It doesn’t matter how big your business is our how large of a budget you have to work with, you have to market your products and services if you expect to expand your business or to even survive the competition. How else are you going to increase exposure of your business in order to get more customers? Because of this, it’s important that you implement content marketing and social media marketing into an online marketing strategy.
The following are a few content marketing and social media best practices that you should employ, whether you're a large corporation selling state-of-the-art products or a small family-owned dental practice:
Content Marketing
The first order of business is to set up a blog on your website. The blog is where you will post all of your content. The following are a few content marketing strategies that will help make your content more effective in attracting more potential customers:
- Create good content – The number one content marketing rule is to make sure the content on your blog is good. Emphasize quality over quantity. Many companies make the mistake of releasing as much content as possible, thinking this will help boost their search engine ranking and help to draw in more readers. While attracting more readers is important, you want them to return to your blog more than once and to become interested in your services. To do this, the content you provide must be relevant, informative and helpful.
- Use high quality keywords – Use relevant keywords that your customers would use when searching for topics related to your business or service. The use of quality keywords will help you improve your search engine ranking, which makes your blog easier to find. Avoid keyword stuffing, which is the tactic of loading content with keywords, resulting in the content suffering in quality. While this practice used to work, most search engines have implemented new algorithms to punish such activities instead of reward them.
- Use social share buttons – By adding social share buttons to all of your content, you make it easy for readers to share your content on social media, thereby exposing it to their personal social circles and increasing the odds of attracting more readers.
Social Media Best Practices
Social media is one of the best ways of interacting directly with customers.
There’s no middle man, which means that you can have one-on-one conversations or group discussions that can help boost your company’s image by improving trust and loyalty.
The following are a few strategies to implement when using social media:
• Post regularly – Make sure that your presence is consistent. If you go without posting for a while, followers will forget about you.
• Link to good content – In addition to linking to your blog when you release new content, link to other websites to share content that you think would benefit your followers. For example, if you run a dental practice, then linking to an article about dental hygiene would be appropriate.
- Respond to all comments – If a follower asks a question, make sure you answer it – even if it’s critical of your services. Social media should be used as another customer service avenue, and the better your customer service is, the better your reputation will be.
- Follow other companies– Find other companies within your industry and follow them. You can even comment on their posts – by building a relationship with them, they could end up sending customers your way.
If you do not currently have a marketing strategy in place, it's never too late to employ these social media and content marketing practices in your online marketing strategy.
