Content marketing vision: being different

Content creation and content marketing is essential to any successful marketing campaign, you will not only get high website traffic but also gain the trust from your target clients. But with the lack of time and resources to deliver fresh and unique contents may lead to business failure. Here are some tips and tricks on how to deliver unique contents and how you can gain more online visibility through your contents alone.

The tips and tricks to get your started

It is a part of integral to create quality content to succeed on inbound marketing; unfortunately a lack of time and resources to write or design your blog can be the down fall of your business. So how can you make content marketing work for you?

1.       Create headline

Gather ideas on content topic for your blog, it can be daunting but once you have started you will be surprised on how many topics you have come up with. Creating a headline first will help you determine your keywords, your description and your overall topic. Try to look back on the questions your clients have about your products and service, you can use those questions and turn it into guide through content. Gathering or brain storming headlines for your content will serve as a solid foundation for your content marketing campaign.

2.       Click click click

While you have gathered your headlines, it is time to list down your keywords and turn them into clickable ideas.

3.       Plan for productivity

Now that you have gathered all your needed resources and ideas of topic for your business blog, it is time to start planning, develop an editorial plan. An editorial plan will help you track your content once it is published.

Write content like a pro

Anyone can start a blog and write contents, but you are not here to just write. Keep in mind you want your blog to be guide from a professional to a client. One of the most struggles of marketers are creating enough content and continuously keeping the quality high. That is something professional writers do on a daily basis. This is why you need an editorial plan for your website content; you just don’t want to write about anything and everything that is related to your business. You want to earn the expertise your clients expect from you. So learn your products and services learn the needs of your clients and start delivering the answers they need through your website content.

Create a simple content creation planning document

Throughout your content marketing plan, you will be making lots of important decisions about how you will construct and manage your content efforts. Start a new excel sheet and save it “content plan Year” And then you can start with these tips below:

1.       Strategic Plan – First you have to name one tab on your excel as “Strategic plan” Then start putting all your headlines on one column.

2.       Create other useful columns where you can add the : objective, structure, Designed action, time and publish.

3.       Core message – create another box for your core message

Get more ideas and search online for Content marketing plan samples. Get the template or idea from the one that works best for you and easy for you to understand.

Conclusion

Decide how you will use your content to grow your business, determine your goals and learn how you can use other marketing channels to promote your content. You can get more ideas from this blog here.

Good luck with your content marketing plan, if you should ever need to update your corporate website and blog we can help you, contact us here

Socratic SBC | Small Business Consulting

2 Wisconsin Circle Suite 700 Chevy Chase, MD 20815

Office: (410) 344-7874

Fax: (202) 318-0689

rwhunni@socraticsbc.com

SocraticSBC is 100% committed to creating solutions, and delivering quality content that improves the way you do business. We want to hear from loyal customers like you. Follow me on Twitter at @rwhunni or email me at rwhunni@socraticsbc.com and let me know what you think about our services. Your feedback makes us better.

Content Marketing and Social Media - How to manage both

Setting up your social media accounts is easy, using and managing social media sites takes time and effort. Whether you are socializing with your current and new client on social media as much as your time can mend, giving them a great and quality content is one of the most important things to keep them seeking you.

Content marketing heavily involve social media and vice versa

Indeed content marketing shall always be in social media sites, and vice versa.  Social media marketing and content marketing are 2 distinct entities, with different goals and processes. Here are some useful info that could help you clear the confusion.

1.       Gravity – Social media is the center gravity of all marketing campaign. Here is where brands and products are shared, discussed and reviewed. In contrast, social media without content would have nothing to talk about nothing to share and nothing to discuss.

2.       Types of content on Social media – Even if you have tons of contents to share on social media, how effective and how much shares and discussion you have about your topic is what matters. The efforts you exceed on social media should be the same for your contents. Your content should be worth it, easy to share, discussable and interesting most of all it should be fresh and unique.

3.       Objectives – Social media and content marketing should be for a multitude of purposes. First it is for your brand awareness, to generate activity and discussion.

How to boost your brand awareness on Social media

Here are the most practical ways to boost your brand awareness on social media.

1.       Twitter – Lots of marketers have been experimenting on ways to boost their visibility on twitter. The results are, they got more retweets with sharing image on Twitter. If you can’t say it with words use image, with this saying it fits perfectly with the limited character status twitter presents.

2.       Share content more than once – We want to share our contents as much as we can on our social media sites, although we hesitate as we don’t want to appear too annoying or too promotional. We want to drive traffic to our website, we want to reach out to our potential clients, we want to be heard. This can be done you CAN share your content more than once, to reach out to your potential client with different time zone. Try to be creative, change the title of your post or sound more urgent or important.

3.       Reach your new follower – Sometimes we do not notice we have new followers and other do not know what to do about it. Instead of following back or sending automated message to them. Try to reach out to them personally. Send personal message, welcome them to your network, offer services you think they might need from you. Be engaging, be humble and welcome them all.

Conclusion

What is important with your content and social media post is, you need from time to time to reach out to your clients in a way which you need to reframe your contents. You can reach more audience when you are aware of your social networks activity online.

The main elements of inbound marketing for small business

On the internet today, marketing has become more and more challenging to overcome. Most small business drops the SEO for more interaction with their followers. But Google says that SEO is not dead though we still need to think like human rather than robots. Search algorithm Hummingbird is an advanced search tool which will also benefit marketers as well as searchers.

Know the elements of inbound marketing

 

1.       Email Marketing – Good email marketing can be the solid ground for your business. Most business deals are negotiated through email not social media

Email platforms to use

·         Exact Target

·         MailChimp

·         iContact

·         Mailgen

·         Active campaign

2.       SEO – Search engine optimization can give life to your website in form of organic traffic. A website cannot survive without SEO. SEO include:

·         Content Marketing

·         On-page Optimization

·         Off-page optimization

·         Keyword Research

·         Competitive analysis

Tools to use:

·         Google Analytics

·         SEOmoz

·         Ravertools

3.       Social media – is a tool that can spread your message well to your community and beyond, if your message is valuable and informative. Target audience will spread your messages in their network and so on, this will give you online credibility and online presence.

Platforms:

·         Facebook

·         Twitter

·         Google+

·         LinkedIn

·         Pinterest

·         Instagram

·         Foursquare

·         YouTube

·         Slideshare

Tools to manage your social media platforms are:

·         Hootesuite

·         Tweetdeck

·         Wildfire

·         Sproutsocial

4.       Content – Content brings life to the internet marketing efforts, without content you will not gain the brand awareness you are aiming for. No one will know about your business without spreading contents across multiple platforms.

Types of content for your marketing campaign

·         White Paper

·         Press Release

·         Blogging

·         Videos

·         Presentations

·         Infographic

·         Video/ online tutorials

·         Webinars

·         Ebooks

5.       Design – design is what binds all your marketing effort into one. A good website design with great user experience is one of the most fundamental elements of your overall business marketing. All your marketing campaign leads back to your website and it affects your overall conversions.

Website needs:

·         Branding/awareness

·         Website design

·         Mobile website version

·         Interface design

·         Responsive design

·         Business information

·         Blog

·         Images

·         Graphics

Tools to use to improve your website:

·         Wordpress

·         Drupal

·         Social media buttons

·         Photoshop

Inbound marketing plan should include these 5 important panels

1.       Identity

Buyer stage needs to have identify stage, whereof the customers permission to sell your products is earned

2.       Exploration

Use blog to publish valuable content and promote it on social media, invite more users to share your content across their network

3.       Decision making

One of the most important thing you can do for your inbound marketing is to help your clients make the decision through easy and quick solutions or informative content

4.       Take action

When your article meets the readers need, show them what benefit it has for them to choose your product and repeat the process.

5.       Advocacy

Turn your customers into your supporters and turn your fans into your clients

What to consider for your marketing mix

 

·         Social media marketing

52% of small business owners have found customers through Facebook, 67% companies who blogs have generated more leads than those who don’t, 43% of small business owners found customers on Linkedin through their professional Linkedin Profile. These statistics tells you that it is worth to mix your marketing campaign and learn the different platforms benefits as well as weaknesses

·         Content Marketing

Adding content with relevant keywords to your website will increase your page rank, having new valuable contents increases interactions with your potential customers. By creating interesting content can give you something to post on your social media sites. New content also means another reason to contact your customers through email content, which will be offered through presentation, white papers or Press release.

·         Video Marketing

Video marketing offers the same level of audience engagement, but more effective than content alone, in fact by year 2016 online video will be the largest single generator of internet consumer. Everyday 75 Million Internet users in USA watch online videos, from Advertisements, to DIY, How tos and Online tutorial videos. Video and marketing will be the perfect pairing, it also improve consumer engagement and increase your small business trustworthiness.

Final words

Make the most out of your inbound marketing by adding and mixing up different marketing campaign to suit all your target audience.

Roderick Hunnicutt

Socratic SBC | Small Business Consulting

2 Wisconsin Circle Suite 700 Chevy Chase, MD 20815
Office: (410) 929-6395  
Fax: (202) 318-0689   
admin@socraticsbc.com

Content marketing - quality does not guarantee traffic but it builds trust

Blogs are great ways to build online presence and trustworthiness, creating content does not mean credibility comes automatically. To create a powerful blog, you need to consider not only your content but your blog design. So what factors do you need to add credibility to your blog?

A list of questions to building a credible blog

1.       Does your blog help you display your expertise?

2.       Do you provide solution to your readers?

3.       Does your social network know you have a blog?

4.       Do you have a shareable blog?

5.       Is your blog focused on your readers?
 

Principles of quality content that builds trust

·         Build credibility

To create a powerful blog, it is essential that people find your content trustworthy. You blog should add

credibility to your business website; use your blog to show your expertise in your niche.

·         Factors to add credibility to your blog

Important factor is to create quality content, other factors to include are good website design, regular publication of content, good social media presence, multiple author (guest blogging), presentation, video, images.

·         Social media presence with quality content

Your social media accounts is your key to promote your content, another factor is to add social media sharing buttons to each of your post. Make sure that you include the number of shares, to justify the popularity of your post.

·         Which social media should you build your credibility

Most of marketers would suggest, facebook as the first and foremost sharing tool for blog posts, because you will be able to add image, URL back to your blog post and ask questions (survey), next popular blog sharing site is LinkedIn which also have the same feature as Facebook. Secondary sharing tools are, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram and Google+

Types of blog contents that add credibility to your website

Your won written article is a major factor for adding credibility to your blog. Ebook and white paper comes next, the 3^rd major factor is visual content such as infographic/charts.

According to a research case study and HOW TO blog categories get more attention than news, stories, survey or polls categories. People are more attracted to contents that has research cases and how to tips. Some people appreciate news and stories. 

Other topics to include in your content creation

1.       Offer evidence

2.       Be specific

3.       Write with rhythm

4.       Irresistible Headline

5.       Build curiosity

6.       Identify the perfect timing to share blog post

7.       Strive for clarity

8.       Talk to directly to your readers

9.       Image sharing

1.   Learn embed content to social media platforms

Conclusion

Building customer trust should not alone be built from your contents; interacting and sharing your customers ideas would make them think that they are part of your success. Identify the topics or problems that your readers encounter and turn these problems into sales with providing product solutions. 

 Roderick Hunnicutt

Socratic SBC | Small Business Consulting

2 Wisconsin Circle Suite 700 Chevy Chase, MD 20815
Office: (410) 929-6395 
Fax: (202) 318-0689  
admin@socraticsbc.com

http://www.socraticsbc.com

Competitive Analysis Plan for starting a small business

For small business it can sometimes be difficult to find the time and dedication to advertise your products online and offline.  People can sometimes have a hard time understanding how a product can ultimately solve their needs.  With proper guide to competitive analysis, your consumers can be convinced that they need your product more than anything else.

Building business structure

Introduce your products/services to your target audience with clear and direct message, describe how your products and services can overcome the challenge they are facing. Include relevant details how effective your products and services are; make sure to outline the problem and resolution, giving the client the idea that your service is using real time solution to solve their real life problems.

Your business website delivers your marketing campaign

With the high technology today there is no way to avoid making a business website for your company that may serve as your marketing campaign. With proper contents, description of products and nevertheless a viewer friendly website could increase your business visibility and gain you more customers in the long run.

Business website should include the following:

• ·         Own Domain name
• ·         Creative template design
• ·         Your business name, slogan and logo
• ·         Your business information, such as where to locate you and when it is the best time to reach you
• ·         Your “about us” page, giving your audience a quick view of what your business is about and what the purpose of your business and why you started the business in the first place.
• ·         Your field of expertise, could also be included in the about us page,
• ·         Your products and description – you need to categorize your products and give them a short and clear description of what these products are for and why your audience should choose your products
• ·         Your blog - blog should always have new informative and valuable contents that are relevant to your company.
• ·         Connecting and socializing – include your social media accounts or add social media icons so that the audience can easily locate you on social media platforms

Marketing of your business using strategic planning

A competitive analysis is vital for your small business marketing plan; you need to establish your products and services in a unique way to be able to attract your target audience. Competitive analysis starts by placing your strategic groups according to how directly they compete. You need to look at your competitors current and past marketing strategies, to learn from their success as well as their mistakes. What are the things you need to research?

• ·         What products and services do they sell?
• ·         What are their past strategies?
• ·         What are their current strategies
• ·         How many clients do they have?
• ·         What are the potential threats do your competitors pose?
• ·         What are the potential opportunities do they make available for you?
• ·         What media marketing are they using

Competitive strategies

Once you have established the assets and skills necessary to succeed in your small business and have gained your competitive advantage, you need to plan your strategic marketing, which usually falls into these categories

1. 1.       Product
2. 2.       Promotion
3. 3.       Pricing
4. 4.       Distribution
5. 5.       Advertising

Conclusion

Many of these factors mentioned above, can be discussed with your marketer, so can agree on a marketing plan template that works well with your goals. Your analysis plan will also help your products pricing threshold, without turning away customers.

Are you ready to choose your products and set your prices?

Contact us today for competitive analysis plan for starting a small business. Socratic Investments will take current market trends and use them to predict the direction of your company

Socratic SBC | Small Business Consulting

2 Wisconsin Circle Suite 700 Chevy Chase, MD 20815

Office: (410) 929-6395  

Fax: (202) 318-0689        

admin@socraticsbc.com