Content marketing for small business involves more than writing a 500-word blog every week. To drive the most growth, you need to avoid these five mistakes.
It’s no secret that content marketing is one of the most powerful ways to promote your small business efficiently. It helps to:
- Establish brand identity.
- Connect with the audience and create long-term relationships with them.
- Gain a competitive advantage over competitors.
- Generate greater ROI.
- Increase organic search visibility.
However, by making mistakes or not paying enough attention to certain points, you can easily miss out on the benefits of content marketing for your small business or even crush your content marketing program.
Mistake #1: Not knowing your target audience
It doesn’t matter how creative and genius your ideas are if they don’t fit your audience. Indeed, even if you publish high-quality content that follows all the technical rules, you may never get the results you hoped for. And all this can happen simply because the content does not interest your target audience or correspond to its values.
As a small business owner, do research to define your audience, what they are interested in and what they value. By creating content relevant to them, you will encourage them to share it on social media and follow your updates.
Mistake #2: Not posting varied content
When you focus your attention on only one type of content, it can become boring and unappealing. So, think about how you can diversify it because content marketing for small business is not just a blog with text and images. Here are some ideas:
- Videos.
- Infographics.
- E-books.
Video content may not be the right option for all small businesses. But e-books and infographics are more versatile, and they make your content more engaging. You will be able to use the content for blog posts, turn it into infographics and use it on social media (where this format is ideal) to get more engagement with your audience.
Mistake #3: Not including CTAs in published content
So you’ve created content that is relevant to your audience’s interests, but you find that the conversion isn’t growing. It’s worth reviewing your content for a call to action (CTA). In order to avoid missing out on the opportunity to turn your readers into buyers, tell them what needs to be done next and encourage them to take the desired action. It doesn’t make sense to drive traffic to your site without a specific CTA.
Think about the desired action you need to include as a CTA. It could be downloading your e-book, signing up for a newsletter, signing up for a meeting and more.
Mistake #4: Not paying attention to SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the foundation of content marketing for small business. SEO helps improve the ranking of your content on the search engines, which gives you an edge over the competition and helps drive traffic to your website.
Data from the Global Web Index show that 81% of people search for a product or service on the internet. Therefore, if you pay proper attention to SEO, you’ll see how much the traffic to your website grows. Investing in SEO should be one of the top priorities in a content marketing program for small businesses.
Mistake #5: Not analyzing marketing performance
Every small business needs to have content marketing goals that they can track using marketing metrics. Without tracking the effectiveness of your content marketing program, you won’t be able to analyze your results and identify what works well and what doesn’t.
With the help of monitoring and analysis, you can understand which type of content your audience prefers most and where your weak points are. For example, if you find that certain content performs better than expected, you should double your focus on that topic.
In summary
Content marketing for small business is designed to generate profits and improve competitive position. By making regular mistakes, ignoring early warning signs and not paying enough attention to simple things, your content marketing strategy can be disruptive to your business.
By doing everything right, the advantages and positive changes will soon follow. Promote your small business effectively with content marketing.
Need help?
If you have a content marketing program or are planning one, download our e-book 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.
This e-book will walk you through the mistakes of hundreds of other companies and the challenges they faced in implementing their content marketing programs. To learn more about how Tempesta Media can help you streamline your content creation process and deliver quality content at scale, contact us today.
