Why Your Small Business Needs a Content Marketing Strategy

To maintain relevance with your business’s online presence, a strong content marketing strategy is key. Quality content keeps your brand trustworthy, current, competitive and searchable. Especially for businesses with an online sales component, keeping your SEO well-groomed will make the difference between stagnancy and growth. After all, 72% of marketers report content creation as the most effective SEO tactic. Content marketing assumes this dominance by offering your website and brand many benefits.

Building Value and Attracting Prospects with Inbound Marketing
Intrusive advertisements on the internet don’t get you too far these days. Consumers have evolved past these primitive tactics. A strong online presence is really marked by inbound marketing: Offering value to your target audience in order for them to find you, rather than you spending your time trying to find them. How-tos, infographics, free introductory services, research and statistics, and entertainment pieces all offer different types of value to various audiences.

Building Brand Awareness and a Trustworthy Reputation
Another derivative of having quality, valuable content is the image your brand will build. Teaching prospects new, relevant information or providing them with some other value will earn authority for a brand. Your business name and logo becomes associated with this content — the more widespread the content becomes, the more familiar your brand is to consumers. The trust built from content marketing entices consumers to trust your business and products/services. They become more open to your referrals.

Get a High Ranking from Google for Quality Content
Google’s job is to produce the best results for searches made. In order to ensure these high standards, Google ranks sites via SEO that dictates satisfactory and valuable results. Many components of these SEO algorithms are covered by strong content: Keywords, syntax, modernity, consistency, and variety. There are many subtles features that Google’s automation grades well when reviewing content formats. They even analyze spelling, grammar, and readability via specific algorithms. Keywords in specific places, styled in certain ways and relevant to your overall content, will also bolster your search rank. And Google isn’t only qualifying your website, it’s quantifying by evaluating how frequently you post new content.

Turn Consumer Problems Into Your Business
People don’t always know that they’re even searching for goods and services in an online query that leads them to a business website. They are searching for answers to the problem they are trying to solve, before they even know what products and services are solutions. This is your opportunity to be seen, heard, and recognized. By providing content that answers questions searchers have, your website will have a wider scope of search terms and higher rankings amongst your competition.

As an example, let’s say your business offers pet supplies. These supplies range from toys to food to medications to grooming supplies. Who needs your services? Pet owners with needy pets. But they’re not experts on all of the products available, like you. They may not have dealt with fleas and ticks before, and so they don’t know what they should do when Rex suddenly has a tick after an outing at the park. They search: How to get rid of ticks on dogs? But a product — nonetheless, a product at your store — is highly unlikely to be viewed by Google as a high-quality response for such a query. Search engines recognize that is not what the user is looking for. So SEO will choose to put written articles or illustrations/videos of how to solve that problem.

Your flea and tick shampoo or flea collars and other preventative measures will not be in the results, but your article on “Keeping Your Pets Flea and Tick Free” probably will. In such article, you can offer do-it-yourself techniques for removing fleas and ticks, recommendations for good veterinarians, or information about how to flea-proof your home. Information like this is where value to your audience lives. Amongst this value, you can recommend and link to the product page of the flea and tick shampoo and collars you are selling.

Even if not everyone purchases a bottle of shampoo, you still have a better reputation for providing that information and a more-trusted brand. You organically generate rapport and brand awareness through a first-rate user experience. Your website also looks better in SEO terms, as more people spend more time on your site.

Link-Building and SEO
Link-building is a very important part of SEO that lends authenticity to your website. Linking to other popular, high-rating websites and content allows Google and other search engines to assume that your website is similarly valuable. On the other hand, linking to unmanaged, spammy websites and content reflects poorly on the quality of your content. To maximize your content’s results, an assertive link-building strategy should be a part of your content strategy. A successful link-building strategy is a two-way road: Not only do you need to link to high-quality material, but quality, popular sites need to link to you as well. The first step of this process is creating and publishing content that you can use to insert links and be linked to.

Customer Interactions and Building Contact Lists
Use valuable content as incentives to join your mailing list or become a loyalty member. Compile a list of prospect and customer contacts from these exchanges. The quality and quantity of a business’s contact list dictates a lot of business value: This information is a targeted, prime-for-conversion cohort of the general public. Advertising and outreach dollars spent on this self-selected audience will return a much higher rate of return than dollars spent on non-targeted advertising. Having a smaller target audience will also allow you to tailor your interactions, offers and content to appeal more to the type of person who will become and remain your customer.

A regular content plan widens your net to a broader audience and gives your brand more targeted opportunities to be found. As you develop data regarding access to your content, you can focus on more popular, conversion-yielding topics to improve your content strategy’s performance. Having quality content is essential to returns on your investment into a content marketing program. Here at Rubic Consulting we offer a variety of quality content marketing plans and content (like this piece!) suited to your individual business.