3 Ways To Boost Your Small Business Through Content Alone
21 May 2013 | No Comments | posted by Sam Swiech | in Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Strategic Blogging
As the marketing world wakes up to the fact that the Internet’s endless sea of data has essentially commoditized users’ attention, the importance of having superior content cannot be overstated. This rings especially true from the perspective of a small business owner struggling to carve out their own piece of the market no matter how local or global their scope may be.
Content marketing is essential to just about every aspect of your small business’s online persona. Depending on the specific demographic of your consumers, the Internet might very well be the primary medium by which people conduct business with you. From your “about” pages to product or services descriptions and social media profiles, keeping your content engaging needs to be a high priority.
Blog Away, But Don’t Waste Your Time
1 Feb 2013 | No Comments | posted by Megan Totka | in Content Marketing, Introductory, Strategic Blogging
If you’ve spent even a small amount of time reading on this site, you probably already know why your business needs a blog. However, blogging can be time-consuming, and if you’re not doing it properly, you might just be wasting your time.
A blog, to be effective, must be maintained and updated. Frequent, well-written posts are required if you are going to attract and keep readers. We took the time to find some tips on ways to keep up with your blog and save you some time while doing it. Read more..
What Small Business Marketers Can Learn From NPR’s Local Content Facebook Experiment
10 Dec 2012 | No Comments | posted by Sam Zastrow | in Intermediate, Social Media Marketing & Management
In late November, NPR released data from an experiment it ran on its Facebook page. Instead of simply posting general content to its page, it geo-targeted local-specific content produced by NPR affiliates in five cities so only fans in those areas saw the content. Overall, they found these localized posts were more successful than normal posts for generating engagement.
But like any savvy social media marketer could tell you, their results on a post-by-post basis varied wildly, with some localized posts performing extremely well and others drawing very little engagement at all. To better understand this phenomenon, they sorted their successful local stories into nine categories.
NPR is in the news business, which means not all of the nine types of local content are applicable for local, small businesses engaged in social media marketing. That said, there’s a lot to be learned from the ones that are. I’ve sorted the categories below by their importance for these types of marketers, along with explanations of each and some examples.
Slam Dunks
1. Awe-inspiring Visuals
These types of posts “capture [local] wonderment through photos and videos.” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: photos and other visual media should be the driving force behind any Facebook marketing campaign. For small businesses, this means frequently taking photos from your place of business: of your employees, of your products and of your customers.
As we learned from this study, it’s also a good idea to mix in photos from around your community, as many of your fans are likely from your city and the surrounding area as well. If you’re not one to take these types of photos yourself, consider monitoring photo sharing sites like Flickr for images that are tagged with local keywords. Just make sure to credit the photographer when posting.
Reputation Management Basics For Small Businesses
21 Sep 2012 | 1 Comment | posted by Sam Zastrow | in Introductory, Local Search Engine Optimization
Contrary to what Ms. Jett says, you should, in fact, give a damn about your (digital) reputation.
An aspect of digital marketing that often gets ignored by small businesses is local search optimization, or as we like to call it, reputation management. What I mean when I use that term is taking ownership and optimizing listings on review sites.
Engaging in reputation management can help your business in a variety of ways. Especially if your website doesn’t perform well in search rankings, there’s a pretty good chance a directory page from Google+ Local or another local site is going to pop up at the top of the search engine results page ahead of yours. Making sure you have control over what the searcher sees is important in a situation like this.
Optimizing your local pages and including links back to your site also improves your site’s search rankings, and actively monitoring these pages for reviews allows you to respond to bad reviews with your side of the story and highlight good reviews across other online platforms.
If you’re not sure where to start, we’ve provided a step-by-step guide for getting your digital reputation management: Read more..
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