Content marketing has undeniable power to drive customer action. It attracts visitors to your site, keeps them there and influences them as it’s consumed.
Content marketing creates customers and builds brands.
Yet, for smaller businesses, keeping up with the demands of a content strategy – including social media marketing, email newsletters and blogging – can be cumbersome.
Although the tools needed to create content and syndicate it can be free, the process requires continuing dedication to achieve reach, impressions and engagement.
Few small businesses have the resources to:
- Set goals
- Develop stories
- Create an editorial calendar
- Create inspiring content
- Maintain it
- Improve it
- Measure the impact of content marketing
Is Content In Your Marketing Strategy?
If you are interested in marketing your business online, according to Copyblogger, content marketing is what allows you to “attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers.”
People want valuable information and successful content marketing delivers both educational content and periodic sales messages. Consumers get bored easily, and they will quickly forget about a company that doesn’t continue to remind them of its presence.
However, simply providing updated content isn’t good enough.
Businesses must also make sure that the content they offer is enlightening, engaging and builds the brand’s reputation. Consumers don’t want to read uninteresting content, nor do they want to be bombarded with content that offers no value beyond its blatant advertisements.
To get the most out of content marketing, businesses must learn to provide consumers with a steady stream of useful content that inspires them to think, ask questions, comment and otherwise positively engage with the brand.
Content Marketing Challenges
Though larger businesses may be able to devote an entire team of specialists to content marketing, small businesses don’t often have that luxury.
In many cases, small businesses assign blogs and social media tasks to existing employees with little experience in the marketing world. These employees are ill-prepared for the task, and their other responsibilities often prevent them from devoting enough time to content creation.
Fortunately, small businesses can create content and build a successful social media presence without overworking current employees or hiring new ones.
By partnering with a digital marketing agency, a small business can harness all of the benefits of content marketing and social media marketing without draining its limited resources. It can set goals, and hold the agency accountable to those goals, without implementing marketing tasks internally.
Effectively Meeting Content Demand
When a business partners with an outside agency, it turns over all of the responsibility for content creation and promotion to a team of professionals.
To maximize consumer engagement, content is shared on social media networks on a daily basis, including pins, interesting tweets and visually appealing Facebook and Google+ posts.
Contests, giveaways and polls are interesting to consumers and keep them returning. To make the experience rewarding for clients, customized applications should be built for running Facebook contests, thus allowing clients to follow up with participants to make offers and build relationships.
Though it may be possible to create a content strategy and implement it without outside help, most small businesses can benefit from expert assistance. Not only will partnering conserve a business’s time and resources, but it will also give them access to marketing expertise.
By staying on top of the latest marketing trends, agencies can adapt quickly to changing formats on all of the leading social networks. Small businesses should capitalize on the benefits of content marketing without taking time away from their other important projects.
Can you meet the demands of content marketing? Please provide any thoughts or ideas in the comments section below. If you liked this post, please subscribe to our e-mail newsletter!
Image credit: shioshvili