Crucial Role of Content Marketing in Local Business

Published on: 09 March 2021 Last Updated on: 26 December 2024

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:

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.

The Role of AI-Generated Content in Small Business Marketing Strategies

AI-generated content is making waves in the marketing industry, we all know that by now!

It’s a game changer for small businesses.

If you’re a small business owner, you know that keeping up with content creation can be a full-time job in itself.

Blogs, social media posts, product descriptions—the list goes on and on!

But what if we told you there was a tool out there designed to help you do it all? Here are a few ways AI can benefit your small business.

Save time & Money

Time is money, isn’t it?

This is why you would need to make the most of the trendy tools which are coming our way. With AI tools, you can create content in the blink of an eye.

You could have a full blog post written, an Instagram caption, or even an email campaign done in minutes. Imagine having ChatGPT or Copy.ai doing it for you. Freeing up more time to spend on other areas of your business-like product development or customer service.

Affordable but Quality Content

Hiring a content writer? Expensive.

But AI? It’s way more budget-friendly! If you’re working with a small budget (and most small businesses are).

Yes, AI tools let you create professional-quality content without a huge price tag. Now, that doesn’t mean you’ll never need a human touch because editing is inevitable. But for the basics, AI can take you a long way. More money saved, more options to grow your business.

Keep Your Content Consistent and Engaging

Struggling to keep up? After all, whether you have blog posts to publish or social media posts to launch, there are a few things to make. Use of AI to rescue!

Utilize AI tools that can help generate topics, write drafts, and keep your content pipeline full. The best part is they can also analyze what’s popular in your industry, so you’re not just posting anything.

You’re putting it there because it matters to your audience. Plus, they are not very complicated to use!

Win Over Your Competitor

Let’s face it—it’s tough to get noticed in the online world these days. AI-generated content allows you to optimize your posts for SEO (even if you have no idea what SEO means).

This will give your business a better shot at ranking in Google searches and help you bring in new customers without spending a fortune on advertising.

If you’re sick of cranking out the content, and not delivering the much needed quality (because of writer’ block), why not try letting AI give your small business a little push instead?

Careful With AI!

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.

When talking about AI content, there are a few items you should remember!

When using AI for content creation, there are a few things to avoid. Don’t rely entirely on AI-generated content without reviewing it. Always edit for tone, accuracy, and personalization.

AI can make errors or create generic content, so make sure it reflects your brand’s voice. Avoid overstuffing AI content with keywords—it can hurt SEO.

Also, don’t skip fact-checking!

AI tools can occasionally produce outdated or inaccurate information. Lastly, avoid using AI for all your content; mix it with human creativity to keep your messaging fresh and authentic. Balance is key!

Read Also:

Content Rally

Content Rally wrapped around an online publication where you can publish your own intellectuals. It is a publishing platform designed to make great stories by content creators. This is your era, your place to be online. So come forward share your views, thoughts and ideas via Content Rally.

View all posts

Should You Consider Outsourcing Your Brand’s Marketing Campaign?

If you’re in higher management, you strive to make sure your marketing team is doing its best to market your brand and bring in leads to the sales team. Lest outsourcing becomes ponders publicity, keeping your organizational processes internally is crucial to you because you want to keep control over operations, and you want to keep costs at a decent minimum. Now you’ve realized that internalizing all of your online marketing efforts might not be working out as well as you’d imagined. Businesses that outsource marketing have specialized marketing services on their side, collaborating with them with every campaign and a new initiative to make sure it’s successful. Online marketing services are often more efficient than an in-house marketing team and, more often than not, more affordable. Systems are even created to make sure your brand still has control over activities and the reputation of the company. Outsourcing your marketing efforts can be a great option if you understand the importance of a powerful marketing campaign but don’t have the resources to do it by yourself. Who Can Benefit from Outsourcing of Brand Marketing Campaign? Many companies and brands decide to outsource their marketing activities to help them create brand awareness and generate leads. But certain businesses tend to use outsourced resources to implement their marketing agendas. Here are some of them. 1. Early-Stage Businesses Upscaling a new business is a challenging and stressful job. You have many decisions to make while developing new services and products. At the early stage of the business, business owners often concentrate their efforts on creating the product and do not have the financial power or the time to hire full-time marketing people. As the company prepares to launch their service, they need to develop a brand image. An outsourced marketing agency often handles the processes that design the style guides and website and creates the company logo. 2. Growing Companies When companies launch their service or product without problems, they often enter a high-growth phase to quickly bring supplementary marketing resources. Outsourced marketing services provide the necessary talent and resources to increase revenue growth without adding a lot of overhead. More often than not, businesses in growth stages cannot afford the time it takes to train and hire new staff members. Outsourced marketing firms or Virtual PA services provide expertise and flexibility during these growth stages. Often, venture capital firms invest in companies at this stage and use the influx of cash to accelerate growth through social media platforms, content marketing, SEO, and digital advertising activities. 3. Companies with Large Marketing Teams Global organizations hire hundreds, if not thousands, of marketing professionals to back their brand and sales initiatives. These enterprises will often use outsourced firms and professionals to provide crucial services. For instance, a company will hire outsourced professionals to promote an event, save money or launch a new project. Outsourced resources are often more affordable than in-house professionals. The company may want to skyrocket a specific product line and outsource for a short-term initiative. 4. Niche Companies Brands and companies that operate in specialty markets like engineering or biotechnology may find it challenging to hire in-house marketers with the experience and the know-how they need to create and launch content marketing campaigns. Outsourced marketing services often specialize in a specific niche market. They bring not only valuable resources but also experience in these unique markets. Virtual assistants, for example, combine technical expertise with marketing education or experience. These professionals work in leading organizations and have a greater understanding of the market than full-time professionals with little experience. When To Do Outsourcing? If you do not see the results you want from your in-house marketing team, then you should consider outsourcing. Your in-house team is working relentlessly with the goals set before them, but the results continue to be short of optimal. Staying on top of performance and campaign optimization isn’t easy. Often in-house teams have no time to optimize these campaigns for better performance, so they end short of hitting their goals. Evaluating the results of marketing efforts is critical to the success of a team not only in-house but for outsourced professionals as well. If it’s been a few months since your brand launched a great marketing campaign, it might be time to outsource marketing. a. Your Marketing Team Is Burned Out In marketing, there is graphic design, copywriting, SEO, website development, email marketing, lead generation, and so much more. How many professionals do you have in your team? Do you have someone assigned to each task involved in marketing, or do you have one marketing guru filling many hats? A copywriter can’t be a graphic designer and vice versa, but so many entrepreneurs expect so much from one marketing employee. One team member cannot meet the massive marketing demands in today’s market. b. You’re Always Running Out Of Time You’re planning a stellar email campaign this month, but your team ran out of time, so you reschedule it. You’re rushing to get the offer, the Facebook posts, and the blog posts out before Christmas. If you feel like you’re always running but never get anywhere, then it might mean you don’t have the necessary systems or strategies in place to run efficiently. c. You Lack Proper Strategy Getting things done might feel rewarding, but those things are time idlers instead of business generators when they are not part of an overall strategy. Posting on social or sharing a blog post is useless unless you have a purpose of reaching your goal. Sharing for the sake of staying active on social media platforms is not a real strategy. You feel the pressure of staying active online, so you ask your marketing team to ensure the social accounts are active always, but you don’t give them a genuine reason. As a business, you have income goals, but if you lack a proper strategy to meet those goals, then you might want to consider outsourcing digital marketing services. Summary That’s all about the logic behind considering outsourcing your brand’s marketing campaign. I hope the article was intriguing enough to make you understand why you should outsource the marketing campaign. The rationale is justified above along with specific situations to make your concept clear. Wanna clear any doubts? Drop your queries in the comment area below. Read Also: What You Need to Know When Outsourcing SEO How Legal Services Outsourcing Aids Law Firms and Legal Departments Balancing the Books with Outsourcing – Virtual Receptionists 9 Things Conservatives & Liberals Have in Common How To Reduce The Operating Cost of Your Business?

8 Key SEO Strategies for E-Commerce Websites

Online shopping has changed the way people shop. The popularity of the online shopping portals makes two things clear. First, people like the convenience that online shopping provides them. Being able to shop for anything and everything at their own convenient time and from the comfort of their homes or offices is a great plus point for shoppers across the world. Second, with the increase of online shoppers, the number of e-commerce websites is also increasing. This is leading to aggressive competition in the arena of online marketing. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into the picture. SEO can help e-commerce business owners to beat the competition and keep attracting targeted visitors to their website. Here are 8 key SEO strategies that can help e-commerce websites to gain success: 1. Provide unique and impressive product descriptions : An e-commerce site is all about products and their sales. As such, product descriptions are vital for such sites. Since e-commerce sites have to deal with a huge number of products, sometimes they may tend to use the descriptions provided by the manufacturers for the products. Or, they may want to repeat the same description for similar products. But that is a wrong strategy and must be avoided. You need to come up with a unique product description for each item you are selling on your website. Though it’s a lot of work to write unique descriptions for each product, this strategy is sure to bring in the desired results. 2. Ensure easy navigation of your website : Make sure that your e-commerce website is easily navigable. This strategy is important not just for improving your site’s search engine rankings, but also to offer a smooth shopping experience to your customers. Create categories to organize your products and make them easily searchable. Ensure that your sitemap is easy to follow. Also, the design of your website must be clutter-free so that your customers can continue with their shopping without feeling irritated. Place your menus in a way so that your customers can access them easily, regardless of where they are on the site. 3. Optimize the loading time of your website : Your e-commerce website is likely to have a large number of images for the products you are selling. These images can slow down your site. Ensure to optimize the load times of your website by reducing the image sizes. High-quality images are essential for any e-commerce website. But if they slow down your website, it can impact your SEO in a bad way. So, it’s better to include images with small sizes and have a feature that allows your customers to zoom in on the images to see an enlarged version. This will enable you to provide your customers with quality images without affecting the load speed of your website. 4. Go for internal linking of your pages : Internal linking is an essential aspect of SEO. Even Google prefers sites that opt for internal linking in an effective manner. Your objective must be to ensure that your customers can reach your various product pages within your site with as little clicking as possible. One way to do this is to link every page to other relevant pages within your website. This will also help your site visitors to navigate to similar products in an easy manner and give you a chance to convert them into customers. If you want to know more about customer conversion, you can check out The Ultimate Guide to E-commerce Conversion Funnel Optimization. 5. Make sure that your site is optimized for mobile : Today more and more people are using their mobile phones to do their shopping at various online stores. This makes it essential for you to optimize your e-commerce website for mobile. By doing so, you will be providing a smooth mobile shopping experience for your users. So, either go for a responsive design for your site or create an interactive mobile application to draw in the advantage of such customers. Ultimately, your objective is to attract more customers and ensure more sales for your website and this is a good strategy to achieve your aim. 6. Assure user security on your website : User security is one point that needs extra attention in case of e-commerce websites. Having HTTPS encryption for user security on your website is a great way to go about this task. HTTPS encryption ensures that your customers will have an added layer of security when shopping on your website. This will diminish any doubts they may have regarding user security on your site. Also, HTTPS encryption will help Google to mark your site as secured and increase the chances of your site’s ranking on the search engine pages. 7. Include social media sharing buttons on your product pages : The reach of social media is undeniable. It can take just a few minutes for an image or a piece of information to attract the attention of thousands of users on social media. Incorporate social media sharing buttons on your product pages so that your users may share information and images of the product on the social media platforms. On one hand, this will increase the reach of your products and attract the interest of relevant customers. On the other hand, it will be good practice for SEO as well. This is because Google may perceive the social signals as an indication of authority. 8. Check your website and pages for errors : For an e-commerce site, it’s not unusual to grow at an incredible speed and have a large number of pages within a short time. But such growth also increases the prospect of having errors on your e-commerce website. It’s not feasible to hinder the growth of your site. So, the next best thing to do is to make sure that your website remains free of errors. Carry out regular checks to ensure that none of the permalinks on your site generates 404 errors. Also, check that the links to external sources or content are in a functional state. Read More : 9 Ways To Use Pinterest To Promote Your E-Commerce Store 5 Most Common Challenges Faced Bye Commerce Businesses Today How To Get Product Ideas For Your E-commerce Business

5 Questions To Ask Your Digital Marketing Agency Before You Start Working

In the past few years, brands, regardless of their shape and size have started understanding digital marketing. This means that convincing a majority of them about the advantages of digital marketing has ceased to exist in most situations. You need to do thorough research when choosing a digital marketing agency that you need to partner with. If you are starting from scratch, you need to go via Digitech Web Design, a leading agency that can help you with everything from designing your business website to taking care of your SEO strategies and plans. In 2020, brands are faced with a new challenge- which agency to partner with! Digital Marketing agencies are propping up left, right, and center. While everyone claims to be the best at what they do, it is for brands to be sure of their abilities. In this article, we are going to help brands get on board the best digital marketing agencies as partners. However, before we get to the questions, brands should ask agencies, let us first look at some of the challenges of the same. Challenges to Hiring the Best Digital Marketing Agency for your Brand Every business is unique. It has its own sets of challenges. In terms of priority, some businesses want to concentrate on one aspect, while others look to do something else. It is important that your internet marketing agency understands your needs and requirements as a business. Many brands feel that every digital or internet marketing agency offers the same. However, that is not the case. If you want to work with a complete 360-degree agency, you will have to shell out a premium. Therefore, it is essential to work with a skill set, which you feel would be most helpful for you at a specific time. A creative agency will tell you that it is all about branding, logo, design, and language. An agency geared towards social media would want to focus on just that one aspect. You need to team, which amplifies your complete digital performance at all levels. List of 5 Questions to ask your Digital Marketing Agency before you start 1. What is their area of Expertise? It is essential that you honestly ask them about what their area of specialization at the very start is. Like we already mentioned, while some have a great social team, others might boast of a brilliant SEO team. Depending on what you want to proceed with for the next year, you need to ask them about their different verticals in the organization. 2. What are Budget and Fees? At the end of the day, money matters. If you are looking for a highly-skilled, specialized agency, you need to shell out a good amount as retainer every month. However, if your agency helps you increase your sales and revenues multiple times, you will not feel the pinch. Try starting with a smaller agency to understand those basics and then proceed with the bigger ones. 3. What are their Credentials and Past Work Records? Many brands feel secure when they see that an agency has handled clients in the past from their niche. While this is a great starting point, you should not let your options be limited by just this fact. If they have worked with a business of a similar nature in the past, then they are aware of all the challenges, strategies, and processes, which will be required in the case of your business. 4. What are their Marketing Inputs about your Brand? Most agencies will ask you about your pressure or pain points and then proceed to offer solutions accordingly. You can use this to ask them about larger marketing and sales goals. This will help show you how much they are aligned with your brand. It will also demonstrate whether they understand your issues and are willing to address the same with their skills. 5. What is the Timeframe for seeing Results? You are only working with an internet marketing agency because you want to start seeing results. There is always an expectation involved. Do not fear or feel embarrassed in communicating the same with the prospective agency. This will allow them to assess their performances and see whether they have the capability to fulfill your expectations. The Final Word It is essential that you proceed with these five questions before signing on an internet marketing agency. This will allow you to structure your expectations accordingly. A good digital agency can be a great asset to a brand. However, on the flip side, if you do not get the best agency, you will end up losing money. Read Also: 5 Most Common Digital PR Mistakes And How To Avoid Them How to Empower Your Small Business through Digital Marketing? Why Should You Hire a B2B Digital Marketing Consultant?