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8 Reasons Every Small Business Should Invest in Content Marketing

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Content marketing has been a buzzword in the marketing industry over the past few years. It revolves around answering your target customers’ questions and providing them value (mostly free of cost) with evidence-based strategies.

Every business can benefit from content marketing strategies. There is no restriction based on the type and scale of the service you provide. Whether your business is big or small, you can use content marketing to increase your reach and attract more customers.

Content can be of several types. Marketers use written, visual, audio, and video content uniquely at different marketing funnel stages. Forrester claims that a buyer consumes almost twelve pieces of content before deciding to make a purchase.

Informative content like blogs, infographics, ebooks, and explanatory videos adds value to customers’ lives by providing answers to their queries. Emails and web copy can effectively remarket and convert visitors into leads.

Moreover, social media content like catchy product descriptions and testimonials helps generate sales.

In this blog post, we have given you eight compelling reasons to invest in content marketing. So, let’s begin.

1. To Establish A Brand Identity

A company becomes a brand when customers ask for them instead of the product they need. For example, when you ask for a “Kleenex” instead of a tissue. Or, when spotting a pink and orange billboard from a distance, the name of “Dunkin Donuts” pops in our minds even if we can’t read the billboard.

Content marketing strategies like guest posting, infographics, LinkedIn publishing, and podcasts are great ways to instill brand awareness among the masses. They establish your authority in the niche, automatically creating a reputable impression in the minds of prospects.

2. To Help Your Business Appear On Top Of SERP

Producing quality content and then optimizing it according to the latest SEO trends will help your website rank higher in the search engine result pages (SERP).
Why? Because search engines rank content based on the authority and the value it adds to the lives of the users.

The higher your website and social platforms appear in the search engine, the greater are your chances of securing leads and sales. People mostly view the top results that appear on the SERP, and if your website is there, they will visit your website.

Having a blog section on your website is a reliable content marketing strategy. All the keywords in your niche, which are essential to use in your content, can’t be added to the homepage or product/service section alone.

But by regularly publishing blog posts, you will be able to use all the high-ranking keywords to generate organic traffic.

3. To Develop Meaningful Relations With Your Audience

Content makes it possible to create a lasting and meaningful relationship with your audience based on trust. Every written or visual content provides different benefits in terms of forming these relationships.

It also helps increase engagements and, subsequently, conversions. Twitter statistics reveal that 94% of people plan to purchase from a business they follow.

An effective content marketing strategy is to evoke the emotions of the customers via brand stories and personalized content.

It can be a funny/sad/inspirational incident that gave you the idea for your business, or how your products had a positive impact on the life of your customers. Reading personal anecdotes makes the customers feel connected with a brand.

In addition to it, CMI research shows that Interactive content like quizzes and contests are the most engaging form of content.

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4. To Gain Trust Of Prospects By Providing Valuable Advice

Search intent is the reason why a customer searches for a specific query. For example, if a person is searching for “best restaurants near me,” then the intent could be that they are going out to eat or want to have something delivered to their house.

If you can understand the intent, you can use it to your advantage. Here, keyword research comes handy.

SEO experts will tell you the exact terms and phrases your prospective clients use to search for related content. In this way, you can provide value by integrating these keywords naturally into your content.

For instance, Kraftwurks, an online 3D printing service in Houston, TX, is an excellent example of a company that informs and educates the customers about revolutionary 3D products in a simple yet fun manner.

It’s the appropriate way to share your expertise with ideal customers.

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5. To Generate Organic Traffic

Hubspot conducted a study in 2018, in which 61% of marketers revealed that generating more traffic and leads is their top priority.

Creating content and optimizing it with targeted keywords brings organic traffic to your site. Since the traffic is organic, there is a high possibility that your content will hook the visitors and convert them into customers.

You can generate organic traffic without spending heavily on paid ads if you produce quality content. Plus, it should include relevant images, GIFs, or facts to make it attractive to customers.

6. To Convert Traffic Into Leads And Sales

When you capture your audience’s attention with unique and informative content, they are more likely to convert. According to a study by Kapost, content marketing produces thrice more leads per dollar spent than paid search.

Take an example of Solar Buffalo. Based in Buffalo, New York, it is a small business providing solar energy solutions in the Buffalo city. Their website features some highly informative content regarding the benefits of solar power with their call-to-action just beneath the content.

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This type of content educates the audience and converts traffic into leads.

7. To Target Local Customers

Initially, the success of every small business depends upon its reputation in the local community and the neighborhood areas.

According to Hubspot, 97% of all online searches are from people trying to find a local business. Therefore, focusing on local SEO should be a priority for small businesses to get more customers.

A local SEO company that has worked in the area for a long time is well aware of the traditions and customs of the region. So, hiring a local SEO company is a smart strategy, as they will create search engine optimized content targeting local customers.

For instance, if you have a small business in any of the cities of Delaware, then hiring a Delaware SEO company for content marketing and local SEO will be highly beneficial to create a name for your business in the region.

They can plan campaigns for local festivities and will optimize your content based on local trends and regional lexicon for better results.

8. Using Visual Content To Reach A Wider Audience

Visual content, comprisied of images and video, is understandably the most appealing form of content. It gets a lot more shares and visibility than a written post.

A survey conducted by the Aberdeen Group found out that marketers who use video get 66% more leads every year.

You can use visual content to extend your reach in several ways. If you have a product that provides relief to customers in a unique way, demonstrate it via clear images or a short video.

Also, make sure to share it on all your social mediums to get increased visibility and prompt customer feedback.

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Summing Up

Using content marketing for your business will bring you the desired ROI much quicker than other marketing tactics.

Make sure to outdo your competitors by keeping a close watch on what they are publishing. Beat them with creativity by making and sharing better and more relevant content.

Most importantly, check your content thoroughly for fluff, grammatical, and spelling mistakes before sharing for an expert and authoritative impression on viewers.

How to Get a Better Return on Your Video Marketing

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Of all the forms of content marketing, video offers the greatest opportunity for digital marketers.

And yet the majority of us are blowing it.

Broadly, mistakes in this strategy manifest in three ways:

– Not creating a clear standard for ROI
– Publishing new videos and moving on without promotion
– Whiffing on the content itself, particularly the video topics

When the COO asks about the performance of video marketing, the reflex is to talk about views. But views don’t count as ROI; they’re a vanity metric. Only 35% of marketers report using “intermediate” analytics, i.e, anything beyond views.

Videos are often uploaded to YouTube without much thought for SEO optimization or distribution. Then it’s on to the next one.

It’s that old Field of Dreams mentality: build it and they will come. It doesn’t work like that.

Meanwhile, people are absolutely feasting on video. YouTube reaches more 18 – 49 year-olds (so a huge majority of the population) than any TV network. If you’re a content strategist, or have any stake in the success of your company’s content strategy, you should be thinking about how to excel at video marketing.

In this post, we’ll cover how to improve your video analytics, distribution, and engagement, so you can stop counting views and start delivering some real ROI.

Create specific goals. Use deeper analytics.

On better strategy

First things first: every successful video strategy has to have a goal.

Getting more views isn’t a great strategy, but it’s unclear how that benefits your organization. Here are better examples of goals:

– Increase traffic from video content by x%
– Generate x number of conversions from video
– Attribute x amount of revenue to video content

Of course, each of these depends on the needs, budget, and capabilities of your company. Personally, I would go with the second option: generating conversions and building a contact list.

Focusing on lead generation allows you to take a full funnel approach, which means you can produce top of funnel, mid funnel, and bottom funnel videos that each serve a distinct purpose. (More on that later.)

On better analytics

If you want to have better goals and realize a better return on video, you need better data.

The native analytics provided by Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram can tell you how people are interacting with your content on their platforms. But it won’t be that helpful when you’re trying to measure results.

You’re going to need to grab a video publishing platform like Vidyard or Wistia and hook it up to your marketing automation system. This not only unlocks a deeper set of analytics, but also connects the data from Facebook et al. to what’s happening on your website.

Think of video analytics as intention data. Once you have access to a more expansive dataset, you can see how many viewers watched your entire video, which parts they rewatched, and what percentage clicked through and converted.

Plus, you’ll be able to associate how many leads that originated from your video strategy convert into customers, giving you that all-important baseline for ROI.

Without these analytics, you’ll be adrift in the YouTube sea, wondering which videos actually perform and which just get meaningless views.

Expand your content strategy

Now that you’ve got a better plan — and a better means of measuring success — let’s talk about content strategy.

A lot of B2B brands struggle with video content strategy, because they tend to excel at mid and bottom of the funnel content, while writing off the top of the funnel. But video marketing is an entertainment game, so if you want to win, you need to get better at the top of the funnel.

There are a couple of ways to do this.

The first is to move your SEO up the funnel and focus on topics that are only mildly related to your product — if at all.

For example, at Soundstripe we doubled down on production assets for our video creator community. That means we wrote entire articles about these topics, built landing pages for them, and then made videos about each topic.

Check this video for our storyboard template to get an idea of what I’m talking about.

Does this topic have any direct application to Soundstripe’s YouTube royalty free music product? Not really. But we know that it’s important to our audience, and showing up for this keyword makes us relevant.

That’s the top of the funnel in a nutshell. There are probably tons of topics that your audience is interested in that are several degrees removed from your product.

On social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, people are not actively searching for anything to purchase. They’re just scrolling aimlessly. So you’re going to need to meet people where they are, and that means focusing on broad, entertaining topics.

That’s alright, because as long as you can get someone to engage with your video, you can retarget them later. (Or if they convert on the video, nurture them through email.)

Another important way to attack the top of the funnel is to go beyond keyword research. Yes, it’s possible. Social monitoring tools like Buzzsumo allow you to search for topics your audience is talking about on social media.

These ideas aren’t always represented in search volume, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t interested. So find some of those topics, make a few videos, and see if you can grab people’s attention. Bada bing, bada boom: you’re relevant to a whole new segment of your audience.

Get your distribution right

Now it’s time for the big finale, the third pillar of this video marketing temple: distribution.

Organic social reach is more or less a relic of a bygone era — except on LinkedIn, strangely. So if you want to really get a return on your video marketing, you’re going to need to put some dollars behind distribution on the big social networks.

Now, that doesn’t mean you should just start dumping money into the black hole of Facebook Business Manager. You need to be judicious. Start small and run some tests. And for the love of all that’s holy, don’t serve the same ads to every part of your funnel.

Since you’ve done all that work creating top of the funnel videos (you’re doing that, right?) follow those up with mid funnel and bottom funnel videos. These guys should have more of a conversion focus, because the audience you’re showing them to will be better acquainted with your brand.

Once you get some data from your initial campaign, analyze, tweak, and repeat.

Look, no one said video marketing was easy. It takes a lot of effort to get right. You have to set up your strategy, collect the right data, and optimize your content. But once you approach video marketing in a formalized way, you’ll start to make waves in the most popular content format in the history of mankind.

This guest article was written by Zach Watson, Content Marketing Manager for Soundstripe, a royalty free music company that helps creators and businesses with YouTube monetization, among other things.

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