• In the B2B realm, 75 percent of buyers say that their decisions are influenced by content (nearly 93 percent of customers report that they value vendors capable of demonstrating their knowledge and experience through content creation)
• 47 percent of buyers view anywhere between three to five pieces of content before contacting a sales rep
• In 2017, 53 percent of marketers said that quality blog post creation was their top inbound marketing strategy

All of these numbers sound really promising but the picture may look somewhat different when you have a small online business or a local shop and you can’t afford to compete with larger companies or entire marketing teams. The truth of the matter is that you don’t have to!

Content marketing for small businesses is all about demonstrating your knowledge, values and passion. If you’re willing to share this knowledge with prospects, you’ll be investing in the long-term establishment of brand recognition.

In the beginning, reaching your content marketing goals is not going to be an easy task. Engaging content that is tailored to the company’s specific needs can be difficult to produce, even for experienced marketers. Still, the benefits of content marketing far outweigh the costs, which is why you should give the inbound strategy a try. The following guide will acquaint you with some of the best content marketing benefits for small business practices.

Content Marketing for Small Businesses: Why Get into It?

How is content marketing different from the traditional outbound advertising activities (like TV spots or print ads)?

The answer is simple – the content you create gives something to your clients. It turns them from prospects to an engaged audience. As a small business owner, you know your clients better than anyone. This is your biggest strength. You can create blog posts, infographics or a shopping guide that will provide real value and even more – it will build trust.

The needs of customers today are specific. Internet users are more discerning that ever. If you just bombard them with advertising messages, you’re not going to establish the emotional connection required to make your brand stand out.

You build trust, you establish an emotional connection and you get people to invest time on the words and the images you’ve crafted. Eventually, these people will remember you when needing relevant products or services.

In order to develop a long-term strategic plan that will work, you’ll have to ask yourself one very important question – what are you trying to accomplish?

Step 1: Determine Your Content Marketing Goals

Researching, writing and promoting content are all processes that require time and dedication. In order to get a good outcome, you need to pinpoint the aim of the campaign. Your marketing priorities depend on your budget, the expected return on investment, whether you’re attempting to attract a new audience, to boost brand recognition or to accomplish another tangible result that can be measured through the selection of the right metrics.

If you want to get the most of your efforts in content marketing, think about your audience. Your content has to be valuable:

• to solve problems
• to answer questions
• to help customers reach you easier

Once you determine what your content marketing goals are, you can go a step further and choose the content marketing approach that’s best suited to your needs.

Step 2: A Content Marketing Strategy Should Be Comprehensive

There are more than 100 types of content that you can use. That sounds like countless opportunities, but you don’t need to overwhelm yourself and try it all. Evergreen content comes in many shapes and sizes.

Experimenting with formats is ideal for those who don’t know their ideal target audience yet. It also allows for the utilization of multiple channels and communication opportunities. What matters the most is consistency – the quality, the tone and the style should follow your branding guidelines, regardless of the format.

To accomplish your content marketing goals, you should consider incorporating the following in the strategic mix.

Blogs

Long-form content is the most popular option for content marketing. There’s a reason why. Long blog posts give you a chance to explore an in-depth topic and to ascertain your reputation in the field. Additionally, it tends to rank better in search engine results.

Try the following: tell your business story, write how-to guides, industry overviews, interviews with experts, explanatory series that take an in-depth look at the topic. Make it informal and casual. When you find yourself capable of presenting complex ideas in a simple way, you will begin building a loyal audience.

User-Generated Content

Listen to your clients, pay attention to every comment and review. Customers believe reviews and testimonials as much as they believe in personal recommendations, so it’s up to you to make the communication stronger.

Try the following: always reply to customer reviews, no matter how positive or negative they are. Stay polite and be respectful. Encourage people to share their experience with your service and you may also want to provide stimuli for check-ins at your local store, product photo posts and shoutouts. Use their images or videos after they give you permission.

Videos

Visual content is one of the most powerful tools you can rely on to boost engagement. Statistics show that 45 percent of people watch more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos per week. This content is easily perceivable – the brain is much more skilled at processing visual information than text.

Start by building a YouTube channel and featuring product/how-to videos on your website. By the end of 2019, video will account for 80 percent of all online traffic, which is why you may want to jump on the bandwagon right now.

Try the following: you can make a Q&A video for a new product/service; present the team behind the brand and show the human face of your business. Create a behind the scenes series, revealing processes and intriguing information from the kitchen.

Photos and Inforgraphics

Visual content is the future of storytelling according to Forbes. Words remain super important, but photos, infographics, memes and other visual elements can make the text more appealing.

Try the following: use free stock photo websites (Pexels and Pixabay are two excellent choices) to get quality images that can be altered, put into galleries or turned into collages. Use online editing tools like Canva or the filters of your smartphone to improve your own photos.

There are free infographic creation tools out there and even if you don’t know how to handle the process, you can hire a freelance graphic designer to do the job. It doesn’t cost a lot and the return on investment will be high.

PowerPoint-like presentations are also a great option in terms of visual content generation. Use SlideShare to upload presentations you may already have and use the links in your social media marketing campaigns.

Leverage the Power of Influencers

An influencer is defined as person whose online presence has the power to affect the purchasing decisions of others. An Instagram celebrity can be an influencer. The same applies to an industry leader who has a well-established and popular website.

Forging partnerships with influencers can be mutually-beneficial – they will be getting a chance to try out something new and create content while you will be getting exposure to their audience. What matters the most is allowing an influencer to build their own content without insisting on a positive spin. If you do, the message will carry a degree of fakeness that the audience will recognize immediately.

A partnership with a business expert or a social media celebrity will bring credibility to your service.

Whitepapers and eBooks

These long content formats are becoming increasingly popular in terms of building an effective content marketing strategy. As a part of content marketing for small businesses, ebooks can be used particularly well for B2B interactions, as well as for establishing your reputation in the respective field.

Try the following: you can turn a series of “how to” blog post in a short ebook that unifies all information and gives your audience a compete overview. While whitepapers are shorter, you can use them to focus on a specific topic that your customers are interested in.

To accomplish your content marketing goals, you have to put together a comprehensive strategy. A single format isn’t going to cut it because you can’t accomplish all your marketing tasks through it. Take some time to think strategically about what you’d like to do and who you will be addressing. Based on this information, both the relevance and the effectiveness of your content can be increased.

Step 3: Avoid These Common Content Mistakes

If you want to achieve your content marketing goals, avoid some of the most common mistakes in the world of content marketing:

• • Avoid huge chunks of text: reading on a screen isn’t the same as reading a printed page. The eye gets tired easily so short paragraphs and proper formatting are incredibly important. Keep the text concise, the paragraphs – short. Use bold and italic to highlight your most important claims.
  • Avoid over-promotion: today’s internet user sees 11,150 ads per month! You don’t want to be adding to this digital clutter. When creating content, focus on building relationships and eliciting an emotional response from your audience. When you have the trust and the loyalty of website visitors, you can move on to other forms of promotion.
  • Don’t be everywhere: promote your content where your audience is – a few social media channels are enough. Be consistent and choose the platform that will be most helpful in terms of accomplishing the specific goal.

The most important goal of creating content for your small business is to lay the foundations of a conversation with audience. Pay attention to what’s going on and engage with people! Writing a text once and putting it online doesn’t get the job done.

Content marketing is a highly effective, approachable inbound approach. Investing in quality content creation will pay off almost immediately. Think about partnering with experienced professionals – they can help you go beyond and above the original expectations.

Phoenix Digital Solutions specializes in content marketing creation, SEO and the selection of the right digital strategy for every single client. Whether you have a small home-based business or a larger corporation, we know what it takes to reach the right online crowd. Contact our team today and don’t hesitate to let us know a bit more about who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish!

The post A Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing for Small Businesses appeared first on Phoenix Digital Solutions.

Using content marketing as a part of the overall marketing strategy has become equally important for big enterprises and small family businesses. Over the years, content marketing proved its credibility – a recent survey shows that 53 percent of businesses invest time and money in content marketing.

The reason for such investment is simple – it pays back. Content market is a cost-efficient option to catch the user’s attention in an environment that buzzes with tons of data and engagement opportunities.

Even startups can reap the benefits of small business content marketing. According to HubSpot data, small businesses that blog regularly get 126 percent more lead growth in comparison to their rivals.

While the importance of content marketing is easy to understand, companies still struggle with the creation of engaging and meaningful strategies than convert. As social media and mobile technologies evolve, coming up with unique content marketing ideas becomes tougher than ever. Certain mistakes tend to be quite common and here are five of those.

No Awareness of What Content Marketing Entails in Terms of Writing

Everybody knows that Content is king in the digital realm but some still believe that writing for the web is a piece of cake. All that you need are great content marketing ideas, right? This isn’t exactly the case.

The way that people search, read and share information changes every year – it’s not just Google algorithm updates anymore. You have to bear in mind that mobile traffic in 2017 represented 52.64 percent of the global traffic. The share is still growing. Looking for content via a mobile device is a specific process that is changing SEO content marketing as well as the overall approach businesses have towards information dissemination.

Writing for web is all about:

• Keeping it simple – reading on a screen is not the same as reading a printed text
• Putting emphasis on the most important information via formatting
• Getting rid of lengthy explanations and large chunks of text
• Developing niche topics that will shape up your reputation in the field
• Thinking about content that’s easy to share and that will appeal to a wide range of audiences
• Keeping SEO elements in mind
• Keeping the competition in mind to avoid duplicates and benefit from originality

Small business content marketing isn’t the same as writing an essay or a promo page for a print publication. There are rules to be followed and these rules will change quite often.

If you have no experience, chances are that you’ll struggle and you’ll fail getting the results you’re hoping for. Using professional copywriting services in such instances will save you time, money and the headache, plus it will help you reach new potential customers.

No Idea about the Target Audience

According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), content marketing aims to “engage a clearly defined and understood target audience.” When you work on your SEO content marketing, you create a strategy for a specific audience.

Knowing your target is the key to creating text, video, infographics and even live streams that will engage and yield a high ROI.

If you want your content marketing to succeed, you need to define a target audience that will be interested in what you have to offer. Even more, create buyer personas and write content specifically for them. Your buyer persona will impact:

• The topic selection
• The content formats that you use
• The frequency of posting updates
• The style, tone and language complexity you use
• Dissemination channel selection for the purpose of getting more people to see your content

Generic content isn’t going to cut it. Content without focus isn’t going to cut it. If you’re not speaking to a certain person, your content marketing ideas will fail.

Relying on Recycled Content Marketing Ideas

Are your content marketing ideas both fresh and evergreen?

What’s the easiest thing you can do when you’re idealess but you still need to do effective small business content marketing? You can recycle a topic you’ve done in the past. You can see what the competition is doing and attempt to put together something similar.

Guess what, today’s online audience isn’t gullible.

If you fail offering quality, chances are that you will lose your audience pretty fast. A good content marketing strategy is a quest towards originality, an ongoing effort to surprise, excite and educate readers.

The typical internet user has a short attention span. They are spoiled with information and winning them over depends on how creative your content is.

If you want to create truly engaging and interesting content, pay attention to actual problems your audience faces – what are their most common questions? Create a poll or a questionnaire to understand their opinions and interests. Check your Google Analytics to identify hot topics and do follow-ups on those. Data is your friend when it comes to generating content marketing ideas.

Excessive Focus on Promotion

Gone are the days when you could use slogans like “big sale“or “unparalleled offer” to get an audience engaged. People are no longer fooled by straightforward promotion. You have to make an effort and come up with creative content marketing ideas.

Content that’s overly promotional or featuring straightforward advertising will be perceived as spam. If people don’t get something from the texts you write and the videos you shoot, they’ll never come back for more.

The direct responsibility of content isn’t to sell (although you can accomplish this goal). It’s to build your reputation and provoke an emotional response. Getting people to respond emotionally forms an attachment to the brand that you can rely on later on.

Emotional attachment drives brand recognition up. In a world where people can choose among dozens of products and services, this is the one thing you can count on.

Attempting to be a pushy salesman through the content you create will fail miserably. Instead, invest in becoming the authority in the niche. When people can turn to you for useful information, they will also remember to turn to you when they need products or services in the niche.

No Strategy to Guide Content Marketing Efforts

All your efforts for creating, targeting and promoting content will be useless without a consistent marketing plan. Writing for the sake of writing doesn’t do content promotion any good if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish.

The basics of every content strategy include:

• Defining your target audience
• Pinpointing content marketing ideas on the basis of audience interests
• Choosing the right content formats
• Identifying channels for publishing and promotion
• Choosing metrics to track
• Analyzing metrics and modifying the approach on the basis of results

A content marketing strategy helps you achieve consistency in your SEO and content marketing efforts. You can’t rely on a single blog post to bring high traffic for a long period of time. When you manage to gain attention, you will need to meet the same expectations time and time again.

Coming up with content marketing ideas is just the first part of the process. You have to learn how to see the big picture and what you can accomplish through the creation of unique, original and informative content. If you lack the skills, the knowledge or the time, we can help you get there. Please don’t hesitate to contact our team with inquiries about the best strategy for the promotion of your business.

The post Five Perpetual Content Marketing Problems and How to Fix Them appeared first on Phoenix Digital Solutions.

This post isn’t meant to convince you that you need to spend on something that you don’t believe is needed by your business.

Having professional content, however, can help you accomplish a number of important goals. It can even bring you new revenue generation opportunities.

Without further ado, we’d like to present the X reasons why opting for a professional article writing service will make a lot of sense for your business.

More Targeted Traffic to Your Site

Your corporate website is the heart and soul of your online presence. Content quality is needed to establish your reputation and it’s also in the foundation of successful search engine optimization.

Opting for an article writing service will drive targeted traffic to your site. People that need certain products and services search for those online using keywords. Professional copywriters know how to address the needs of that particular audience and improve the search engine positioning of your corporate website.

Just think about it – 72 percent of millennials do online research before buying products and services. In addition, digital information and online engagement influence about 36 cents of every dollar that consumers spend. Well-written content is in the heart of convincing people that your brand has the quality and the features that they need. Don’t underestimate the power of words!

Higher Engagement = Improved Brand Awareness

Being visible online will quickly increase the popularity and the recognition of your brand. Yes, you can accomplish the goals through the use of a professional article writing service.

Well-written content fuels engagement. People will read, post comments and ask questions. Each interaction makes it a lot easier for potential buyers to remember your company and what it stands for.

Traditional marketing is no longer effective. Inbound promotion is the way to go. It’s engaging and it gives buyers and opportunity to interact with a brand. Content marketing is an important component of your inbound strategy. Just think about it – 57 percent of organizations have at least two people on their team responsible for content creation. Almost 50 percent of the B2C marketers publish new content online more than once a week. These numbers suggest that advertising experts see text as an important tool for boosting brand recognition.

More Trust from Consumers

Good content turns you into an industry leader. It doesn’t matter what industry you represent – both B2B and B2C clients will be affected by the texts appearing in your website and on your corporate blog.

Good content and more trust from the consumers give you higher price margins. Some of the biggest marketing experts confirm the fact. Investing just a bit in an article writing service will give you a chance to raise your prices and still generate a big number of sales.

One of the Most Affordable Marketing Opportunities

You pay for professional content once and you get to use it for years to come. Quality, well-written, timeless content will maintain its value and continue delivering benefits.

As a result, this is one of the most affordable inbound marketing techniques. You can use content to accomplish a vast range of your marketing goals. In addition, you’ll find a copywriting agency or a freelancer to build a steady relationship with. As a result of this relationship, you’ll be given the best quotes. Content marketing gives you a high return on investment (ROI) and you don’t have to worry about doing marketing on a small budget.

Your Competition is doing it

Take a look at the websites of competitors. Impressed by their appearance and content? Chances are that other companies in the industry are already doing content marketing.

By avoiding this technique, you’re missing on a huge opportunity to become a thought leader and build a personalized relationship with a loyal audience. This is particularly important for companies that are trying to build brand awareness in a particularly competitive niche. No other technique will deliver the same results within a short period of time,

It Fuels Other Marketing Strategies

Well-written content is the fuel behind other amazing marketing strategies.

Social media marketing is heavily dependent on having interesting content to share with your audience. You can certainly do content curation but if you aren’t sharing links to your own website, you aren’t getting a lot of traffic.

An amazing website can be used in a number of different ways. The best content will easily go viral and your customers will start doing promotion instead of you. Investing in content means investing in a long-term relationship with prospects and buyers.

A Few Content Marketing Challenges to Overcome

Now that we’ve established the ways in which content marketing can help you, it’s time to take a look at some of the challenges. Obviously, it’s essential to find the right professionals for the job – copywriters that have enough experience and that will understand the specific needs of your audience.

A few of the additional content marketing challenges that you’ll need to overcome in order to make the most of the opportunity include:

• Knowing what the goals of the content marketing campaign are and following through
• Determining the right audience to deliver the content to
• Coming up with a content plan that will guarantee consistency in the long run
• Measuring the effectiveness of content and figuring which posts are most popular among the audience
• Keeping it niche enough to establish your reputation
• Creating content that’s unique and different from what the competition has to offer

We can help you overcome all of these challenges quickly and effectively. Phoenix Digital Solution’s team of experienced copywriters has helped numerous customers establish their reputation, stand out from the competition and establish their niche. Don’t hesitate to contact us and benefit from a free quote. To learn more about the opportunities that we have to offer, please take a look at our service portfolio.

The post Six Reasons Why Every Company should Invest in an Article Writing Service and Professional Content Marketing appeared first on Phoenix Digital Solutions.

The numbers don’t lie – Facebook has 1.44 billion monthly active users (as of March 31, 2015), Twitters scores 302 million and YouTube has over a billion active monthly users that upload approximately 300 hours of video every single minute!

Due to mobile internet developments, the number of online users keeps growing and according to recent predictions, it will exceed three billion people in 2015. Furthermore, one third of the world’s population will have access to social networks, according to the We Are Social forecast.

For businesses, all these numbers mean potential fans and followers that can be turned into customers. However, creating accounts in the most popular social networks and updating them time and time again is not the right approach. The effective management of social network presence requires a content strategy and the selection of social media marketing services that fit your brand.

How many social profiles does your business have? Are you active on all? What’s the level of interaction between you and your fans? If you aren’t completely certain of the answers, you need to think about the right way to use social networks and how to make the most of using social media for business purposes.

Do You have to be Social?

How many of your friends and your coworkers have zero social media accounts? We can think of just one such person (and potentially, he’ll succumb to the temptation any day now).

Facebook and the other social networks have started setting the norms when it comes to human interactions, information dissemination and entertainment. According to a Global Web Index’s quarterly report, one in every four minutes spent on the internet is on social networking. Furthermore, the typical online adult spends 1.69 hours on social networking each day.

To answer the question, yes, you do need to be social.

Whether you are the owner of a small local business or you manage a national company, using social media for business is a must. Your marketing strategy, regardless of budget, will be missing on a huge opportunity via the exclusion of social media as a viable channel.

What is the Difference between Social Media Presence and Activity?

Being social means you have to be active. Different social networks require a completely different approach and a unique content strategy. Using the right channels and social media marketing services will improve your visibility, increase the number of customers you have and potentially create brand new revenue generation opportunities.

Creating social accounts based on the newest trends might be a working tool for some brands but does it fit yours? Pinterest and Tumblr are the fastest growing social networks and they continuously register amazing popularity surges. Some businesses take advantage of the trend and develop Tumblr or Pinterest social presence but it doesn’t mean that everybody needs to be there.

Just being ON the social network isn’t enough. Interactions with users, sharing interesting content, the process of asking questions and getting answers are the most important parts of the social communication strategy. The more targeted and effective you are in the approach, the higher your visibility is going to be.

Creating Meaningful Social Activity: A How-to Guide

Facebook announced that a new news feed update is rolling out. The aim of the update is to balance content from friends, pages and promo campaigns. Said bluntly, your fans will be less likely to see post from your Facebook page unlike posts from their friends. That means that the content that your page produces will be more important than ever.

Changes in social networks algorithms aim to improve content. This way, pages putting effort in quality content curation will see a much better exposure and the ones that are just there will sink to the top.

So, what does it take to use social media for business like a pro? Follow these basic, yet very effective steps:

Choose the right social channels: you can choose among hundreds of social networks. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram are among the most popular platforms. When choosing a social networkm, think about your users and the places where they are likely to be most active.

Have a content plan: creating interesting posts that engage users is a tough job. People have a low attention span and to keep them focused, you need quality and relevant content. Don’t be afraid to experiment with content. Post questions, photos, infographics, videos, and observe reactions. Be ready to answer questions. People are online more than ever and you need to be ready to meet their requirements for quality interactions with a business.

It’s all about the user experience: when you’re posting, think like the typical social network user. People need added value in terms of information. Help them or make them laugh – both approaches will work. If you manage to create social media content that engages people, they will interact more with your account.

Customize the campaign for each channel: every social network has specifics – some are B2C, others are more suitable for B2B communication. You can use both B2B and B2C channels but pay attention to the messages you share. Every social platform requires a specific approach, even when it comes to the number of posts.

Don’t be pushy in terms of promoting your business: tell the audience about your products and services. Upload quality presentations and make sure that your brand identity elements are all present. Still, social media are all about building relationships and giving your audience something valuable. Don’t be pushy with the promotion, otherwise, you risk losing many of your followers.

Social media management requires time and devotion.  Just being on these platforms isn’t the same as making full use of them and boosting engagement. A thoughtful approach will be needed to connect with the right audience and keep it actively involved.

Do you lack the time to work on your social media marketing? Don’t know how to get started? Contact us today for a free consultation. The Phoenix Digital Solutions social media marketing team will be happy to answer all your questions. To learn more about our social media management service, please click here.

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