Crucial Role of Content Marketing in Local Business

09 March 2021

Contents

1 What Is Content Marketing?
2 Why Is Content Marketing Important?
3 Does Content Marketing Work for Small Businesses?
4 Reasons Your Company Needs Content Marketing:
5 How to Score Your Content?
6 Bottom Line:

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.

Read Also:

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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Trends That Shaped The Content Marketing Industry In 2022

Content marketing is the backbone of online advertising. It involves creating and publishing materials like blog posts, videos and images online to attract target audiences and encourage them to remain connected with a particular brand. For that reason, it has become indispensable to companies looking to grow and succeed. Recently, it has been evolving at an unprecedented rate. Many tactics or strategies that have been effective in the past may not achieve the same results in an ever-changing sector like this one. Firms are now teaming up with experts in life science content marketing to stay on track. For your company to stay ahead of its competition, it's important to keep up with the latest trend in 2022. Here’s a breakdown of the most significant ones: Top 7 Trends Of The Content Marketing Industry In 2022 1. The Rise Of Influencer Marketing Influencer marketing remains one of the most lucrative forms of promotion to this day. All signs indicate that it will probably stay that way in the foreseeable future. It's the practice of partnering with social media personalities, celebrities, or bloggers to generate interest in your brand. These people usually have millions of followers on various social media channels. When you get them to share your content with their own audiences, you tap into a market that sustains itself organically. In the right circumstances, this should provide you with numerous opportunities for conversion. But it takes more than just reaching out to a popular personality to get results. The trick with influencer marketing is finding someone who can actually help you connect with your target market. Businesses should do research to figure out what they’re going for by working with an influencer. The ideal one matches your marketing voice and tone and can reliably encourage their audiences to consider what you offer. 2. The Popularization and Optimization Of Voice Searches Since the beginning, business websites came with search bars to help users find specific information with ease. From there, user interface designers have tried and tested a variety of methods to improve the “type and click” format. The latest, and currently most popular, is voice search. This method of query input works much like a search bar. The difference is that, instead of typing keywords, users only have to speak into a microphone to issue commands or look up information. It removes a layer of effort needed to utilize a website’s or app’s functions. The use of voice search technology boomed for various reasons. For the most part, consumers saw it as a way to save time. All they have to do is speak to their devices to accomplish tasks. Furthermore, they can do it while driving, walking, or doing something else. The growing concern for accessibility also drove the popularization and optimization of voice search capabilities. Persons with physical or neurological disabilities can rely on it to access the same functions others use daily, allowing them to participate in an environment increasingly shaped by digital technology. 3. The Continuing Power Of Social Media Content The number of people using various social media platforms continues to grow by the day. There’s simply no going around the need to use them to produce a working online marketing strategy. One of the reasons why social media remains popular as a marketing method is that it allows businesses to connect with vast audiences beyond the limits of time and space. Their data-gathering capabilities also provide businesses with real-time insights into client behavior. Even though certain social media platforms have dominated the field, that has not stopped innovators from creating more. And yet, not every channel may be suitable for your business. For that reason, if you decide to create dedicated social media accounts for your business, you need to select the right platform. Currently popular platforms have subtle differences in the way they can further your marketing. Ideally, you should work with one that your target market frequents regularly while also offering content formats you can reliably use. Striking this balance is necessary to sustain your strategy in the long term. 4. The Domination Of Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is another trend that holds strong in 2022. Business owners have long used it to streamline various operations, and promotional work is no exception. For instance, by leveraging the power of AI, one can continuously collect data on consumer behavior. Using that, companies can design buyer personas that help them customize their marketing efforts better. Since AI can automate marketing processes and eliminate repetitive tasks, they are a useful investment for furthering your marketing operations. They also help you maximize the use of resources, aiding your efforts for business sustainability. 5. The Constant Need to Optimize Old Content Although publishing content online can be a game-changer to the success of a business, creating them requires a lot of work and time. For that reason, most businesses turn to an updating strategy. They work to optimize old content to better fit the current needs of their target market. Besides saving time and money, updating old content has many other advantages. For instance, it provides them with a regular base from which they can catch up to the latest search engine optimization (SEO) trends. If you don’t have a dedicated team for your online promotion efforts, this is a viable strategy you can use to generate engagement. 6. Video As The Reigning Format of Content The rise of video-centric platforms is a testament to the continuing power of video as a format. There are many reasons why most markets concentrate on videos more than other types of content nowadays. First of all, search engines love videos. Humans rely mostly on a vision for perception. So, formats that capitalize on visuals tend to rank high in search engine results pages. Videos also offer more in the way of convenience than plain images and text, combining both sounds and visuals to get messages across. Your business should consider utilizing it more in your promotional material if you need to engage your audience. 7. Search Engine Optimization Search engine optimization (SEO) is still part of the current arsenal of content production among businesses. It's not enough for a brand to produce content that aims to address its clients’ needs without making it easy for them to access. Such is the importance of SEO in achieving marketing milestones. There are various methods to utilize SEO. As always, the key to its successful use is finding a specific strategy that gets you the results you want. Are You Keeping Up? Undoubtedly, content marketing will remain necessary in the future as digital technology continues to shape our world. By no means is this an invitation to try and implement every single trend. It only serves as a roadmap for firms like yours to find their own way to achieve success. Find what works for you to stay ahead of the competition. Additionals: How to Get Into Content Marketing The Top 7 Content Marketing Challenges for 2022 Content Marketing Mistakes You Shouldn’t Be Making 4 points to consider when creating a Great Content Marketing Strategy

Marketing

How to Monitor Your Brand?

On the Internet, to be particular on social media, everyone and anyone can share views about your brand. One thing you need to understand is that this information will reach a vast audience. Most of the information that people share on social media go viral. Brand monitoring is the best way forward if you want to keep on top of this information. What is brand monitoring? Brand monitoring refers to the process of monitoring several channels to find out various mentions of your brand and asses what people have to say about your products or services. It can include complaints on social media or a newspaper article about a merger, among other things. The role of brand monitoring is to respond and act on the mentions you get. It can assist you to jump on good publicity or spot a crisis before the situation worsens. It will also give you valuable insights on how the market views and talks about your products. We can also define brand monitoring as a business analytics process that monitors various channels on the media or web. It helps users to get information about the brand, products, and all the things that are connected to your brand. It will allow you to monitor the reception and reputation of your brand by your target demographic, consumer base, and the general public. You have to strategically and regularly investigate online resources and media to help you react to the various sentiments your brand and of your competitors experience. You have to proactively monitor the reputation of your brand and react to customer and press concerns to enhance trust in your brand. Why do you need to monitor your brand mentions? Identifying and Addressing Infringers: These people always look at the popularity and name of your brand to ride on it. Web monitoring will help you to identify these infringers who adopt confusing domain and brand names that resemble yours. Trademark law protects brand owners and consumers against such unfair competition. The good news about brand monitoring is that it will help you to enforce this practice. Addressing Consumer and Competitor Protection: Brand monitoring will help you to respond to both positive and negative sentiments from consumers. Most customers express their feelings on complaints, sites, forums, or social media. Also, it will help you to monitor the competition representation of your brand in terms of negative reviews and comparative advertising. What monitoring tools are there on the market? The market has so many social media monitoring tools that you can use to track your mention. Some of them include; Famm.io Famm.io is one of the best social media and web monitoring tools. It is an effective tool if you want to know what people think about your brand. The tool will show you the resources where your brand is mentioned most of the time. It will show you the best resource when it comes to brand mentions. Find out the places where people just watch and where people communicate most of the time. LexisNexis Print media and tracking broadcast are quite tricky unless you have people reading all the newspapers and watching all channels. LexisNexis is one of the best tools for monitoring these two elements. They will assist you in tracking mentions on several publications and in analyzing the results. Source LexisNexis is a big organization, which helps some of the biggest brands explore analytics, data, reporting and monitoring. It helps in identifying the quickest trends and news breakouts (viral content) and informs brands of advertising opportunities. The smart and easy interface helps brands understand metrics and take detailed steps as to the nest strategies. Google Alerts Google Alerts is an easy and free social media monitoring tool. You will need to input a keyword and you will get an alert when a person uses it on the website. It offers mentions but has no long-term overviews and analysis. Google Alert is an absolutely free tool that will help you get mentions about your brand in a small, yet significant way. Please do not expect this tool to be as powerful or potent as some of the best ones on the list. It is free and should be expected to be basic. TweetDeck This tool is great for community managers who use Twitter but also does brand monitoring through Twitter. Setup search columns to give you live feed once the things you specify get mentions. A free tool is ideal for brand mentions. This was an independent tool, which was later acquired by Twitter. This is a great platform to align your Twitter mentions and activities. The dashboard is clean, precise and easy to use. Once you start using TweetDeck, it will be difficult for you to go to other platforms like HootSuite, Buffer or anyone else. Why Famm.io stands apart from the crowd? Over the last three years, I have used several brand-monitoring tools on the market. What makes Famm.io stand out is the multi-functional capabilities. You are not only allowed to see your brand but also integrate content resources and competitor strategies in your dashboard. If you are looking to run Influencer Marketing campaigns, Famm.io helps you find your brand mentions not only on search but also on social. However, for me personally, the best part about Famm.io is the possibility to reach out to different Content Creators. You can look for content creators, not only in your niche but also in different niches. The capabilities of Famm.io can help your brand manage its online reputation in a successful manner. It can also help you reach disgruntled users or employees before they can do too much damage. This will help brands maintain good relations with their audiences and tackle PR nightmares before they get too big. Conclusion: Brand monitoring became a trend in a recent couple of years. It brings value as a marketing and PR component as well as a steady approach for brand awareness strategy. What can be more important than benefits for users, a brand’s value and its reputation? Overall, tools enumerated above are trustworthy enough and good for analysis and building marketing strategies and social media campaigns. All of these online assistants insulate from the needless search offering the selection of on-demand features. Read Also: Winning Tactics To Build A Competitive Service Delivery Website Reasons Why You Should Implement Wireless Monitoring System

5 Ways Marketing Strategies Will Change Post COVID-19

To think life will go back to normal post-Pandemic is a pipe dream. The world underwent a paradigm shift to the new normal, and there is no returning now. The COVID-19 Pandemic has brought many changes we couldn’t have ever predicted. The unheralded health crises impacted nearly everything, from personal affairs to governmental decisions and even corporate matters. Business operations, in particular, faced quite a few alterations. Digital mediums took over the world by storm, and e-commerce businesses experienced a significant rise in demand. These reshaped business activities welcomed a considerable restructuring of marketing strategies. Marketers primarily shifted their focus to online tools, giving digital marketing an unanticipated hype. Given the technological innovations rate, marketers expect to see many more advancements in the marketing department post-COVID-19. Read below to find out how marketing strategies will change after the Pandemic. 1. The Importance of Online Presence: If businesses have to choose one takeaway from the crisis, it would be essential to have an online presence. With strict lockdowns and restrictions on going out, the entire world switched to conducting and participating in businesses online. Many also realized the convenience such platforms bring. Hence, owning a website has now become an essential business marketing strategy. Almost 56% of businesses with a website perform better as compared to the ones without a website. Besides, a website is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools. It marks your presence on the internet and helps you get more reach. A website also lets you upload a customizable flip book or eBook where you can share all necessary details about your products and services. It is an exceptional technique to spread awareness about your brand, attract traffic, and eventually boost sales. A website gives your customers ease of access and costs much less than traditional marketing, and dramatically impacts investment return. It is a proven worthwhile investment. An authentic-looking website enhances your business’s professionalism and adds value to it. Hence, having a website is vital for a business’s success. So, it is safe to say that website marketing will be a critical element post-COVID-19. 2. The Emergence of Social Media: Social media is undisputedly the king of marketing. The world is quickly becoming digitally advanced, with social media users increasing rapidly. Nearly 83.3% of people use social media worldwide, and the figure is likely to grow by 10% each year. Not only that, 71% of businesses have a social media account, out of which 90% experience improvements in sales and growth. 90% of users connect with brands through social media, and 54% of consumers make purchases from brands after scrolling through the brand’s social media account. The statistics above prove the criticality of a social media presence for businesses. The future is uncalled for, but one thing is for sure; social media’s regime will only grow. Social media helps connect brands with potential customers and allows marketers to make informed decisions based on the target audience. It also gives businesses an incredible opportunity to grow. The paid advertising options on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are the easiest, quickest, and most affordable promotion plans for your business. So, you can popularize, promote, and increase your brand’s overall ROI without breaking the bank. Social media is here to stay and quite possibly grow into a platform unimaginable. Hence, social media was, is, and will remain, marketers, fundamental focus. 3. Video Marketing: Video marketing was every marketer’s favorite even before COVID-19 and is still growing phenomenally. Studies confirm that videos interest more users than any other graphics form and carry great potential for attracting customers. YouTube and other video streaming sites are experiencing an incredible increase in usage. These sites allow businesses to market their products and services or raise brand awareness in the form of high-quality videos. Video content also plays an essential role in emails. It exceptionally increases your email’s click-through rates and decreases the unsubscribe rates. Additionally, it boosts your SEO by attracting traffic and increasing your site’s searchability and visibility on different search engines. After seeing how effective video marketing leaves on the brand and consumers, it is likely to grow and remain a powerful marketing strategy in the future. 4. Customer Retention and Loyalty: One major disadvantage many businesses had to face due to the Pandemic was to cut down costs in essential areas like marketing. As a result, markets had to shift their focus to different, long-run marketing tactics like building customer loyalty. Customer loyalty helps you stay one step ahead of your competitors. Loyal customers give you valuable feedback, increasing your business’s rating and eventually attracting new customers. Building customer loyalty considerably reduces your marketing spending, but retaining a customer also leads to a more profitable outcome. Remember, customer retention is what powers customer acquisition. The free word-of-mouth promotion your business gets from loyal customers is one of the most significant benefits of building customer loyalty. Loyal customers are also likely to make purchases repeatedly and trust your business enough to pay premium prices. 5. Less Is More: The Pandemic has stipulated marketers think about innovative marketing strategies without having to go all out. They have to find ways to develop creative marketing campaigns, which are both practical and inexpensive. Moreover, with a limited budget, marketers have restricted resources which they have to ensure to save for more than one campaign. In short, the coronavirus has compelled marketers to do more with less. Marketers need to make efficient use of technology to find solutions and make decisions quicker. The “less is more” trend will continue long after the Pandemic is over as marketers turn their attention to enhancing innovation and improving skills. Conclusion: Businesses will undoubtedly have to deal with the pandemic effects for a long time to come. However, organizations have to push ahead. The Pandemic led to several changes in consumer buying patterns which marketers cannot ignore at any cost. The changes in consumption techniques encouraged marketers to think ahead and think creatively. Even though companies cut down the cost of marketing immensely due to COVID-19, the role of marketing has thoroughly increased during the Pandemic. However, there is still quite a lot of room for growth and innovation. These alterations in marketing strategies are likely to continue and grow post-COVID. Read Also: Key Components for Your Marketing Stack How To Foolproof Your Digital Marketing Strategy? Why Email Marketing is the BEST Digital Marketing Outreach in Singapore

Crucial Role of Content Marketing in Local Business

What Is Content Marketing?

Why Is Content Marketing Important?

Does Content Marketing Work for Small Businesses?