Using Visual Content for Your Small Business Marketing

When tackling a content marketing campaign, you need to know what will rouse online growth and engagement for your small business. Text-based content will always be important, but in this digital era, visual content is integral to the success of content marketing.

Websites that are mobile-optimised should focus on visual content as the internet has made attention spans shorter than ever. The popularity of content presented in big blocks of text is long gone.

It makes sense to use visual content when over 50 percent of people are visual learners. Content that resonates psychologically is said to be at least 43 percent more persuasive. To reach your audience on a deeper level, here are 3 types of visual content to incorporate in your next campaign:

Compelling Images

Images are the first thing people think of when it comes to visual content. Knowing to add images to your content marketing campaign isn’t the hard part, it’s choosing the right type of images to get your point across.

Just like relevant keywords are important in text-based content, high quality and relevant images are vital to visual marketing. When deciding on how to choose images for your campaign follow these tips:

• Aim for original images over stock photos
• Candid photos over posed
• Capture a feeling

Top Tips for Small Business Content Marketing

You probably read a great deal about how important the right content is for your small business in addition to continually striving to create the perfect content for your business every time. The fact is that your content marketing materials are so much more than merely top-quality, compelling, educational content. They need to earn you a good living.

Getting your marketing materials to produce the right results

If your marketing materials don't produce the type (and level) of results that you need them to produce, the chances are really great that you will not continue to use those content materials. Of course, the concept is extremely simple; however, achieving the goals that you have set up to achieve are not necessarily as easily obtainable.

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A content marketing approach that works

Using Images to Improve Your Content Marketing

Whether they are inserted into the header or placed within the main body of text, images are an illustration of your small business contents core idea. Including simple images that relate to as wide an audience as possible will help maximise the work your content can do.

Where Can I Find Photos?

There are a number of places on the web you can find royalty free images that are free to download.  Even more where you can pay to download. The easiest way to find the latest resources is to do a search for “Royalty Free Images.” Pixabay is a good place to go.

No matter where you go for images, it’s vitally important to give proper attribution when required. A good rule of thumb for attribution is to credit the contributor of the image and include the website where you found it, ie: “Photo Courtesy of ABCD from FreePics.com.”

The same goes for a registered trademark or trademarked product. For example, if Nike Swoosh or an actual Nike product is seen in the photo, include a statement like, “Nike, the Nike logo, and Nike Products are trademarks of Nike Inc., registered in the U.S. and internationally.”

Image SEO 

5 Key Components to an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

There’s more to your content marketing strategy than your content. You can create as much content as you want. But, it won’t get you anywhere without brand visibility, repeat traffic, social media marketing, and other factors.

The following 5 key components will help ensure that you put your content to good use. When you spend time or money generating content, you don’t want it to be wasted. Pay attention to these 5 components:

• Brand visibility
• Website traffic
• Calls to action
• Multiple channels
• Quality content

Brand Visibility

The first component is brand visibility. This includes awareness and familiarity. When customers see your content, they should be able to immediately recognise it as coming from your website. The easiest way to achieve this is with branding.

Your content should include your branding. This means adding your logo, using the same colour scheme that you use on your website, and making sure that your brand name is prominently displayed.

Website Traffic

You need traffic. Otherwise, how’s anyone going to find your content? So, the next key component of any content marketing strategy is website traffic. This includes referral traffic and repeat traffic.

Referral traffic lets you know that people are linking to your content or talking about it on social media. If you’re not getting any referral traffic, you need to incorporate social media marketing.

Share links to your content on social media. This should help get the ball rolling. 

Calls to Action

Every piece of content that you create needs a call to action. It doesn’t matter if this call to action directs the visitor to a product page or to a lead magnet. The goal is to get them to move onto the next step.

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Writing Web Content Your Prospects Will Read

Creating web content is hard sometimes. Creating web content for your small business that people will actually read is even harder. When it comes to writing for the web, you have to create content carefully and intentionally. People on the internet have short attention spans and with all of the content out there, you are competing for every second of their attention.

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Many web content creators don’t really understand the people who read content online. This is the major problem that causes web content to go unread. People don’t read content on the web, they scan. They want to pull out the important things from the articles without spending a lot of time on it.

Thankfully, there are some things you can do to make your content more attractive to those people that scan. Here’s a quick guide to creating web content people will read.

Not every word will be read

Content Marketing - Make Sure You Avoid These 11 Mistakes

In the near-limitless universe of the Internet, the art of marketing content can be a tricky one. You've got to know your target audience and what they want, and always be one step ahead of the competition. Add to that the constantly emerging new channels for your content, and you have quite a challenging task ahead of you.

However, before you jump into this war of words, here are 11 pitfalls to watch out for:

1. Not doing your groundwork

You can't construct a skyscraper without laying the foundation. What is the purpose of your content? Who are you targeting it to? Is it in line with your brand personality? If you don't brainstorm on these questions and build a concrete plan, you might fail before you even start. It also helps to double-check your content and see what you can do differently from the competition.

2. Not having a clear take-away

Humorous fluff pieces are fun to read on the Internet, but don't let their popularity sway you. Good content needs a solid take-away - a message previously unavailable to your readers. Give them something new through your content, and they'll be hooked on to your every word.

Content Marketing for Your Small Business

A large part of engaging social media posts has great content. Just having a profile on multiple Social Media sites isn't enough to keep followers engaged or attract new customers. To get and hold people's attention, you need to post new, trending and engaging content consistently.

You've probably heard that your social media content should NOT be all promotional for your product or service. Mix it up! Have a variety of different content about a wide range of subjects.

So, what do you talk about across your Social Media Channels, if you aren't supposed to sell, sell, sell? Try these topics, put your twist on them.

1. Company: Give insight to your business. 

The Power of the Email Marketing Pivot

If you have an email address, you're probably very familiar with e newsletters. And, as we all know, familiarity can breed contempt, which is why so many of your email marketing missives are routed directly to the spam folder. Audiences are tired of seeing the same old thing presented in the same old way. Which is why we suggest pivoting away from the traditional "two column" format to a more accessible and easily digestible "links only" newsletter.

Most email marketing efforts involve a very traditional newsletter in the two-column format that allows you to tell a few brand stories, offer a content marketing resource, and maybe include one of your popular blog posts, space permitting. But, imagine if you radically overhauled your format, moving away from the standard design to what can best be described as a "links only" format.

Small Business Sales: Using Content Marketing to Sell Online

Blog content (as a matter of fact, all content) has a very specific purpose. That purpose is to educate and inform your readers/target audience) about your products/services and to put them in a position of knowing a little more after they read your content than before they read it.

Using content marketing to help you sell online 

First of all, when it comes to your content, you need to consistently deliver top-quality, valuable content to your readers. It is your content that enables you to build a relationship with the other person, which means that eventually, that person will trust you enough to want to buy what you are selling. This is where content marketing comes into it.

Content marketing is an amazing tool to help you sell your product(s) online. If you do it correctly, your content marketing materials will reach the other person in such a way that he or she will only consider you and your business to be the one from whom to buy.

The truth is that your ability to sell anything online stems from the content that you share with other people. If not for your content, you would not have any way of letting your online connections know about what you are selling and why it stands above the products and/or services of your competitors. 

Of course, as far as selling is concerned, it is much more difficult to sell a service than to sell a product.