Crucial Role of Content Marketing in Local Business

09 March 2021

What Is Content Marketing?

It’s a form of marketing wherein brands create and share online content. It could be in the form of blogs, videos, social media posts, reviews, descriptions, etc.

Content marketing does not explicitly promote a company/brand (although there can be promotional content). Instead, it aims to generate interest in a service/product via customer education and awareness.

Why Is Content Marketing Important?

Content marketing holds immense importance for brands for myriad reasons. Some of those are:

It educates people about your products/services and brand in general
It answers the questions people may have about you
You can build long-lasting relationships with people through content
In the long run, it establishes you as an authority in the market
It can improve conversion rates
It’s the primary source of lead generation

When all else fails, the fact that most people expect high-quality content from their most favored brands is the reason for companies to churn out content regularly.

Does Content Marketing Work for Small Businesses?

The short answer to this question is – YES. It does work. Small businesses often feel at a loss as they don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on ads every month. But, with content marketing, they can secure top positions in SERPs for keywords with high search volume.

By investing a few hundred dollars in some quality blog posts, they can almost get the same traction as big companies often do by spending thousands.

Reasons Your Company Needs Content Marketing:

Better Social Media Traction:

Content creation is the basis of securing a huge following on social media. However, just having followers is not enough. To keep them interested and engaged as you progress, you present them with information that interests them.

If you’re having a hard time securing any traction on social media despite a big following; you may need to tweak your content strategy.

Establish Trust With Your Audience:

Through content, you can address people’s pain points in your arena. When customers see that you can help them out, it will inevitably establish a sense of trust with them.

Builds Authority:

By churning out quality pieces such as those around possible future trends in the industry and data analysis, a brand can establish itself as an authority in the niche. As people read and interact through your content, they will think highly of your brand. Brands that regularly publish quality and authoritative content tend to enjoy more customers and better sales.

Greater Return on a Smaller Investment:

Unlike traditional marketing that requires a ton of budget but can only reach a small number of prospects; with content marketing, you can reach a much wider audience with very little expenditure. If applied correctly, the return on investment from content marketing can be exponential.

This arrangement is particularly good for small businesses as they are mostly short on the marketing budget. For a tiny budget, they can secure a strong footing in the industry.

Expose Your Business to New Prospects and a Larger Audience:

By optimizing your content for location-specific keywords, you can widen your outreach. There’s no limitation to the amount of audience you can target with the help of your content marketing efforts.

It’s all about how creatively you find topics and promote them through a combination of strategies. Whether you’re a local business or a global one; content can keep on bringing new prospects and a bigger audience to you.

Boosts Organic Search Visibility:

Through the means of regular blogging and social media posts, you can make sure that more and more people can find you organically. Organic visibility is when a person can see you in the search results against queries related to your industry terms or your brand name.

Content marketing and SEO strategy will help you appear naturally in search engines like Google and Bing.

Content Can Be a Major Lead Magnet for Growing Businesses:

By crafting helpful content and placing CTAs strategically in that content, you can get quality leads. With the help of free content such as guides, how-tos, infographics you can prompt the desired user action. It could be getting them to a landing page and getting them to subscribe to a service.

Every lead magnet, in the end, must rely on quality content.

How to Score Your Content?

Often writers are unable to quantify what kind of content is best for their brand as well as the audience. With the help of content scoring, they can objectively look at their content process and identify the pieces that are proving to be the most valuable.

Based on this evaluation, they can replicate their best-performing content strategy to create similar traction in the future as well.

Here’s the content scoring process to stick with –

Decide on a metric –

For your scoring system to be effective, you must decide on an engagement metric. Based on the success of that engagement metric, you can see what type of content is creating the biggest impact. For some, this can mean page view. For others, it can be the number of shares on Facebook.

Devise a campaign –

After deciding on the metric, you need to draft a campaign that can meet the said metric threshold. For instance, if you feel 1,000 pageviews are good enough, start pouring in content assets that can meet those criteria.

Monitor the performance –

See how well each content piece is doing. Keep adding the pieces of content to your campaign that meets the criteria. You can use HubSpot Analytics to track performance.

Find out Patterns –

After you have the results from your analytics at hand, see if you can spot any patterns in your best-performing content. You can then take out those elements and replicate them across all the content pieces you write.

Repeat –

You should know that content is an ongoing process. With time you may notice new patterns emerging. Keep taking necessary action accordingly based on new insights.

Bottom Line:

No matter your niche or industry; if you’re a part of the online sphere you simply cannot do without an effective content marketing strategy at hand.

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Ariana Smith

I enjoy writing and I write quality guest posts on topics of my interest and passion. I have been doing this since my college days. My special interests are in health, fitness, food and following the latest trends in these areas. I am an editor at Content Rally.

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5 Benefits of Digitalization in Marketing

Marketing is an integral part of any business. It is the bridge that connects consumers to products. You want consumers to purchase from you and trust your company as a business owner. So, you can undermine the value of good publicity for your company. Globally, companies are willing to spend trillions of dollars to work on their marketing plan, including working on witty commercials, socially aware campaigns, and even constructing a user-friendly website convenient for consumers. Therefore, digitalization in marketing is no less than an asset for any flourishing business. This digitization brings profitability and visibility and helps your business grow in exchange for minimal effort. But the perks of going online don’t end here. Buckle up and learn more about the advantages digitalization in marketing has brought. 5 Noticeable Benefits of Digitalization in Marketing 1. Accessible Digital Tools There was a time when putting up an advertisement was tedious. You had to make several stops along the way to find a reliable advertising company, think of a catchy billboard sign, and negotiate a price. This task was also risky since you get one shot to run a proper advertisement in exchange for a handsome price. In addition, if your commercial contained a mistake or a typing error, it would cost an additional fee to get that corrected. However, in the age of digitization, you no longer have to deal with this to spread the word about your business. Platforms like the DigitalSupermarket have all the digitalization in marketing packages you need to create and manage great online advertisements. So whether you’re looking for ways to upgrade your SEO, build your content, or need a nifty tool to make your company popular in social spaces, you can find them here. By browsing through the different prices, you can match with a platform that goes nicely with your budget and get to work right away. 2. Saves You Money As a business, you want to save every penny running your business. That is because maintaining a company is expensive. To have a flexible budget, you need some cash in hand. Therefore by relying on types of digital marketing, you get an opportunity to save money by choosing cost-effective ads. For instance, while opting for a pay-per-click advertisement, you can choose from spending less than $500 or staying within $1,000 to determine the number of ads you need and how frequently they should target consumers. Alternatively, social media marketing also offers minimal costs. You may need to spend a small amount to use applications to schedule your posts online and create a social media campaign, but you don’t need to break the bank. By going on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, you can quickly post content about your company and display products by going on Instagram live or Twitter to tweet more about your business by sharing relatable hashtags. Saving money allows you to spread your wings, continue posting quality content, and use your money to work on other projects. So now you’re no longer obliged to spend thousands of dollars to make your company visible and expand. Related guide: Importance of Storytelling in Social Media Marketing 3. Let’s You Cultivate Consumer Trust A customer trusts any company based on two factors. One is that the business produces quality goods, and two, the company makes an effort to connect with them. Your culturally sensitive ads will work only for a short time if you only produce conventional ads but don’t bother keeping in touch with your consumers. You need to make customers feel important and feel as if they’re essential to your business. Therefore, through marketing techniques like personalized emails and introducing loyalty points, you can build an understanding with your client. Digital marketing analysis also allows you to check on your consumer’s habits, so when you’re curating an email for them, you know what their favorite products are and reference them in the mail. This makes the email relatable and shows the customer how much you care about their choices instead of sending a generic happy holiday greeting card. Try to put consumers with similar purchasing habits into one subscriber list to generate leads and offer the same seasonal discounts. Loyalty cards are another great way to ensure you’re keeping tabs on your clients. By asking your consumer base to subscribe to your business and provide their details, you can create unique digital cards which redeem loyalty points. With every purchase, a consumer gets points which should give them access to gifts, free samples, and deals encouraging them to buy from you more. 4. Allows You To Compete On A Wide Scale Whether you’re a small business or a large booming industry, you can compete with anyone, anytime, by using digital marketing. Online spaces work differently. To gain an edge over your competitor, you need to know how to make content, build SEO, make sure your website is easy to follow, and follow hot trends. These include creating a tik to video or donating to social causes. When you’re online, the size of your office, number of employees, and duration of your business are meaningless. It all falls to where you rank on the search engine results, the consumers you attract, and how smart you are in utilizing keywords in your content. Once you manage your business online, you can quickly build a reputation and even earn a high net worth. Therefore, get used to digital marketing if you’re trying to make a name for yourself without going overboard with spending an exuberant amount. Related guide: What Is The Future Of Digital Marketing In Regards To Shaping Up Small And Large Businesses? 5. Your Progress Is Measurable Tracking how well you did with your marketing campaign is imperative since you want to know whether you got a high turnover rate or not. Unlike traditional billboards, where you can’t track the number of views, digital marketing comes with metrics. Tools like google analytics provide you with an optimal breakdown of your marketing tactic. For example, you can see the number of comments, likes, shares, and even purchases your business got. This can help you make a graph and deduce what marketing tactics benefit you every year and what month always gets you new leads. For instance, you may notice that your products sell well during the holidays, and your social media posts also get shared more around the same time. So you can study what aspects of your campaign spoke to consumers around that period. As a result, you will have a better idea of what you need to do for your company. When you learn about the return on investment your campaigns generated, it helps you map out new plans, work on your SEO, and discard methods that don’t yield results, saving you more money. You flourish when you’re no longer in the dark about how well you’re doing as a business. Final Thoughts Digitalization in marketing has taken the world of business by storm. It has brought benefits that traditional marketing can no longer compete with. By going online, you can find your consumers, get their trust, become visible, get ahead of your competition with no fear and ultimately gauge where your business stands. There is nothing better than enabling your organization to find a stable footing in the marketing sector as a business owner. In addition, digitalization in marketing also pulls back costs. It helps you design a budget that prevents your company funds from getting drained. So instead of spending thousands of dollars on marketing with a few hundred bucks or at most less than $5,000, you have a strong campaign ready for launch. Read Also: Effective Ways to Utilize Digital Marketing How to empower Your Small Business through Digital Marketing? Advantages of Search Engine Marketing in Tulsa 6 Reasons Why Infographics Are Important in Media Marketing Benefits of Having a Strong Digital Marketing Program

Shouldn’t On-Demand Workers Get Workers’ Compensation?

Things have changed significantly for American workers in recent years. More and more Americans are working not as employees, but as independent contractors. Some people call it contracting or freelancing, but the implications are always the same - a worker is hired for a particular service and is paid a rate (hourly or per job) for that service. While working as an independent contractor might be the preferred choice of some workers, it is more often than not an arrangement born out of necessity, facilitated by a growing sea change in the relationship between labor and business. Contractors might have a bit more freedom in the way they do their jobs but, as many freelancers have discovered, there are plenty of drawbacks to working as an independent contractor. They pay their own taxes, lack many of the benefits associated with full-time employment and - perhaps most concerning - they aren’t protected when it comes to injuries suffered on-the-job. It’s this lack of compensation for workplace injuries that brings us to a growing discontentment for a large subset of independent contractors - on-demand workers. What is an On-Demand Worker? On-demand workers are the people who pick us up when we hail a ride with Uber. They are the workers who come clean our house or fix a leaky pipe when we book someone on our Handy app. In short, on-demand workers are those that spring into action when we request a service from a company that relies on freelance labor. The “Ride-Share” Economy’s Impact on Workers Every few weeks or so, you’ll find a news story or press release about another company that wants to become the Uber of something. Handy wanted to become the Uber of household cleaning. Cargo wanted to become the Uber of shipping. The list goes on and on. The financial success and the immense popularity of ride-share services have prompted companies to look for ways to incorporate the ride-share business model into other services, and many of them have been successful in doing so. These “on-demand” services are not just popular in the business community, they are popular with consumers, too. In many cases, the services offered by the new breed of businesses are more affordable and, in some cases, more responsive to a customer’s needs. It might be tempting for consumers to think of these services as a much more direct way to communicate with someone who is providing the service they need. The truth, however, is a little more complicated than that. The driver who picks us up, or the handyman who comes to fix our sink, is working on contract through the business who runs the app we use to summon them. The money that we pay that worker is divided between the worker and the business they work for. Many of these businesses have requirements that their workers must meet before they can do their job. Workers don’t have the level of control over their jobs that one would typically associate with an independent contractor, yet they are provided at the same level of benefits. In other words, they are provided with no benefits. Read also: Making Your Office Safer for Workers No Security for On-Demand Workers On-demand workers can suffer injuries just like any other subset of workers. A high percentage of workplace injuries are transportation-related. Many workers suffer injuries while moving goods or traveling for work. When you consider the fact that on-demand workers spend a good deal of their time in transit from one job to another (or, as is the case with drivers for ride-share services, all of their time in transit), it’s no surprise that these workers face just as many, if not more, hazards while on the job as those who are considered to be employees. To zero in even more on just how dangerous some of these jobs can be, let’s look at taxi drivers and chauffeurs, whose jobs are virtually identical to Uber and Lyft drivers. Taxi drivers and chauffeurs have fatality rates five times those of the average worker. On-demand drivers face the same risks - vehicle accidents, violent attacks - yet they aren’t given the financial security that other workers receive. If an on-demand worker is injured on the job, the company that they work for will not be held accountable for the injuries of their workers. That worker will be left without the security that so many of us enjoy as a fundamental right. They work just as hard. They observe the requirements set out by the company that employs their services, yet they are guaranteed nothing when something goes wrong. Contractors “In-Name Only” Understandably, many on-demand workers are growing increasingly dissatisfied with their classification as independent contractors. This is evidenced in a number of lawsuits in which workers are seeking to be treated with the same rights and benefits as other types of workers. This has been happening in the trucking industry for some time, an industry that has shifted from one heavily reliant on employed drivers (who used to be more likely to be union members) to one of the independent workers, and this industry suffered major labor shortage as a result. In one high-profile lawsuit, an appeals court found that FedEx incorrectly classified their drivers as contractors, despite the fact that FedEx required workers to wear FedEx uniforms, drive FedEx vehicles, and groom themselves according to the standards of FedEx. While on-demand workers face slightly different requirements from their companies, the principle is very much the same. The question is: How much can a company ask of you before they should give you the same rights as their “employees” are afforded? The answer is that you can ask only so much from a worker before they are essentially a contractor "in-name-only.” It’s becoming clear that companies are taking all of the advantages they can out of the “contract” relationship they have with workers while providing none of the benefits that they would give their employees. Unfortunately, this means a lack of workers’ compensation benefits for on-demand workers. The Implications for Consumers On-demand services might seem like a great thing for consumers, for now, but there are many ways in which the relationship between workers and their companies will begin to seep into the quality of the services consumers are currently enjoying. If companies providing on-demand services fail to provide workers with adequate benefits, they will face the same challenges as the transportation industry, which is struggling to keep high-quality workers who will find more benefits and security in other labor markets. In other words, on-demand suppliers will eventually get what they pay for and, by extension, so will consumers. In that respect, the lack of protection for on-demand workers is bad for business, not just for the workers themselves, but for consumers as well.

Why A Business Should Use Facebook Remarketing

If your company operates a digital marketing strategy, then you will probably be aware of the various social media channels that you can use to target customers with a particular advert. Indeed, social media marketing has increased in prominence over the last few years while if you are looking to improve the advertising campaigns that are used by your business, as well as enjoy a cost-effective way of targeting particular customers with information about your products and services, you should be aware to use a Facebook remarketing strategy in the near future. Facebook remarketing is based around the principle of targeting customers that have already demonstrated an interest in your products or services while if you do not have the relevant in-house knowledge to implement a particular type of marketing campaign online, you should think about contacting a specialist digital marketing agency in the future. For more information about a digital marketing agency in a particular area of the world, you should think about consulting an online business directory as you will be able to find several companies that you can contact. 1. Understand the concept of remarketing Social media platforms can give you a fantastic way to connect with potential or existing customers while you should also be aware that Facebook remarketing is a means by which you can advertise to potential customers that have already expressed an interest in your products or services. Indeed, people that have already visited your website or clicked on a link can be targeted with a follow-up advert to potentially improve the return on your advertising investment. If you want to create a positive return on investment when you are implementing an advertising campaign it is essential to be aware that a Facebook Remarketing Service can provide you with a fantastic way to target people that have already shown an interest in your products or services. 2. Lower your costs Furthermore, it is essential to know that if you are looking to improve the return on investment for a particular advertising strategy, you should think about using Facebook remarketing. Facebook remarketing can provide your business with a low cost per click, especially when compared to implementing a number of other marketing tactics through the various major search engines. In addition, you should be aware that targeting a particular group of customers with a follow-up advert is a major aspect of Facebook remarketing which can provide your business with a fantastic return on your investment. 3. Create a high conversion rate Lastly, it is essential to note that social media remarketing can provide your business with a fantastic way to improve its conversion rate. Indeed, converting people that visit a website for the first time into actual buyers can often take time, while you should be aware that Facebook remarketing can allow you a fantastic way of targeting people that are already interested in your products or services. Understand the concept of remarketing using Facebook Lower your costs Create a high conversion rate Therefore, in conclusion, if you are looking for a fantastic strategy that you can implement as part of a social media marketing campaign you should think about implementing a Facebook remarketing strategy as soon as possible. Read Also: Social Media Marketing role in Technology The 7 Most Common Email Marketing Mistakes 9 Best Entry Level Marketing Jobs When Starting Your Career

Crucial Role of Content Marketing in Local Business

What Is Content Marketing?

Why Is Content Marketing Important?

Does Content Marketing Work for Small Businesses?