5 Content Marketing Tactics For Small Businesses - TribalCafe

Are small businesses using the right content marketing tactics to fuel their social media?

1. Small businesses need to get the basics in place ? objectives, keywords, listening, measures?
2. Small businesses have little time and money to invest and need to use content marketing effectively
3. Content helps fuel social media so getting the right tactics in place can save time and money, as well as deliver a focus for what works

The State of Small Businesses and Social Media

A report from Manta, an online business community, shows that crowds of American small businesses are turning to social media in the hope of generating new business. The problem though is that despite the time they are ploughing into it they are seeing little if any ROI.

Some key figures:

• The survey was taken from 1235 small business owner
• Nearly 50% have increased time on social media
• 55% are using Facebook and Twitter as their primary tools
• Around 60% have seen no ROI

Another survey conducted by Staples produced similar figures showing that 40% feel that their social media use has helped their business (60% didn?t). This report found that 51% of U.S. small business owners are either novices or don?t consider how social media can help their businesses.

The problem is that with the allure of seemingly ?FREE? there is the temptation to think it will be a silver bullet to ailing sales or other business problems. Expecting quick wins is unrealistic. The hope that social media might patch over a poor brand proposition, marketing plans or an ailing business is clearly flawed. With content marketing fueling social media developing a clear focus on your customers is critical.

The Basics of Social Media For Small Businesses

Businesses are built on relationships and trust. In this sense online is a direct reflection of offline, where your reputation, what you say and how you say it affect how and who you will attract. Traditional networking offline has not entirely been replaced but online makes it easier, faster and lowers costs. It also provides the perfect vehicle to more effectively target customers.

Our tolerance and dislike of poor sales people, processes and being interrupted are the same offline and online (probably our tolerance is lower). For these reasons small businesses need to recognize the basic principles of social media and online marketing.

Information comes to us easily. Search, RSS feeds and a variety of apps and media help with that. In this mass of media, devices and channels small businesses are having to compete for attention and that is competitive. Simply rocking up and saying hi will get you noticed and it may even help develop relationships, but it wont get across your brand/products/services and demonstrate how you can solve customer problems. In truth you need both ? good content and to be human.

The temptation to be random on social media is huge and without a good focus on content marketing it can easily fail. The basic guiding principles are again the same online as they are offline:

• Understand who your customers, your niche market
• Have clear goals and objectives ? offline is not different to online, focus on SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed) objectives.
• Identify how your product or service relates to them e.g. what problem does it solve
• What makes you different ? what are your unique selling points (USP?s)
• How can you solve your customers problems, make their life easier and/or add value
• As in offline understand how you connect the marketing and sales process ? connect the dots between the two

These points underpin then how you develop content and use it to develop your business online. Content marketing is about being useful to your customers, it provides a backbone for your SEO and fuels your social media. It also translates into how you gain leads.

5 Content Marketing Tactics For Small Businesses

Here are 5 actionable content marketing tactics to help small businesses. These are based on the trends and insights from the main content marketing reports and experience.

1Get The Content Mix Right

Most people have heard the exercise of how you place large rocks, pebbles, sand and water into a glass jar (if you haven?t here is the link to explain it). It is a great metaphor for living life but also applies to many other situations. There is a nice comparison here to content marketing ? prioritize your content build out your high value content first.

Use Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is timeless, that never or at least rarely goes out of date. Unlike a Tweet, a Facebook post that simply has a moment in time. The key to good evergreen content is to make it relevant to your audience e.g.:

• Frequently asked questions ? not the ones you see that are 4-5 long and cover the obvious. You want to create FAQ?s that genuinely go deeply into the buying process or insights into the service or product.
• Lists of useful resources e.g. top 50 social media experts or 50 technical definitions explained.
• Checklists
• How to?s

Blend in and use other high value content first ? Slides, Infographics, Whitepapers/reports?. The majority of businesses are in services (in the UK accounting for over 75% of GDP). Why does this matter ? well many B2B businesses rely on using Slides some of which may have great content on that can be easily shared.

2Repurpose Content
Content can be used again and again saving time and money.

A survey or report can be turned into a blog post(s), used as a basis for an interview with the person who produced it or to garner opinion, form the basis of a presentation (SlideShare) ? all of which in turn can be Tweeted or posted on Facebook or Linkedin. Again this focuses on the need to produce the high value content first.

3Curate Content
Becoming an expert on a subject requires you to know about what is happening in your sector: trends, key tools, methods, key people, tensions e.g. different view points?All this can be difficult to keep on top of. Content curation involves pooling and filtering content so that you provide relevant high quality content to your audience saving them from having to search through the noise of the internet.

Curating content can relatively easy but remember to be specific to your niche in your subject e.g. social media daily (Paper.li) would be drowned out on the internet but social media marketing for salons could be useful if I was targeting Salon owners.

Some great content curation tools exist to help you produce regular content. Tip: many platforms now allow you to comment on the curated content ? don?t be afraid to add you own thoughts to demonstrate your breadth of knowledge/skills.

4Co-Create / Collaborate
Co-creating content sounds difficult but it is just like many other forms of collaboration. The key to it is a clear understanding of your objectives and the best method to achieve them. Here is a great slideshare that outlines the many methods and approaches that can be taken.

5Blend Your Media
A survey by by content strategy company, Content Science, found that people still come across a lot of unreliable information on the internet.
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Many small businesses can use their expertise to interact with their target audience to build trust and demonstrate expertise. Some of the best ways to achieve this is to use media that helps you directly interact with you audience or that promotes your ideas, thoughts and shows the people behind the business.

Webinars have become one of the most effective ways of building an audience and for customer acquisition. Used well they can provide plenty of further fuel for blogs and further interaction. A useful approach to event marketing is to follow this approach:

• Pre-event: activities to build and promote the event e.g. unique hashtag for Twitter and now Facebook. This builds interaction.
• Event: the use of social media during the event
• Post event: follow up with content and actions from the event and developing the relationships with your target audience/customers

Summary

Content Marketing can seem daunting and time consuming. Certainly blogs do require a lot of commitment, but by putting in place the basics building blocks and making sure you cover the most important points first you can quickly lay down some great foundations to help your content marketing. Some of the best small businesses work with customers to co-create content not only using incentives e.g. photo contests, but because they are focused on helping promote the customers passions and interests.

Source: http://www.tribalcafe.co.uk/5-content-marketing-tactics-for-small-businesses/

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