How to Make Smart Content Choices for Local Businesses?

Do you want to develop a strong content strategy for your small company? We’ll look at how to produce and distribute location page content that works in this article, using ideas and research from the industry. Additionally, a variety of content marketing tips to help your business grow will also be included in this blog.

You’ll discover how to leverage content to build your small business naturally and increase brand recognition once you are done reading this blog. 

Does Your Small Business Need Content Marketing?

It doesn’t matter who puts this question in front of you, your CMO, CEO, or your own conscience; it’s crucial to understand that strong thought leadership and high-quality local business content are the two critical aspects to help your business stand out. 

Unlike advertisements, which stop generating leads as soon as you turn them off, organic content offers marketers more significant long-term benefits. 

Furthermore, and rather counterintuitively, content marketing is not limited to internet platforms. Businesses operating offline might also see their return on investment.

As per Semrush’s State of Content Marketing 2023 Global Report, 99% of offline and online companies employing 11 to 50 people report that content marketing produces favorable outcomes.

Nevertheless, 66% of them have a content strategy that is either fairly developed or sophisticated.

Benefits of Content Marketing for Small Business

There are several obvious advantages of content marketing for small businesses, aside from boosting your marketing efforts. This is the breakdown of them: 

1. Builds Customer Relationships: Content marketing allows small businesses to engage with their audience, answering questions and fostering a connection.
2. Brand Awareness and Trust: It helps build brand awareness, trust, and loyalty among the target audience, contributing to long-term success.
3. Cost-Effective Advertising: Content marketing is a cost-effective strategy compared to traditional advertising, allowing small businesses to keep costs down.
4. Improved Visibility: Content has the potential to improve visibility in search engines, driving organic traffic.
5. Stronger Brand Identity: Content marketing contributes to developing a stronger brand identity and presence in the market.
6. Conversion Boost: Relevant and valuable content can increase website traffic and conversions, supporting business growth.

The Best Time and Way to Invest in Content Marketing

Here are some considerations to help determine the best time and way for small businesses to invest in local content marketing:

Define Your Goals:

• Clearly define your business goals and how content marketing aligns with them.
• Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your content marketing efforts.

Understand Your Audience:

• Know your target audience and their preferences.
• Create location page content that addresses their needs, challenges, and interests.

Start Early, But Be Strategic:

• Begin local content marketing efforts early in your business journey, but ensure that you have a clear strategy in place.
• Develop a content calendar outlining topics, formats, and distribution channels.

Quality Over Quantity:

• Rather than generating a lot of material, concentrate on producing valuable, high-quality content.
• Consistently publish content that demonstrates your expertise and provides value to your audience.

Invest in SEO:

• Incorporate search engine optimization (SEO) best practices to improve the discoverability of your content.
• Investigate pertinent keywords and make sure your material is search engine optimized.

Utilize Multiple Platforms:

• Diversify your location page content across various platforms (blog, social media, video, etc.) to reach a wider audience.
• Tailor content formats to the preferences of your target audience.

Engage with Your Audience:

• Engage your audience in conversation by leaving comments on blogs, social media posts, and other platforms.
• Create a community around your business by encouraging dialogue and answering criticism.

Monitor and Analyze Results:

• Utilize analytics tools to track how well your content is working.
• Based on what connects with your audience and produces the desired results, modify your approach.

Budget Considerations:

• Allocate a budget for content creation, promotion, and distribution.
• Consider outsourcing content creation or hiring specialists if resources permit.

Adapt and Evolve:

• Keep abreast of market developments and modify your local content marketing plan as necessary.
• Experiment with new content formats and channels based on changing audience behavior.

Collaborate and Network:

• Collaborate with influencers or other businesses to expand your reach.
• Leverage networking opportunities to share and promote your content.

Educate and Showcase Expertise:

• Use content marketing to position your local business content as an industry expert.
• Inform the people in your audience about the advantages of your goods and services.

Long-Term Perspective:

• Recognize that content marketing is a long-term strategy that builds brand awareness and trust over time.
• Be patient and persistent in your efforts.

Early in your company’s development is usually the best time to invest in content marketing, but the secret is to approach it intelligently, knowing your target market and your objectives. Keep an eye on performance and make necessary adjustments to your plan to ensure success and relevancy in the rapidly evolving field of content marketing.

We have collected some of the best tips and advice that can help your business sore through content marketing: 

1. Build a Solid Base

Content is just a small portion of the bigger marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy won’t propel if any of the elements do not function properly.

Before you think of scaling your marketing efforts, it is crucial to have all the resources and assets ready in place. 

• Your website, both user- and search engine-friendly
• Proficiency in design and copywriting
• Follow-up and conversion tactics, such CTA (call to action) buttons in your blog posts and email marketing for downloaded content.
• Analytics to assist you in evaluating your progress, such as event monitoring in Google Analytics 

By utilizing supporting editorial content like blogs and guides as an internal linking opportunity, you can concentrate on crafting a well optimized homepage and your core category page copy. Small businesses may stand out from the competition by developing a distinctive selling proposition and a strong brand voice. Keyword optimization can provide the technical support your company needs to expand.

2. Build a Social Media Presence on Particular Channels

You almost certainly have some sort of social media presence if you’re actively involved in product or service sales.

Regretfully, being present alone is insufficient. On the platforms that your audience uses, you must be active.

How can you pick the social media platforms that are best for your brand out of all the available options?

Determine who your target audience is before you start publishing anywhere. On social media, you are speaking to a particular group of customers with particular interests rather than to everyone. Once you know who you are speaking to, you need to figure out how to reach them. 

There are numerous approaches you may take to find out where your audience is engaged.

1. Combine all of the current consumer data to determine the internet activities of your target demographic.
2. Look at the social media accounts of your rivals to determine which ones have the most active users.
3. Determine the internet behavior of consumers by utilizing tools such as Google Analytics.

You may start identifying the platforms where your target audience is active and start distributing location page content to them on those specific platforms by following these three steps.

3. Place Narratives at the Centre of Your Approach

Using narrative patterns, brand storytelling enables you to communicate your company’s history, mission, and distinctive identity. It can serve as the cornerstone of your content marketing plan, setting you apart from the competitors.

The best way to communicate with your audience in a language they can comprehend is through stories. Stories tend to convey information in a more remembered way and assist you in evoking strong emotions in others.

Narratives lend a purposeful direction to your local content marketing. When creating your own narrative map, concentrate on what sets you and your business apart and how you intend to use your products and content to transform the industry you operate in. 

Explore the essential components of a compelling brand story with the infographics below: a practical approach, authenticity, consumer focus, relevancy, and more.

4. Use a Simple Customer Sales Funnel

Obtaining the appropriate consent that meets your customers’ demands is essential to encourage them to complete a purchase.

You must determine which stage of the sales funnel your client is currently in and provide them with content that relates to that stage by creating a simple customer sales funnel and an accompanying content plan.

The path that individuals take to get to the conversion stage is called a marketing funnel. Everything in the funnel is covered, from their initial exposure to your brand to their conversion. A sales funnel typically includes four steps:  

Attention: Be aware that a potential customer may come across your advertisement, social media post, or word-of-mouth referral.

Interest: the buyer is curious to find out more

Desire: Customer’s desire is to convert

Customer action: purchasing your product, signing up for your email subscription, etc. 

Make sure you’re providing relevant material to clients at each point of the funnel in order to match this four-step process with your content development. For instance, you wouldn’t want to overwhelm a prospective customer with an extensive content asset during the attention period.

5. Customer-centric Content, Niche-focused Approach

You must emphasize crafting targeted location page content for niche audiences, aiding buying decisions. Michelle Buck, Crystal D’s Marketing Coordinator, advises marketers to create valuable content solving customer problems. Both stress being intentional and customer-focused in marketing plans.

To achieve this, rely on extensive audience research and data for content decisions. Shift perspective to assess content relevance, practicality, and enjoyment from the customer’s standpoint. Automation tools like the Topic Research tool aid in aligning content with audience interests and driving targeted traffic.

By entering a broad idea or high-volume keyword, such as “ecommerce” for a U.S.-based audience, Topic Research generates subtopics and related searches. For instance, exploring the ‘Credit Card’ subtopic reveals existing article headlines and common questions, offering inspiration for relevant and engaging content.

6.) Build a Content Calendar

In addition to putting in the effort to create your customer personas and provide them with the information they require at each stage of the buyer’s journey, it’s critical to continue releasing pertinent material on schedule.

Create monthly schedules that contain social media postings, blog  emails, entries, and any other material you would like to produce that month rather than rushing to produce content on the spur of the moment.

This strategy not only aids in maintaining organization, but it also enables readers to become accustomed to a regular publishing schedule and to develop a lasting sense of familiarity and confidence with your local business content.

7.) Be Experimental

Don’t be scared to advertise your brand widely. As a small business you have certain restrictions that include limited reach, and the content topic you want to publish has already been utilized by a bigger brand. 

Here are some tips that you can implement in order to tackle the restrictions we mentioned earlier: 

Be bold and experimental:  Make use of whatever is unique about you. Memes, humor, and pop culture analogies are a few strategies you might employ to draw in viewers. They provide a much-needed break from the never-ending stream of blog posts.

Share your opinion:  “The best strategies” or “10 trends to follow” in your industry are already well-known to your audience. Instead of going along with the crowd, voice your thoughts. Let your viewers know your position on the matter.

Be visually attractive: A distinctive title, a vibrant cover photo, and the application of additional graphic components can all have an impact.

8.) Create a Variety of Content Types

It’s critical to make every effort to stand out in a crowded field. Your small business can accomplish this, among other things, by using content marketing.

Examine your current location page content as well as that of your rivals in-depth. Check out what is and is not appealing to audiences. It’s time to try to duplicate that success with your next content once you’ve demonstrated efficacy. 

Then you can unleash your creativity. Don’t let what is already in place constrain you. Make an infographic out of your most recent blog post. Transform your infographic into a whitepaper. Convert your white paper into a set of social tiles centered around quotes.

There are countless options for creating content.

9.) Be Selective with Your Content Distribution Channels

Just blindly selecting or utilizing every distribution channel equally is never recommended. Creating content at all channels is easy but it’s often not necessary. You must only focus on platforms where your most valued customers exist, which usually differ for every business. 

Take help of your customer research analytics and insights to identify the suitable platforms on which you can share your location page content. 

Do your clients use social media? Where do they view videos if they do? Do they examine specs, picture galleries, or other information? Once you’ve determined which media platforms work best for your audience, repurposing content is a productive method of producing more with less.

Distribution Channels for Small Businesses

Approximately 70% of small businesses use social media for digital marketing purposes, indicating its significant role. Social Media (25%) followed by company website (20%) and online advertising (18%) as the top three digital marketing techniques for small firms. In addition, 30% of them work in search engine optimization and sponsorships.

Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram are the top three social media channels for small businesses to choose from.

10.) Pay Attention to Your Metrics

Monitor your progress in relation to the objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) you have established for your content marketing campaigns. Consider developing a methodical way to track your development, for example by resolving to produce reports every two weeks.

Among the most important content marketing KPIs to look at are:

• User behavior metrics: Metrics related to user behavior include page visits, average time spent on page, bounce rate, traffic sources, and pages that perform well (data source: Google Analytics).
• Metrics of engagement: mentions, shares, likes, and comments (data sources: Prowly and social media analytics) 
• Results of SEO: backlinks, organic traffic, and keyword ranks (data sources: On-Page SEO Checker, Position Tracking, Google Analytics)
• Impact on revenue: Quantity of leads and conversions, cost per acquisition, return on investment (ROI) from content marketing (data sources: CRM tools like SalesForce, content analytics solutions like ImpactHero)

Wrapping it Up!

The key to success in local content marketing is becoming an expert in the creation of location-specific content. Through location page content customization to the specifics of a certain region, companies may build a strong online presence and develop a close relationship with their local audience. For the purpose of increasing awareness, encouraging community involvement, and creating brand loyalty, location page material must be strategically integrated. With a targeted local content marketing plan, small businesses may dominate the brutally competitive online market by improving their digital presence. Using local business content to its full potential guarantees a genuine conversation with the community, which opens the door to long-term growth and recognition.

Cheers to endless ideation and the world of possibilities that awaits! Add a dash of wisdom to your content journey! Turn your thoughts into a literary masterpiece by collaborating with Glocify. Get in touch with us now to start the content revolution! Additionally, you may reach us on LinkedIn and Facebook.