As a small or medium business owner, you have to be wary of how you allocate your dollars for marketing. After all, you don’t have a bottomless budget to spend on commercials and billboards.

So, finding affordable yet effective ways to get the word out about your products and services is vital. That is why content marketing has been catching the attention of SMBs (and even many of the larger fish in the sea).

Content marketing has been shown to cost 62% less than outbound marketing, while still yielding 3x the leads and results. And as for conversions, content marketers are seeing almost 6x more than they do with traditional marketing.

If you own a website, building content is essential to growing your traffic. Websites that use content marketing have already been shown to generate 7.8x more traffic than those that don’t.

On that note, it’s plain to see why 88% of B2B marketers use content marketing.

Now, it’s time for you to do the same.

Here’s a list of the best content marketing tips you can add to your strategy.

Don’t Be Afraid to Be Specific (While Still Relevant)

In business, you’re always looking to grow your reach, which can lead to you making some pretty bad marketing decisions, like trying to craft content that appeals to the masses.

Not everyone needs or wants your product or service, so it doesn’t make sense to waste time on these audiences. Tailoring your content so its specific and relevant to your core audience is the best strategy.

In order to do this, you have to understand your audience, so that you can deliver the content they want to consume. The idea is to craft posts that they’ll find helpful in their buyer’s journey.

For instance, educate them about their problem, and suggest possible solutions using your product or service.

Be Consistent in Content Production

Consistency is everything when it comes to content strategies. You need your content to always be high quality, relevant, and available.

If you’re only publishing content occasionally, then you’re going to lose your audience fast.

Now, if you’re going to commit to publishing weekly, make sure everything you release meets high standards. It’s a lot better to push out two high-quality articles each week than to publish ten mediocre blog posts.

Hire a Content Writing Company

Let’s face it – most business owners don’t have the time to both create a content marketing strategy and execute it. There’s a lot of research, testing, and writing to be done, which you likely don’t have time for.

And that’s okay!

That’s why you’ll find companies with the most successful content marketing by using content agencies. This helps to free up their time, while still ensuring their content efforts are up to par.

A content writing company can offer topic creation, calendar organization, blog writing, photo finding, and SEO. All of this together will help you provide content that’s consistent, optimized, and of great quality.

Focus on Helping, Not Selling

It’s hard not to gloat about your products or services, especially if you’re a firm believer in that they can help your target customers. However, you don’t need to make this known every chance you get.

Around 84% of millennials don’t like traditional marketing; they’d prefer to be a part of the content. For example, a thoughtful conversation, or showing ‘real’ people instead of models, will really help you appeal to a younger audience.

And, more importantly, millennials want content that helps them to achieve their goals. Whether that goal is to improve themselves, better their lifestyles, or boost their careers, millennials might look to you for tips on how to get there.

If you can produce content that does this, then you can win over the millennial audience.

Opt for Long-Form Content

In the past, you could get away with short blog posts of 500 words or less. That’s not true anymore.

Both search engines and consumers are looking for longer pieces of content.

Why?

Because it offers more value to the visitor. There’s not much you can say in 500 words, and Google and other search engines know this.

According to Google, the top pages in the SERPs have an average of 1800+ words.

Of course, it shouldn’t just be a long-winding post of repetitive, fluffy content. Including actionable tips, insider advice, and helpful resources is critical if you want your visitors to stick around.

After all, as we know, Google rewards pages and sites with long visitor sessions.

Use Data to Evaluate Your Content

It’s hard to know whether your content is doing well if you’re not evaluating its data. So, it’s essential to track each piece of content so that you can determine this.

Google Analytics is an excellent tool. However, you can also use other platforms, such as Chartbeat. Whatever you decide to use, you’ll need to track the right metrics.

For example, you should monitor:

• Traffic
• Shares
• Leads
• Sales

Looking at traffic alone is a mistake that a lot of companies make. Without combining this with other metrics, you’re looking at nothing but vanity numbers.

A large number of visitors means nothing if they’re not engaging, sharing, and converting.

Start Making Improvements to Your Content Marketing

We understand. Putting together a content marketing campaign isn’t the easiest of all business tasks. And this is especially true if you aren’t a marketer.

So, rather than hiring a dedicated department to handle this for you, you can outsource to a content marketing company. This way, you can ensure you’re getting the best strategy implemented to attract your target customers (without breaking your budget).

Now, at least, you know some of the ways you can make improvements to your content strategy!

So don’t just wait. Contact us to start planning an effective content marketing strategy today!