For small and mid-size businesses, one of the most effective strategies for growing your business is through the use of content marketing. At Vertz Marketing, we always recommend an integrated content marketing plan with our clients. What is content marketing? Quite simply, content marketing focuses on providing educational and sometimes entertaining information to your prospects and clients to build your brand name and promote whatever it is that you’re selling. Examples include blogging, stories on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and even video marketing through YouTube. Although content can be placed on these sites for free, there are significant resources that successful companies need to invest in to make the content meaningful, relevant, and continuous.
A few tips for content marketing…
– Make sure you have a company blog. Make sure you’re hosting your own company blog. For blogging, we recommend wordpress.org. If done appropriately, your blogging will build continual, useful, and engaging content that your prospects and customers will want to read. As you build your library of blog articles you’ll be seen as the ‘thought leader’ for your marketplace and your prospects will see you as the prime source for information. This will go a long way in building trust with your prospects so that when they need your product or service, you will be at the top of their mind.
– Facebook. If you sell to consumers, this is a must. 67% of the US population that is over 13 years of age visits Facebook at least once a week. More and more consumers visit a company’s Facebook page than they do their company website. However, having a Facebook business page is just the beginning. You need to make sure you have continual, engaging, and interactive content on Facebook at least 3 times per week, but no more than 10 times per week. You need to have consistent information so that you’re engaging your ‘likes’ but you don’t want to be annoying. If you post too much, they’ll hide you from their news feed or ‘unlike’ you altogether.
– Integrate your efforts across all marketing channels. With this approach, make sure your blog articles automatically sync to Facebook. For example, a blog article will automatically be created as a Facebook article the second you publish the blog article. Have a blog feed on your Facebook page. Make sure to have a live feed of your Facebook business page on your website. Allow visitors to your website to ‘like’ your Facebook business page right from the website without having to go to your Facebook business page. Don’t reinvent the wheel. This is all about making life easier for you and getting the most mileage out of your content marketing.
These are just a few of our tips for content marketing for small and medium-sized businesses in the Milwaukee and Wisconsin market. If you would like to learn more about our content marketing strategies, contact Vertz Marketing in Milwaukee at 262-910-4125