If you’ve had your small business ear to the ground at all in the last couple of years, you know that content marketing is king and updating your website with relevant and useful content is the gold mine for connecting with potential customers through organic web traffic.
The hardest part of content marketing is the content part. How do you come up with reasons to keep your website up-to-date with useful information that not only helps people searching the internet find you, but is content that enhances your brand image? It can be tricky to come up with ideas, but your lack of execution could cost you. Here are some tips:
Dial into Your Expertise and Passion
Hopefully the small business you’re running is an extension of some sort of deeply rooted passion or a way for you to flex your expertise in certain area. Thinking of topics to blog about that tap into these will help you execute the weekly or monthly duties of keeping your website up-to-date, but should also help you come up with topics. These topics should be something you’d want to write about anyway!
Get Ideas from Your Customers
A pediatrician bombarded daily with questions about vaccinations should realized immediately the powerful potential of a well-written vaccination article on her website. If five of our social media clients are asking about Instagram this week, that should be a hint that an informative article about Instagram is just what the target audience is looking for. Most likely, you’ve come across a frequently asked question about a particular subject, service or product you work closely with . . . start a list and make this your articles to-do list.
Search Social Media
Twitter is alive with people asking questions or broadcasting their own content under certain hashtags. Searching #smallbiz might turn up juicy article ideas that help small business clients and entrepreneurs. Research hashtags that relate to your industry and look on Twitter for ideas. If you’re business is active on Facebook, don’t be afraid to ask your followers for ideas on what they’d like to read more about. A fashionable boutique might find out that its followers want blogs about great outfit ideas for the season. What a nice way to promote products and provide useful content.
Watch Your Competition
Sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. A competitor or similar business in another geographical area might already be thinking of fabulous ideas. Take some inspirational nuggets from your competition and come up with your own content marketing gold. Don’t steal content, but you might be able to jump-start your own brainstorming process by looking at what others are doing. It’s important that the content you use is original and your personal take on a subject. It has to be an extension of you and your brand, but that doesn’t mean that the origin of the idea has to be completely original 100% of the time.
Once you’ve made searching for a content a part of your every day routine, you shouldn’t have to struggle when the time comes to publish that all important blog article or send out that email newsletter.
I’m a mom, a small business owner, and I’m a marketing professional with over a decade helping businesses with their branding and online presence. When I’m not spending time with my family or on my business, I love cooking (and eating) and snuggling with my dogs while I binge on TV shows. My favorite authors are Malcolm Gladwell and Steve Martin. My favorite movies are L.A. Story, Little Mermaid, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Trainspotting.