You have many options in creating a digital marketing strategy. Every business needs to choose the right platform for them. You can learn from the mistakes and experiences of small-business owners to help you get started.
These are tips from online community members for small business owners who want to make the most out of these strategies.
1. You should take your imagery more seriously
Every photo is not equal in quality, especially true on Instagram and Facebook. Nearly every industry has content creators who strive to create images that will entice potential customers to take action.
What are you doing to improve your game lately? Are you using the same stock images or creating meaningful photos and videos reflecting your business’s true beauty?
Stock photos are more affordable, but in-house content is authentic and can eliminate the possibility of using images that your potential customers may have seen elsewhere.
Spend a little more time searching for stock images representing your brand if your team cannot create custom imagery. You will need to search for images that may not be on the first page of your search results. You can also use images that your team took with their phones, and these authentic images can make you stand out amongst the sea of stock photos.
2. Use your resources wisely
Content marketing can be expensive. This could mean spending a lot of time creating content or outsourcing it to creatives. Content marketing is expensive and should be managed carefully, and Analytics is a crucial part of this.
Imagine putting all that effort only to discover that you were pushing your content on Facebook when most of your traffic came from Pinterest and Instagram.
It hurts, and you’re not the only one who would experience it. You can use your social media analytics to help you target the right audiences and platforms with your content.
3. Be a better blogger and marketer
It takes time to write blog posts and other social media content; however, it is possible to improve your skills and create a schedule to get more done in your workday.
Jess Cooper shares productivity tips for freelance writers and bloggers in this Moss Media article.
4. Work with a communications and branding agency
Small businesses may not always be able to afford full-time staff for marketing and branding. You can outsource specific tasks to agencies, which is a good thing.
Ivan Widjaya, the SMB CEO, discusses the services these agencies offer.
5. Engage with your followers
It’d be better if you didn’t abandon your content pages and ghost the audience, and this could come across as insincere. Brands connected with customers love them, and social media is a great way to achieve this. This platform was designed to connect people.
There are many ways to show your audience that you care, from responding promptly to messages and commenting on posts to responding to negative and positive reviews.
Are you short on time? Are you short on time? Set up automatic Messenger replies to help you get started with your social communication strategies.
Are you ready for Facebook marketing at the next level? ReachLocal offers a range of solutions to help your company achieve its goals. Contact us today!
6. Analyze and follow your competitors
It would be best if you didn’t try to reinvent the wheel without looking at what others are doing. You might be imagining something trendy, but it could be outdated. While some tactics can last for years or even months, others fade almost as quickly as they hit the ground. Social strategy is all about pivoting, and you can’t pivot if your bubble is too small.
Recalling the previous point, if your competitors are constantly creating original imagery, but you’re not keeping up, this could be one reason their business is growing. Your vertical might be using similar stock imagery to your branding if it is niche.
Facebook offers many powerful tools that will help you keep up with your competition. You can start following your competitors under the Pages to Watch section by going to the Insights tab. This tab is rich in data about your page. Although the information on your competitors is not comprehensive, it allows you to track their posting frequency, engagement, and total page likes.
To keep up to date with the content of your competitors’ pages, it would be a good idea to follow their pages via your profile, and there is a good chance they already follow you.
7. Set appropriate goals
How can you achieve your content marketing goals if you don’t know them? These goals can be set mainly based on your analytics and examples.
- Which platform are you setting your goals?
- In a year, what achievement do you want to acquire?
- Are you looking to increase the number of your followers?
Maybe you want to increase traffic and user interaction. Now that you have your big yearly goal in place, it is time to break it down into smaller, more manageable monthly goals.
These are your steps to achieving the big, overall goal. Next, determine what daily tasks are necessary to achieve your larger goals.
8. Define how you will measure success
If you want to measure the effectiveness of your content, you must track its performance. Do you plan to track hard metrics such as sales and leads or soft ones like social media user engagement?
You’ll want to track consumption metrics (how many people download or view your content), sharing metrics, and lead generation metrics.
What is content marketing
Traditional marketing is losing effectiveness every day. Forward-thinking marketers recognize that there has to be a better way.
Content marketing is a strategy-oriented marketing approach that focuses on creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and keep a defined audience and ultimately drive profitable customer actions.
Without great content, marketing is impossible
Regardless of the type of marketing strategy you choose, content marketing should be part and parcel of your overall marketing plan. All forms of marketing should include quality content.
Social media marketing: Your social media strategy should be content marketing.
SEO: Search engines reward businesses that produce consistent, quality content.
PR: A successful PR strategy should focus on issues that matter to readers, not just their business.
PPC: You need to have great content for PPC to be successful.
Inbound marketing: Content is the key to driving traffic and leads.
Content strategy: The content strategy is an integral part of all content marketing strategies.
Marketing is all about content.
Reread the content marketing definition once more. This time, remove the valuable and relevant. The difference between content marketing and other informational junk you receive from companies trying to sell you “stuff.” Companies do send information all the way.
Most of this information is irrelevant or spammy. Content marketing is so appealing in today’s world, with thousands of marketing messages every day.
Conclusion
Content marketing is dynamic, and it would be best if you were open to changing strategies when they don’t work. It is important to establish goals and define your success metrics, and this is not an easy task.
Think carefully about where you place your resources. These five tips can help you improve your content marketing skills.
