So far in 2021, we have discussed how businesses in Hawaii can boost their revenue. All of us took a nasty hit due to COVID-19, and some of us lost up to half our revenue; all of us forced to make difficult choices last year as we navigated the new normal.
Now, as we work to recover, we want to be stronger than ever before. This has led us to share about how you can boost your revenue through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and its little cousin, Local SEO.
We also talked about how you can adopt E-commerce and even bring that E-commerce to international customers.
During our time exploring SEO, we touched on the concept of content marketing. Realizing we don’t have many posts that discuss content marketing in detail, we thought it be valuable to create one as it is such a powerful tool for any business that wants to market online.
So, we’re going to talk about the content marketing strategy and how you can adopt it to help boost your website’s SEO.
Also Read: The No-Fear Guide to Basic SEO For Your Website
A New Champion In Marketing
Content marketing is a relatively new marketing approach that not only seeks to build authority, influence, engagement, but also trust with the target audience.
Content marketing is a form of inbound marketing as opposed to outbound. In an outbound situation, you go to the customer, typically through paid advertisements or cold calls. Inbound means the customer comes to you because something or someone referred them. The pieces of content marketing are not advertisements or pitches, but rather quality content for the audience to consume.
If you think about it, you see content marketing all the time. If you look in your email, you probably have invites to read a list-based article or check out a new podcast from some business. If you look at your LinkedIn or Facebook feed, you’ll probably see the same thing, plus opinion and poll posts.
All this and more are considered forms of content marketing. It’s everywhere because it works. It has been shown, time and time again, to boost revenue by increasing search engine ranking and traffic to your website. It also helps your target customers know, like, and trust you as a business.
It’s something every business should employ, to some degree.
Also Read: How Businesses In Hawaii Create Effective Websites
How To Get Your Content Marketing Approach Started
There are a few basic building blocks of content marketing you can start using this week. From there you can build on your success.
- Start a Blog
Starting a blog is one of the most common ways to get started in content marketing. Blogs help your website get more traffic, which leads to more views for your E-commerce platform and more people looking up your location for a physical visit.
A good goal as you start is to post a new blog post, 600-800 words long, about once every two weeks.
Coming up with topics may feel difficult. If you run into trouble, talk about things you and your business find interesting. Talk about industry trends and news you see. If you know how to do something specialized, write and publish a how-to guide for it.
As you get into practice, you’ll begin to see potential blog topics come up in your conversations and observations in business.
- Start a Social Media Account
Second, start an official social media account for your business. We recommend Facebook and/or Instagram. If you can only do one at first, start with Facebook then branch into Instagram from there.
Invite friends, colleagues, and customers to join your business’ page. Then, begin posting about once a day.
Post photos and images related to the blog content you’re already working on. Post polls and opinions to get conversations started in the comment sections. All this will help your paid ad campaigns, build trust with your customer base, and lead to more traffic on your main website.
When people message you on your social media page, make sure to respond to them!
- Hire a Content Manager
If a regular blog and daily social media posts sound like a lot to handle, it’s because they are. Though you can reuse and adapt content for multiple platforms, it simply requires time and energy that not every owner has.
To get the most out of your content marketing opportunities, hire someone with experience to create content for you. This may seem like a weird expense at first since content marketing isn’t a direct method of advertising.
But, it does indirectly boost your sales enough that a good content manager pays for themselves and then some through the revenue they bring in for your business. You don’t have to start with a full-time manager, either. You could bring in a freelancer to work on it for a few hours per week, and build from there.
If you would like help with developing your content marketing strategy, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Further Reading: Content Marketing Guide, How We Drive Traffic and Rankings With Content
Photos Courtesy of Olga Serjantu, Austin Distel, and Leon.