25 May 2024 | By - Sudha Mariappan

Having a small business is no easy game.

They have to constantly battle with huge brands to get consumers attention, especially in today’s digital age.

But thanks to this avid technology world, content marketing has become a powerful tool not only for small businesses, but businesses of all sizes. Particularly for small businesses, content marketing is an affordable and effective way to reach new customers, build their portfolio as a brand, and drive growth. To grow your small business, below are 5 strategies to effectively generate sales using content marketing.

1. Develop a Clear Content Strategy

Developing a clear content strategy in the initial stages of content marketing for your small business is the key.
This consists majorly of defining your objectives, getting to know the audience and planning the content you plan to post.
What do you wish to accomplish with your content marketing? Do you want to increase brand awareness, capture more leads, direct people to your website, or make more sales? The end goal of your business can make it easier for you to monitor how you’re faring and alter your approach if need be.
If you want to create content that attracts your audience, you must know them, their interests and their problems.
You can do this by carrying out a market survey and get to know about the demographics, buyer persona and buyer interests. Your customers who are loyal from the start can redo their survey to know if there are any changes in their preferences.
After understanding what you want and who it is meant for, the next step is to determine the type of content that would be suitable for you to create.
Content such as blogs, videos, infographics, podcasts and social media posts may serve this purpose. You just need to make sure that all your publications reflect the driving force of our organization but also appeal a bit at least to our subscribers.

2. Create Quality and Relatable Content

Content marketing only works effectively if you have quality content. The content that adds touch to good quality, helps your business to be considered as a leading player in the marketing world. It also makes the content relatable to your audience when you produce it with humor and daily happenings.
If the quality in the content is high, such as good search results, good writing with valuable information that it communicates to the right target audience.
But don’t just create content because it must be done, concentrate on providing answers on your niche, and dealing with subjects closely related to your clients' problems or desires. Create something that speaks to your readers or customers.
You need to make sure that you keep in touch with recent developments within your area, and consequently engage with the subjects which are currently happening. In this way, you can enter into the consumer's minds.
Using proper visuals such as images, videos, and infographics can make your content more appealing and engaging with the audience. It can also give your audience the option of sharing your content, which will make your brand content more reachable.

3. Optimize Your Content for Search Engines

The most important part of your whole content marketing strategy is Search engine optimization (SEO).
To optimize our site and attract more traffic, it is very critical to make sure that your content is discoverable to your target audience.
Identify what keywords will work for you. For example, if you’re a shoe company, then you can use keywords such as “shoe shops near me”, “shoes for men”, or “shoes for women”. This particular search, which is known as a long-tail keyword will get close to what your target audience is searching for and you can get more website views from this.
You can try Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and SEMRush to find popular phrases with low competition.
Make sure to add keywords in your title tags. The meta description which comes under your title on a google search page impacts the whole traffic to your website. Therefore, you need to add headers in the entire body of the article for search engine optimization.
Also, make sure that your content is well planned and it contains internal and external links so that it is easy to understand.
Search engines bump up your website rank and bring it visitors with backlinks. It happens when other blogs who have used your blog as a link redirect them to yours.
Relationships with industry influencers and bloggers are also important if you want to earn links from authoritative domains.

4. Leverage Social Media

There is no doubt that social media is a powerful tool for effective communication, interacting with the target group and therefore creating your brand name. With an endless number of options available to make more leads through your social media marketing, you can be rest assured that this is a valuable tool for your business growth. With social media being used, you can increase the number of followers that see your brand’s information regarding his or her products.
For that, your focus on the social media platforms should be solely on where your target audience is most active. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest, all of which are included where people are the most users out there.
Each platform has its specific strengths and practices that work best and you can make them suit your content and strategy.
And social media isn’t just a platform where you broadcast your content. It is also a place where you can interact with your audience.
It is mainly done to create bonds between people and establish a lively community, therefore you need to engage in conversations by either responding to comments or answering questions. You can also promote your content using social media using advertising.
Experiment with different types of content such as stories, polls and live streams to see how your audience handles your brand.

5. Measure and Analyze Your Results

For your business to have a successful content advertising campaign, measuring is very important.
This will not only allow us to know what works or does not work for your brand currently, but also tune your brand strategy for your future leads and so.
Identify the key metrics that work in line with your goals, i.e. website traffic, social media engagement and sales.
Google Analytics, social media analysis tools among others are some of the tools you can use for this work so that you are able to collect information that involves lead generation. You also need to review your performance data on a regular basis to discover trends, patterns, and points of improvement.
Check to see what types of content are doing well relative to others, which traffic channels are most popular, and user engagement in your content. Finally, after analyzing, keep testing and optimizing to enhance your results as much as possible.

Creating a content strategy plan for your small business may take some time and effort. With our service from Ontogen Digital, we can provide you over 15+ services including social media marketing and web development services. Connect with us at info@ontogendigital.com and subscribe to us for more blogs.