Content marketing has quickly become an essential component of any small business’s marketing strategy with 82% of marketers actively investing in content marketing. In an increasingly crowded environment, small businesses can harness the power of content marketing to position themselves as thought leaders in their industry and provide practical ways to meet consumer pain points.
But to stand out in a noisy marketplace, your small business needs to create and share content in a range of formats and through a variety of channels. Broadening your content marketing tactics helps you to maximize the value of your content, reach your customers where they are and provide multiple touchpoints for your audiences.
Content Marketing: Tactics and Trends
Content marketing tactics evolve every year as people change the ways they consume content. Your small business has a wide range of options to choose from when determining which content marketing tactics fit into your overarching marketing strategy. Before choosing your tactics, determine where your customers and potential customers spend their time and how they consume their content.
Some common tactics include:
- Blogs
- Short-form written content is a great way to build brand awareness and reach customers at the top of the sales funnel. Optimize your blogs with thorough keyword research and SEO (search engine optimization) best practices to drive organic traffic to your website.
- Video
- The average user watches 19 hours of video content each week — if you haven’t already implemented video into your content marketing strategy, now is the time. Video content is trending towards short-form videos with Instagram reels and TikTok. Livestreams are also on the rise as they can provide an inside look into a business and a sense of closeness between consumers and brands.
- Visuals
- Beyond video, harness visual content such as graphics and lengthier infographics. These are excellent for sharing on social media, whether it’s an in-depth infographic or quote-based images.
- Long-Form Content
- Case studies, ebooks and white papers are longer forms of written content that can provide immense value to your customers and leads. While they require more time and energy, these resources go a long way to position you as a thought leader and provide opportunities to collect lead information from potential customers.
- Podcasts
- The podcast boom isn’t over as podcast listening continues to increase. Audio content is a unique way for potential customers to learn about your business and can be created from existing content like blogs or white papers.
Why Broaden Your Small Business Content Marketing Tactics
Your small business may have a blog with quality posts or a YouTube channel with videos that highlight your products and services, but for content to rise above the noise, it is essential for small businesses to broaden the content marketing tactics they use. One channel for your content won’t be enough to provide results. So why broaden your content marketing tactics?
Reach customers throughout the sales funnel.
One or two content marketing tactics won’t reach all of the audiences that your small business needs to touch. A blog post may serve as a great entry point for the top of the sales funnel to attract organic traffic to your website. But a blog post is less likely to assist with closing a deal. Consider your audiences, buyer personas and sales funnel and make sure you have content that serves consumers throughout their journey with your small business.
Stand out in a competitive landscape.
The content landscape is crowded. That means that to stand out, you need to create quality content across platforms and channels. Content marketing is also a great way to compete with competitors who may have larger ad budgets — but only if you are creating quality content that meets your customers’ pain points and needs.
Harness the power of SEO.
The more you can position yourself as a thought leader who provides valuable content for searchers, the more search engines will reward you. Using targeted keywords across different content tactics provides more opportunities for searchers to find you organically. But today’s search engines aren’t just looking for keywords, they are looking for websites that exude expertise and give individuals the answers to their searches. A variety of high quality content shows that your small business is worthy of trust and high search engine ranking.
Provide multiple touch points for customers and leads.
Broadening your content marketing tactics can provide customers and potential customers multiple places to see your brand and engage with your content. Customers and leads value a brand that is transparent — broadening your tactics gives your small business multiples ways to tell your story and provide value.
How to Broaden Your Tactics
Taking on new content marketing tactics can feel like a daunting prospect. Creating high quality content is not an easy task, but it is crucial to a good marketing strategy. So how do you decide which tactics to embrace and how to create more content in different forms?
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every new piece of content. See what content you already have and determine how you can adapt it to multiple formats. Do you have a high-performing blog post? Have one of your experts highlight the main points in a video or a podcast. Or take several related blog posts and make an ebook. Do you have great video testimonials from customers? Splice the video into short-form video for your social media channels or use their quotes for your next email newsletter. Broadening tactics can mean getting creative and intentional with how you use existing content.
A good content marketing strategy relies on key performance indicators (KPIs) to show where content is doing well and where it could use improvement. Use these KPIs (alongside your audience data) for your content types and where you share it. You can tweak your content accordingly based on which content tactics are performing the best for your measurements.
Consistency is Key
No matter how many content marketing tactics you use, they won’t be successful if you aren’t consistent. This doesn’t mean posting every day, but determine a cadence that works best for you and your small business. Use a content calendar to make sure that you stick to your goals and keep the content flowing.
If you’re looking for help with content creation and expanding your content marketing goals, we’re here to help. Our expert writers, videographers and SEO specialists can create content and develop a well-rounded strategy to meet your customers where they are and position your small business as an expert and thought leader in your industry. Reach out to us today to learn more.
