An easy fix for Small Businesses – The 3 Content Marketing Best Practices that Small Businesses Usually Tend To Make.( Avoid Them)
“Content is King” – The same phrase written in different styles, more or less beating about the bush almost all webmasters and bloggers choose to put it up in their articles to attract the audience.
The only thing that matters is whether you have information they are looking for and how well you interact with the audience. But, now the question is how effectively does the Content Marketing Best Practices influence small businesses? For those who have spent a fortune on hiring the best content writers, it is time to sweat, as these best practices cannot work out any magic as expected.
Break the rules and enjoy the freedom to formulate a business specific content. Here, we will discuss which rules are meant to be broken:
Best Practice 1: Develop a Content Strategy
Content Strategy is just crap. It is more like a household word these days. Let me explain it better for example, if someone asks you what you are wearing for the party tonight and you take up a paper and jot down a strategy for choosing a dress. Absurd isn’t that? Got it. The same is what happens when you decide to formulate a strategy for developing content.
If you really feel a strategy can help you, then no matter draw out one. But, I bet it will be for the first and last time you are doing this. It means wasting a lot of money, time and effort and moreover when it comes to a small business, your resources are limited and you have to utilize it intelligently. At the end of the strategy fever that has wound you up, you will be depressed to find that either,
Your content marketing team couldn’t execute that strategy as planned
OR
It couldn’t please the customers as expected.
So, if you already got your team to work on developing editorial calendars, then dump the plan as it cannot bring in any bustling or responsive results as expected. I would say it is an unnecessary waste of resources when your team develops a plan ages ago and at a later time, it is dumped into trash with changing business goals.
Contradictory to what we already discussed let us think of implementing a content strategy and what happens next.
As such having a strategy can never be harmful, but the difference that it generates depends on how well you succeed in executing the plan. Ok, then go ahead and decide a strategy, but I will like to strike a warning here, make sure your strategy develops as your business progresses each day. Don’t make it appear static and boring.
Businesses have experienced success in the past and are following the same age old tradition of developing strategy for content marketing. The secret lies here. How many of them decide to have an emerging strategy and how many of them stick to the same one? Well, a business is meant to progress and not shred into reins and so is a strategy.
It comes with creating, publishing and promoting the content. Monitor the content that you promoted and check the responses that you have received. It is just like a cycle. Now, you can create content and experiment how well it strikes the masses and depending on the response you can alter the strategy.
The best strategies are:
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Publish latest updates and you can draw better results rather than choosing a single day of a week or month to work on the interaction section.
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Don’t limit yourself to reporting news from a single perspective. Don’t forget you have an universal audience and you need to please them all alike.
Unless you implement and witness the results for yourself, you will not experience the change it can bring to your business.
Best Practice 2: Weave a story through your Content
Stories are going viral and the traffic it generates is eye popping. Indeed it is a great idea if you can construct stories and please the audience. We all love stories and the same rule applies here. Bigger business organizations have abundant resources with them and it doesn’t matter even if their stories fail to hit the consumer eye. I guess you can understand what I am trying to point out how the idea of tale telling can prove to be a flop.
Being a small business why don’t you plan for content that is transparent. It is easy to get people read a few lines over volumes of manuscripts that might be boring.
The Statistics given below depicts how small businesses can effectively utilize content marketing:
Follow the Trend or be the Trendsetter
You spend plenty of bucks and hire a highly experienced content writer and blast out nonsense and even you forget what your aim is once you arrive at the end of the story. Here, you are having a hard time checking out a better strategy to promote content that matters, but your competitors are steading fast with an awesome list of things that they do and they don’t.
Lists of facts is what impresses people as in:
10 Little-known Facts About E-cigarettes – HowStuffWorks
Human Evolution: Did We Come From Monkeys? – YouTube
15 Most Amazing And Beautiful Places In The World That …
6 Tumblr Shortcut Keys You Might Not Know | The Love …
I have tried the same for promoting content on our blog and believe me it really works. People are actually interested in reading through articles that come with lists in the heading as it is usually simple and precise and undoubtedly, these are the articles that receive the higher click through rates over the Google Search Engine Result Pages.
I will help you to measure the quality of your content with a few analytical tactics:
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Social media engagement implies that your content is shareable.
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Excellent bounce rate metrics indicates that your content is usable.
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Repeated visitors are a sign of content that is memorable.
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Findable content implies top ranking in the search and organic traffic.
Why waste your time yarning stories that might be meaningless when a very simple set of points can drizzle magical wonders. These tips will help you bring home the bacon.
Best Practice 3: Content Marketing ultimately leads to customer acquisition
Height of awesomeness is when you have control over your customer’s mind and everything worked as expected. There would be no turning back and your business will top the charts.
But reality is far apart from that. We all expect content marketing at the top of the funnel to lure customers and at some point of time they convert into sales. Almost all businesses work on this principle, as you might have witnessed highly-qualified content writers yielding content that is expected to build business brand awareness and generate trust ultimately leading to customer acquisition.
Customer conversion is never an immediate process. It can take ages for people to come back to you. We have experienced the same and from my experimentations and experience I would guarantee that you would gain leads which turn into active customers but not immediately. The customers who read my content have inked my brand in their mind and have visited time and again to re-read what I have written.
Some time later, we managed to gain their trust and build a bond so intact that they are an inseparable part of our business horizon. Check out here, http://www.slideshare.net/ethos3/simplify-simplify-simplify how you can keep your content humble and appealing. Remember, keep it plain and gentle, do not be self-promotional as it can harm the trust you have gained.
Conclusion:
Best Practices have been named so, after businesses experimented these and found them to work out extremely well, over the other traditional practices. Why not try out these practices and check out which is suitable for your business to gain success.
http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/why-content-marketing-fails
http://www.bitrebels.com/business/marketing-content-media-guide/
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/373728469051200378/
http://www.ezanga.com/articles/the-state-of-small-business-content-marketing-infographic
http://www.pammarketingnut.com/2014/10/stop-listening-to-social-media-gurus-and-build-your-own-plan/