. Use it to understand the user’s position on a topic through the results of the questionnaire, which is also a source of materials for planning upcoming topics.

Now the job of creating and collecting survey results is made simple with tools such as Survey Monkey, Audience and Google Consumer Surveys.

5. Make good use of visual content

Now SEO is mostly concerned with text content because search engines can read it, but visual content is more attractive to people. People are more willing to participate in visual content because 90% of daily life content is visual. Those who made good use of picture content compared with those who did not make good use of the picture saw a 94% increase in traffic.

A report made by marketing staff from Marketing Sherpa found that pictures are the simplest form of content creation. The practice of using charts in research work has been frequently used, and charts are often used in outsourcing blog content creation. By adding pictures or GIF format pictures, you can attract and interact with your fans.

6. Video content

Another way to continuously create high-quality content is to make videos. 79% said they watch online every week video, 55% said they watch it every day.

It is not expensive and does not take too much time to start a video blog. Short videos are easy to understand and easy to shoot with a personal camera.

Making video content is known to be an effective marketing strategy popular in the current trends of the business industry. Video blogs do not require much editing and can even be uploaded directly to YouTube.

7. Re-editing the content of the old topic

If you have dug into a topic, but it takes time to create new content on this topic, you can re-edit the original articles on a topic and create some articles. Organize content through general topics, such as “website design skills”, you can package it into supplementary articles, which also provide readers with valuable content for them to learn.

Another way to re-edit the content is to review some of the previous content, and then provide some updates. In this way, updating new content to old posts can be more easily studied and evaluated continuously.

The sum up

Content marketing is an essential part of SEO, operating by encouraging interaction and sharing between new and old audiences. For small businesses, this is indeed difficult to achieve, because inspiration is difficult to generate continuously. By understanding content marketing strategies and diversified copywriting methods that have been used successfully in the past, creative inspiration can be continuously generated.