So you’ve decided to start producing content to build your brand awareness and increase your SEO. It’s a tactical decision and if done correctly, can reap many rewards. It is becoming increasingly important that small businesses produce content, whether that be blogs, eBooks, checklists or videos, among other marketing techniques, in order to stay competitive.
It’s easy enough to produce the content, whether in-house or through an agency, but how can you use it to gain a maximum return on investment? Using these techniques, you can gently guide visitors down the sales funnel.Strategy / Plan
Organise your content. This includes having enough content to post and decided when you post it, and through which channels. Planning this, and keeping your publishing consistent is important for growth and analytics. If you post a blog every Tuesday at 10 am, your followers will come to expect this and tune in to read it. It takes a strategy to get all your content ready and published in time.
Test, and measure results
Find out what works for you. Keep a close eye on your Google analytics to see what engagement your posts are getting, and how long visitors stay on your website. Social media also offer insights and analytics for each post. Check these when deciding on the best times to post your content. An excellent place to start deciding the best times to post on social media is outlined in this info-graphic.
Piggyback off news stories
Is something trending on Twitter that is relevant to your industry, product or service? Likewise with news stories. By utilising hashtags properly and current events is an easy way to create content. When visitors land on your website, they have an interest in you and your industry. Give them more reading and
Build customer personas
Create content that resonates with your customer personas. A persona will identify the different groups of customers, their reasons for buying from you, what they like, age, industry types etc. By creating personas, you can get an in-depth insight into the buying motivations of your audience, and market specifically to that, e.g. pain points.
Use visual content
While you’re creating all this content to increase your SEO, which focuses on text, visual content is far more appealing to users. Visual content is also easy to make. Info graphics are simple to create and a visual alternative to a blog with lots of facts and stats. The internet is full of writing, and not only that but audiences are naturally more inclined to engage more with visuals. Images/GIFs or animated images to a social media post takes seconds, and on average, a Facebook post gets 120% less engagement than posts that include an image (source).
Re-purpose content
If you suddenly find yourself stuck and not producing content to your schedule - perhaps your content creator is away on holiday - re-purposing your old content can save you. Gather your previous content with a common subject and create a blog to provide more information. Or a check sheet with all the points made across the blogs. Another way to re-purpose content is to update it. Are certain facts from 2016, that are now out of date? Update the content with the latest studies/facts/figures and re-post.
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