Many marketers struggle with the implementation of web marketing, SEO and social media marketing strategy. They tend to over complicate their strategy and because they make it so complicated, they can’t execute.
Here’s the process simplified:
The most important task in establishing a stronger online presence for your firm is generating content. Generating new content is like exercising; you must focus on doing it if you want to reach your goals. Generating content requires discipline. You must allocate time each day to not only generating content but also re-purposing and distributing this content through a multitude of marketing channels.
Start with the Blog
So how much time should a small business devote to generating content? For a sole proprietor, a general rule is to start with two quality blog posts a month. That’s fairly reasonable right? Write two 400-word blog posts a month. Make sure the blog entries display thought leadership and cover topics that are pertinent to your target market. Those two monthly blog entries will serve as an excellent foundation for all other web marketing tactics. If you can write more than two blog entries a month, that’s great, but two per month is a manageable goal for most businesses.
Re-purpose the Content
If you’re averaging two blog entries a month, this will turn into eight blog entries over a four-month period. As you create these entries, this blog content can be re-purposed for different marketing platforms. If the blog entries are well written and relevant to your target audience, it will only require minor tweaks for each marketing channel.
Email Newsletter
Typically your website blog audience will be prospective clients, while your email newsletter audience will be current clients. You already have two excellent blog entries, why not tweak these entries and re-purpose as email newsletter articles? Typically a blog entry will have a more informal tone than an email newsletter article. You can just formalize the tone a bit and you have two newsletter articles each month. If you only send an email newsletter quarterly, awesome! Now you will have six different blog entries to choose from.
Press Releases
Many of the blog entries you create can be utilized as press releases. Identify the most timely, most newsworthy blog entries and once again, repurpose the content. Add quotes and write in the third person, and now you have a press release that you can release through a newswire service like PRWeb or PRNewsWire. Newswire dissemination will help your website rank more prominently in search engines. Search engines value backlinks from prominent websites. If your press release is picked up by a national or regional publication, this will help with SEO.
Social Media
Twice a week, take tidbits of content and tips from your blog entries and include these in Facebook status updates, LinkedIn group discussions and Twitter tweets. Social media channels will help brand your firm as a specialist in your industry, stay top of mind and position your website as a resource center.
Videos or Archived Webinars
With some of the blog entries you create, a video or webinar is an excellent way to re-purpose the content. Within minutes, you can take a blog entry and create a voiceover PPT presentation from it. You can then add this to your website and host it on YouTube – once again helping your firm gain visibility and improve your website’s SEO and keyword ranking. Website visitors are intrigued by different content, even if it’s the same content re-packaged. Some like to read blog entries, others like to watch a video. By re-purposing this raw content, your website can capture the attention of both types.
White Paper & Premium Resources
As you create more and more blog content, your entries will have related themes and threads. For an accounting firm, there may be 3 to 4 blog entries related to small business incorporation. Why not package this up and create a white paper out of it? The white paper should be more polished, well designed and include photos. You can then create an offer on your website to download this white paper. By creating more and more premium resources like white papers on your firm’s website, you will transform your website into a legitimate lead generation tool.
Disciplined content generation will help establish your firm as a thought leader in the marketplace, and give your company the tools to generate and nurture ideal clients. As you add staff and each staff member is required to generate content, your firm will build a library of keyword rich content on your website, social media accounts, online publications, etc.
