Content marketing is the oft-repeated phrase that one comes across almost every day in her/his web surfing journey.
There are billions of small business sites on the web competing for eyeballs for this term. In general, content marketing is an effective tool to rank a website’s content on top of Google search landscape.
For small business owners, there are two ways to rank their web site at the top of the search engines. Burn money to get the brand and business product/service in front of the target audience. The other option is to build a definitive content marketing strategy without blowing money.
This is an investment of time Vs $ conundrum. The former is certainly not easy with the business owner having to juggle day to day business activities and not having enough time to develop an effective content marketing plan. Let us take a look at how small businesses benefit from content marketing.
1. Establish a strong brand identity
Branding is crucial in how people perceive your business. It does not matter if you are a multinational company or a small to medium sized business.
It is impossible to be everything to everyone in this day and age. As a business owner, you know the advantages your business can offer over your competition. Content marketing helps drive this in your messaging across every medium thus making it unique to your brand.
When you can clearly articulate your vision through your personality and what your brand can achieve for your customers, it is easy to convince your followers to take action on your site.
2. Build trust with your audience
Let us be honest – trust is a quality that is hard to come across in any sphere of activity today. Even new visitors coming to your site for the first time are not going to trust your brand.
The correct way of establishing content marketing is one that speaks strongly and with conviction to your audience. The truth of your content will convert the uninitiated/brand new visitors to repeat visitors. Over time, your site will be seen as an authority in the eyes of such visitors. This in turn converts to trust and is the catalyst for future transactions.
3. SEO is a consequence of good content marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a natural consequence of an effective content marketing strategy. When good quality content is delivered in unambiguous and lucid style in your domain of business, users who read it will appreciate its value and link to it naturally. This is earned backlinks.
For search engines like Google and Bing, backlinks earned meritoriously is a major signal for likeability of your content and hence your site on the web. The reward for such an effort is reaching the top of the search engine rankings.
4. Building relationship with your site visitors
When you have a great quality site/blog, it is natural to have a high bounce rate as users come to read the latest content published on your site and bounce away.
By having an opt-in form on the page, encouraging visitors to sign up for the sole reason that they will be alerted when new content is published, will get them into your mailing list. Then you can do email marketing via newsletters that contain links to your published content and also serves as a powerful method to sell your business services/products.
5. Pull marketing generates high quality leads
Many a time, when you do paid search marketing, the user is looking to research a product/service and is not yet ready to click your paid ad. The ad is more a hindrance and gets ignored. Even if it is clicked, it costs you $ as the advertiser, especially so when the user bounces away after looking at your landing page. This is a classic case of push marketing.
With an effective content marketing strategy in place, when a user searches on Google with a query that matches the intent of your small business product/service, your site shows up on Google natural search rankings. The user clicks on it and is wowed by all the useful content on your site. There is a very strong chance for the user to convert into a customer. This is a classic case of pull marketing.
By gaining such high quality leads through pull marketing, the return on investment (ROI) goes through the roof. You are bound to succeed by attracting the right customers looking for products/services offered by your business. This is a huge benefit that content marketing brings to the table.
As a small business owner, can I do my own content marketing?
Content marketing is very doable by anyone. But it takes lot of time and effort. As a small business owner, you have to run your business and may not have the time to market your site within a fixed budget.
This is where we at Traffic Alignment come into the picture. We can carve out an effective content marketing strategy that is ideal for your business. We do the hard work for a fixed fee every month and this is the one area we excel in. In addition to this fixed fee, a nominal spend for Facebook advertising is the key to the success of your business online.
Leave the hard work of generating content and marketing it successfully to us. We will ensure that you stand a fighting chance of getting the best bang for your buck when you sign up for our small business friendly content marketing services. It is time to take action.
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