Tag Archives: Content Marketing

Content marketing for local business

Local businesses can use content marketing to their great advantage but unfortunately, most of the local businesses aren’t even aware of the concept. I’ll give a personal example.

The housing society where I live has a Facebook page. The page was created so that the residents could exchange ideas and although, the exchange of ideas does happen, people mostly post messages to promote their local businesses, and one of such businesses is a small catering business that is perhaps run from within one of the apartments in another housing society.

In the beginning, when they hadn’t yet created a nuisance on our housing society’s Facebook page, I had contacted them because I was interested in getting early breakfast from them (which, they don’t provide, but promote anyway). Now I don’t remember how I shared my phone number with them, they also included me in a WhatsApp group. Later on I had to block their number because they were sending 5-10 messages every day about what a great catering service they have and what are their offerings for the day.

As I am always excited about helping new businesses in the beginning I advised them to register themselves with Google Local. I also told them not to spam the Facebook page and the WhatsApp group but, although, they didn’t know how to set up themselves in Google Local and I provided them step-by-step instruction, they didn’t take me seriously when I told them that continuously posting senseless messages is going to be counter-productive. Eventually people started complaining about them on the Facebook page and like me, many blocked them on WhatsApp.

Although the catering service is using the available content distribution channels like Facebook and WhatsApp, they are not providing any value through their content. They’re overdoing it by posting their menu multiple times in a day. They are not making personal connections. I help them with the Google Local listing, I initially showed interest in their service and even interacted with them multiple times but even with me, they have never tried to make a connection. They were simply crowding my timeline with their menus and photographs of the food they are cooking. They never even thanked me for the Google Local listing help. And the worst part is, when I eventually tried to order breakfast, they informed me that they couldn’t deliver, and that was the last straw.

A very nice example of creating a presence through providing content (in the form of a low-cost service) is the hair-salon chain owner Habeeb. Although he runs a chain, at the micro level, what he is doing is, running a local business. Although in the conventional content marketing sense, it doesn’t use the Internet, but it definitely uses the “freemium” service to attract customers.

In the local malls, mostly in the basement lobby, he hires a small space and erects a temporary, mostly wooden structure. In the wooden box (with good interiors) a sleek, unisex salon is run. You can get a nice haircut at 20-30% of what you would normally pay to a nice salon in a mall or a posh market. The hairstylists (normally very young trainees) are very courteous and friendly and give you a basic haircut with all the modern gadgetry. Seats are always occupied and one only has to wait for his or her turn. The place makes good money, it is very affordable, it offers good service and the initial investment is very little. Then, after a couple of years, he opens the big saloon where you have to pay the normal posh-salon rates. Does brisk business.

He doesn’t have to spend on advertising; instead, he advertises round-the-clock in various malls. Everybody is familiar with the name because the box is always set up at the most crowded place. At a fraction of the cost of conventional advertising, he doesn’t just create a presence for himself, but also makes good money while laying ground for the bigger, five-star salon.

What has it got to do with content marketing for local business? I think many of you already know what I’m talking about.

He is basically indulging in content marketing as a local business. Instead of providing content in terms of text, video and audio, he is rendering the service at a highly affordable rate at strategic locations. In the local community, instead of stepping on everybody’s toes, he is providing a useful service. Those who don’t want to get a haircut at a roadside unkempt barbershop but also don’t want to spend a ton of money in a salon, are very thankful that there is a place that is clean, well-lit and efficient and all the hair stylists are neat and clean and courteous.

But not every local business can afford to provide such a service either for free or even at a lower cost. Such local businesses can use content marketing to their great advantage.

Local businesses can use content marketing channels like Facebook, YouTube and to an extent even WhatsApp to stay connected with their customers without annoying them with useless updates. As a customer, from a catering service, I don’t need an update on their daily menu, but I definitely need to know what sort of service they are running, whether they are reliable or not and what the others think of them. For that they can create a Facebook page and invite people in the neighbourhood to join. They can create a food channel on YouTube. They can start a blog detailing how they cook various items.

As long as content is relevant, it doesn’t always have to be something about your business. Yes, eventually, it is about your brand, would be useful. Be a part of a community through useful content. Encourage people to talk about your business on social networking websites, blogs and even YouTube videos. Make videos of your satisfied customers if they don’t mind and then post them on YouTube. Create an Instagram account or a Snapchat account if you want to post daily pics of your food items.

Stay tuned – in the coming days I will be publishing posts on how different local businesses can use content marketing to their advantage.

Create Great Content for Your Mobile Marketing Campaign to Get Customers Engaged with Your Brand

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To engage customers with your brand, along with other platforms you also need to focus on your mobile marketing campaign. According to Search Engine Journal, “4.2 billion people access social media sites via mobile devices with 189 million Facebook users being ‘mobile only’.”

This means that your website must be optimized for mobile use, and the content you share needs to be short, to the point, and interesting to potential customers reading small pieces of content on their mobile devices.

To engage your target demography, you need to create content that has a message people want to share with their friends and family.

Concentrate on Your Target Demography When Creating Content

Your potential customers are using their mobile devices more than ever before. When you concentrate on your target demography and write content they find interesting, you need to make it easy for the content to be shared on social media platforms.

Keep your content focused on your message, and don’t create content that is boring. When your content is unfocused, it is going to fall flat no matter where you share it. When you are creating content, strive for quality over quantity every time.

Keep Your Content to the Point

When you are creating content for use on mobile devices, keep your content to the point. Your content should be broken up into readable portions, including:

The use of bullet points makes your content easier to read.
Content needs bold sub titles to break up long paragraphs.
Short, to the point sentences make your content easier to digest.

Increase Your Mobile Marketing with an SMS Texting Platform

SMS texting platforms offer you several opportunities to reach your customers where they spend their time the most, on their mobile devices. To use an SMS texting platform, you must create an opt-in campaign to get permission to send marketing messages to your customer base.

Once you have members signed up for your texting campaign, you can create valuable content and share it with your customers through text messaging. While text messages offer you a number of opportunities to engage with your customers, one is to send links to the blog posts you create for your website.

Texting Offers Instant Access to Your Customers

The ability to text your customers at a moment’s notice is invaluable when it comes to mobile content marketing strategies. You can offer deals that are time-limited, and you can target specific customers based on where they are located.

If you have multiple locations for your business, this is an excellent way to keep track of your customers and only send out messages to customers that will be able to cash in on your deal. An SMS texting software opens up a whole new avenue of mobile marketing, and it is essential in today’s competitive business world.

Getting People to Share Your Content

To get customers to share your content, it should have a strong message and say something about the person sharing it. For example, content that makes a statement is going to be shared more than content that doesn’t have anything new to share. While you don’t want to create content that is offensive, content that has an edginess to it is more likely to go viral. When you want your content to be shared, it should be interesting to read.

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How you can band content marketing and SEO together

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SEO is a big reason why most of my clients pursue content marketing. Even today I got a query from a German client asking for SEO content that will help them improve their search engine rankings and draw targeted traffic to their website.

SEO and content marketing are related to each other but the problem is most of the small business owners think that the sole purpose of publishing content on their website is to improve their SEO. On the surface there is nothing wrong in this perception, the problem arises when people completely focus on SEO, ignoring the inherent strength of publishing quality, engaging content on the website and elsewhere.

The basic purpose of publishing content and then distributing it using various channels available to you is to provide value to your target audience so that you can establish a long-lasting relationship with them. You need to provide them valuable information. They should hear from you regularly so that they begin to recognise you whenever they come across your content. The purpose of content marketing is creating a recognition space for you and your brand so that it becomes easier to find you, to relate to you and to feel like doing business with you because of a positive association.

Why people use content marketing solely to improve their SEO?

In the beginning content really helped you improve your search engine rankings. Back then the search engine ranking algorithms weren’t as complicated and choosy as they are today. Have 20 webpages talking about a particular topic (with different titles) using your keywords and you could rank well. For straight 2 years in 2004-2005 I used to rank on the 1^st page of Google for the phrases “freelance content writer” and “online content writer” because I had published lots of articles on my website talking about these 2 phrases– it was my mistake that I couldn’t take advantage of this privilege and didn’t pay much attention to maintaining my rankings. Maintain an acceptable keyword density, use the keywords in your title and publish 20-30 blog posts and articles and you could enjoy good rankings.

Since then, much has changed, but people’s perception hasn’t. Firstly, they still think that indiscriminately using keywords in their blog posts and articles is going to get them higher search engine rankings and secondly, the confuse content marketing with SEO. Both are partly related and partly unrelated.

Search engines are constantly aiming at indexing high-quality content and while indexing and ranking high quality content, although they take note of the sort of language and words being used, more important is the relevance and the quality of content you are creating and publishing. How is it going to be useful to the search engine users, this is their primary concern. How do they find out whether a particular piece of content is of good quality? There are thousands of factors but the primary factors are:

How relevant is the title of the blog post or webpage you have just created
How well-written the content is
How the keywords have been used (yes, the keywords still matter)
How easy it is to access the content on the web page
How easy it is to view your content using different devices
How many influences are talking about your content
How many trustworthy inbound links your content attracts
How much buzz it is creating on social media websites
How frequently you publish quality content

All these attributes solely depend on the combination of quality, relevance and usability of your content. A well-meaning title naturally contains the subject you are handling. People naturally share content that is useful. Engaging content encourages people to talk about it through blog posts and social media updates. People link to your content if they like it.

All these factors are taken into consideration by the search engines while ranking your content.

So while it is important to take care of SEO (so that people who are meant to find your content can find it easily) this shouldn’t be the sole objective of your content marketing strategy. You use content marketing to improve your conversion rate and draw people to your website naturally.

Content marketing should be fun, not stressful

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There is a reason why content marketing should be fun, not stressful. I will come back to this after briefly sharing with you what my Guruji often says (he is my vocal music teacher):

When you are performing, you are communicating an emotion. In order to communicate that emotion, it needs to exist within you – you need to transmit it to your audience. If you are not enjoying your singing, neither will your audience. So if you want your audience to enjoy your performance, enjoy your performance yourself.

Coming back to content marketing, after all, it is a communication. It is in expressing art. Whether you are writing as a content writer or creating a graphic as a visual artist or creating a video as a videographer, you are expressing, you are communicating a thought or an idea, and your attitude, your inner psychology, mostly unbeknownst to you, permeates your creation.

So if your content marketing is stressful, if it is becoming painful, if you are not enjoying it, your target audience too will not enjoy it.

This Forbes blog post opines that if content marketing for you isn’t fun, maybe you’re overthinking it. Maybe you don’t have a strategy that gives you focus and peace of mind (that comes with a sense of clarity and purpose). Maybe you’re not targeting properly. Whatever are the reasons, your content marketing is no longer fun, it is stressing you out and it shows in whatever you do.

So what should you do to make your content marketing more fun and less stressful?

Personally I would suggest, find a purpose. You will no longer feel stressful if you know what you’re doing, what you are trying to achieve and whom you want to help, and why. Have a documented content marketing strategy so that at every stage you know what you’re doing and what you are accomplishing and accordingly, what you should do.

Also, this I can say as a writer, develop a conversational style. A pedantic style would be boring and uninspiring and it will eventually stress you out. Have conversations with people you are writing for. Keep yourself loose (no, I don’t mean become uncouth). By the end of the day, it will only be effective if your content marketing is fun.

So do you think content marketing is easy?

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Just like any other marketing, content marketing has its own share of hardships that you have to go through in order to achieve results. Just because most of the content marketing happens on the Internet and just because it’s easier to do things on the Internet compared to the brick-and-mortar world, many people develop this false notion that content marketing should be easy or at least, if not easy, then dirt cheap. Both are misconceptions.

The author of this blog post rightly complains, “Hey, nobody told me content marketing was going to be hard!”

In the blog post the author quotes Joe Polizzi, the founder of Content Marketing Institute who says that in terms of content marketing, we may be entering the “age of disillusionment”.

Surveys show marketers are skeptical about the effectiveness of their content efforts. Many people are trying content marketing with high hopes, but they’re not seeing the engagement they expected. Professionals are confusing short-term campaign-based marketing with long-term content marketing endeavors and they’re not looking for the right kind of ROI as a result. Many are told by agencies that “going bigger” is the solution, but it often isn’t (even if they COULD justify more spend). There are great successes… But there are disappointments, too.

This is something that I have repeatedly written on my blog too, that most of content marketing efforts fail because people have no idea exactly what they are trying to achieve. In most of the cases, they confuse content marketing with relentlessly publishing blog posts and articles trying to cover the keywords to improve their search engine rankings. Whereas there is nothing wrong in trying to improve your search engine rankings, this shouldn’t be the sole objective of content marketing.

The blog post further quotes

The most common mistake is also the most mistake easiest to correct — failing to establish a foundation, or starting point. You can’t just jump in and start producing content and expect to be effective. You have to have well-documented buy cycles, buyer profiles (personas), a library of existing content and an understanding of the tools/technologies you’ll need to effectively measure your programs. And most of all you need alignment from all key internal stake holders.

When it comes to content marketing most businesses apply the “jump first and worry about how deep the pool is later” attitude. You need to have both short-term and long-term plans. You need to figure out your content marketing metrics. You need to know what you exactly aim to do.