If you’re a small Mom and Pop-type business in your city competing with a big chain or nationwide service provider, content marketing can help you become a valuable resource to your clients and potential clients — and possibly more so than any national competitor could ever hope to be.
Combine content marketing with your social media marketing strategies and you’ll have a great head start over the nationals when it comes to engaging customers.
Here are some tips you may want to follow:
Sending newsletters via an e-mail marketing campaign allows you to connect in a profoundly personal and direct way with clients and potential customers. You also can publish your newsletters on your blog (more about blogs in a moment), thus allowing them the chance to be discovered by a search engine. Blogs also can act as a great transition from the more “casual” relationships you may develop with your followers on Facebook and Twitter to one that’s more personal and engaged.
Blogs not only allow you forge deep relationships with your readers, they also can give you some great SEO juice (so long as you place targeted keywords within them), helping you get higher placements in search results.
Perhaps the best way a small company can beat the pants off a large or national competitor is to become the go-to resource center about your products/services in the eyes of current and potential customers. So make your content in your blog, your tweets, your postings, your newsletter missives, as well as on your website itself useful. That is, offer information on how to best buy, use, sell, fix, get, etc. the services and goods you sell. You also can write this information in a news release (and distribute it to a free news release service), create a video about it (and upload it to YouTube as well as place it on your site).
We’ll discuss in our next post how social media and live networking events also can make a small local business become the “go-to” source for its goods/services with local customers.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to learn more about how “content” marketing online can brand you as the expert in your area, contact GoMarketing.com. We’ll listen to you as you describe the goals you have for your business as well as the challenges you face in reaching them and then together we’ll work on crafting an Internet marketing campaign that best fits your needs and your budget. Contact us today!