More local businesses are turning to digital marketing strategies to generate leads and traffic than ever before. At the same time, the technologies and tactics being employed are rapidly changing and will continue to evolve into the year 2022 and beyond.

Your business needs a strategy to stay a few leaps ahead of the competition. If you're wondering what digital marketing techniques you should employ in 2022, continue reading through our list of insights and tips below:

1. Start Optimizing Website Pages for Voice Search

While not a brand-new technology, AI assistants and voice search tools are present everywhere and are changing the way we discover information on the web. More users are turning to these virtual assistants as their accuracy and reliability become more improved with each new iteration. Today, a person can find a local business in seconds by simply asking their mobile device for the best solution to their problem in the area.

The question becomes - how do you optimize a website page for voice search technologies? If you've already implemented an excellent SEO strategy based on the best-known practices, you're already off to a good start. This includes adding a healthy amount of high-quality, relevant content to the page, focusing on primary and tertiary keywords, and optimizing your metadata.

To understand how voice search impacts SEO, we need to examine how a person typically employs voice search. When you type a query into Google with a keyboard, you typically truncate your entry into the minimum number of keywords necessary. For example, you might search for the best Thai restaurant in the area by typing “best thai food.” Google already knows your location through your device and generates all of the relevant businesses local to your area.

When we search with voice search, we typically ask a question as if we were talking to a real person. Instead of the above query, the user might ask “Where can I get Thai food?” The technology actually works by taking that spoken query, converting it to text, and performing the search automatically. In other words, a voice search typically sees users focusing on long-form questions and long-tail keywords that might not currently be a focus in your SEO strategy.

Finally, consider creating an FAQ page that accounts for common concerns presented to you by your customers. Because voice search is so commonly in the form of a question, providing quick, succinct answers on this page can be a recipe for success if you want your responses to be chosen.

Accounting for this conversational way of gathering information should be a focus of your content now and into 2022. You still need to ensure that your content is clear, accurate, and tailored to your audience. However, customers are looking to get more familiar and personable with brands. Optimizing your content to present a more conversational tone can not only help your SEO, but build authenticity and rapport with your customers.

2. Implement Structured Data

Structured data, otherwise referred to as schema markup, is an advanced SEO tactic that effectively classifies the content on a page with relevant tags. These clues help search engines quickly identify what sections of content mean, so that they can better deliver the best information for highly-targeted searches. Structured data will also help you to better deliver your content in the voice search queries discussed above.

Google offers helpful documentation to assist webmasters with understanding structured data and how to properly implement it within your site's HTML code. There are three types of notation you can use to implement structured data, but JSON-LD is the recommended format for most websites.

Structured data not only classifies snippets of a webpage, but can actually nest other items in groups to demonstrate how these variables relate to one another. Instead of necessarily looking at the content itself and attempting to make sense of it, it can employ this outline and quickly understand the full picture.

If you look at an example search, you will see examples of structured data already being used by other major websites and publications.

If you search for Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy film, Google is automatically able to identify the right result with relevant information thanks to the clues provided in the page's HTML. It understands that we want to find the 2014 film. Without a markup that classifies the content as a film, Google may have pulled up results pertaining to the comic books instead.

Below the meta description, we see additional data highlights that likely do not appear in a search result for one of your own web pages. This page nests additional structured data within the film classifier and tags the budget, production company, box office, and producer. Google is able to grab these key data points and generate them in the search result snippet because the structured data helps it understand what this data is and how it is relevant to the original search query. This results in a much more attractive and highly valuable search result to attract more clicks.

By marking up your pages with structured data, you can help Google deliver the best information to your inquiring customers. If they want to know if you sell a product, that product will appear immediately along with any additional nested data. If they want to know your specific pricing, they can find the answer to that question with a search through keyboard or voice search with ease. This reliability builds customer confidence and will push your conversions to new levels in the coming year.

3. Start Employing AI-Automated Marketing Tools

The top business owners and marketers are already accelerating their workflow by employing artificial intelligence and machine learning tools. These allow you to effectively automate countless tasks that would otherwise require additional time, effort, and budget that your team could be devoted elsewhere.

Platforms like DashClicks offer software that can automate the process of managing your sales pipelines, gathering analytics, and communicating with the contacts in your CRM. Instead of manually gathering new leads from your latest landing page, organizing them, and qualifying them, you can utilize these automated tools to qualify your leads from the start, add the worthwhile ones to your contacts, reach out with templated emails, and assign them to the best sales representative without pressing an additional button.

This machine learning is especially vital when it comes to analyzing and optimizing your latest campaigns. Every marketer worth their salt is employing tools and platforms such as Google Analytics or Facebook Ads to automatically gather metrics and insights regarding their creatives and audience engagement. These types of platforms generate millions through ad revenue and are eager to provide you with all of the data you need to ensure your marketing efforts are a success.

With all of these tedious elements taken care of by machines, your experts will have more time and freedom to focus on the things they do best. Your salespeople will have a list of the hottest leads along with qualifying data that can better help them close the deal. Your paid ads managers will have access to information such as demographics, clickthrough rate, custom goal conversions, and heat maps to understand what aspects of an ad are connecting with audiences and which need to be improved.

All of these tools allow your team members to be more agile and produce better content and media as a result.

4. Start Segmenting Your Audience

While your broader audience is made up of individuals interested in your products or services, not all of these people will be exactly the same persona. There are a lot of factors that naturally segment your audience into smaller groups such as household income, age, sex, race, education, or interests that can impact the exact way that a consumer chooses to engage with your brand.

Because no two people are the same, it makes sense that you shouldn't market to different groups the same way, either. This is why we recommend that every business begin to take efforts to further qualify and segment their overall audience for improved marketing success in 2022. This digital marketing technique will aid you in creating highly personalized, tailor-made ads and content that will improve your conversion rate within that specific audience segment.

Your current ads may feel cold, robotic, and designed simply to get your name out there. By taking the time to closely approximate who you may be sending your message to, you greatly increase your chance of converting. A segment-targeted message will feel much more personalized and evoke the feeling of having a one on one conversation with a representative from your brand.

5. Create and Promote More Video Content

Audiences are demanding more high-quality video content from brands and the statistics are there to support that fact. A near-unanimous 93% of marketers expressed that video content is now an important part of their marketing strategy. Regarding the actual ROI, 86% of website owners said that video improved traffic, while 78% said that it played a direct part in increasing sales.

Video content can include content for YouTube, social media, your website, or specifically for ads and landing pages. You can also effectively repurpose existing content you've created for your blog or an eBook to create compelling video that appeals to broader audiences. You don't necessarily need to spend thousands on professional equipment, either, as most mobile phones support audio and video quality that's more than sufficient for a quick video.

Creating video content is also the ideal way to capture the attention of audiences in an era where such a thing is becoming more of a rare commodity. Your average consumer is not as likely to engage with high amounts of text that require careful attention to extract key details. However, a video provides much more dynamic engagement that allows the user to feel as though you are speaking and presenting to them personally.

There are also AI-assisted tools and platforms like Synthesia that can generate personalized videos from only a script. Video creation and editing is more accessible than ever, and it will be a vital strategy for you to add to your list of the latest digital marketing techniques for 2022.

6. Place More of an Emphasis on Local Search

Local search is always a high priority for small, local businesses, but the events of the 2020 pandemic are continuing to ripple throughout everything we do to this day. While more consumers started to do their shopping online for the first time, we are now feeling a whiplash effect that sees buyers once again looking for local alternatives to purchase products and services.

There are a number of ways you can utilize SEO tactics to boost brand awareness among those in your immediate geographic location. Be sure to leverage your location whenever possible in your content to appeal to those nearby. Additionally, look into creating and optimizing your business profile within online directories, particularly Google My Business.

Your GMB profile should contain your address, phone number, email, hours of operation, shop images, and a description of your products or services. Be sure to always keep this profile up-to-date if you change your hours to comply with local or state regulations regarding pandemic hours. Keeping your profile accurate and optimized will make your business much more likely to appear near the top of search results. Users will have everything they need to make immediate contact with your business.

7. Partner with Influencers That Can Elevate Your Brand

Every business needs someone to be their face, so that there is a person rather than a faceless organization for customers to connect with. A popular strategy that businesses are using more than ever is partnering with online influencers to gain additional publicity and traffic.

These influencers are individuals that have already cultivated a notable online following for a number of reasons. The most common reason is that these individuals are existing content creators that represent themselves and are able to make one-to-one connections with other like-minded individuals around the web.

You can take advantage of the trust this person has with their community and grant the influencer the opportunity to promote your brand. Brands will generally agree upon a form of compensation for the promotion as well as access to your products or services for them to try before agreeing to the deal. In fact, it is a federal regulation that an influencer cannot promote something that they do not have actual experience in using.

Regulations also mandate that companies and influencers clearly disclose the nature of the advertisement. However, these influencers always have the option to refuse to promote something that they do not believe in or support. Because the influencer already has rapport and trust with their audience, their audience is more likely to trust any brands that they happen to feature on their various channels.

Influencer marketing is inexpensive but effectively allows you to take advantage of built-in audiences that are already qualified and show interest in what your business offers. For this reason, you should primarily look to partner with influencers who already create content that's either directly or tangentially related to the nature of your business. This type of marketing can work for unrelated brands, but there's a greater chance that the promotion will feel disingenuous or stilted due to the lack of relationship between your brand and the content the influencer creates.

Take Advantage of the Latest Digital Marketing Techniques for Success in 2022!

Leveraging these cutting-edge strategies will aid your brand in staying ahead of the competition in the year to come. Take advantage of the increased focus on local businesses by tailoring your content around the way people ask questions and search. If you have yet to do so, be sure to create and complete your Google My Business profile to ensure that your business is listed among your local peers.

Streamline your workflow by taking advantage of the countless AI-driven automation tools that are now available to marketers and businesses. These types of tools can even allow you to create compelling video content for little to no cost that drives both traffic and conversions. If your business lacks the resources or ability to accomplish these tasks, consider using the DashClicks platform, where our team of experts can implement these techniques on behalf of your brand.

Your marketing efforts are pointless without strong digital branding.

It's an all too often occurrence that companies consult us for marketing services, yet lack an identity, a voice, or unique value propositions that differentiate them in any way from their numerous competitors. Still, they try and exhaust their valuable marketing budget only to realize too late that their strategies just aren't working with no understanding of why.

We want to help your company find its voice. Below, we'll examine seven principles for strong digital branding strategies in 2022 that can help you find your audience, achieve your goals, and establish a reliable pathway to future success.

1. A Brand Represents Real People and Communities

A company's primary purpose for existing is to generate profit and provide income to its employees. However, these are basic needs for every person on the planet and hardly a convincing motive to encourage others to spend their hard-earned dollars on your products or services. If you spend all of your time trying to hard-sell your audience without appealing to any sort of motive or emotion, they're going to walk right past you.

This is the reason why branding exists. A digital media branding strategy allows a company to be more than a cold, money-making vehicle. It's an opportunity to represent the unique and talented individuals that make your services possible. Audiences are just as interested in who provides the service and why as they are in the product or service itself.

More importantly, the people that embody that brand are an extension of the communities they aim to service. When you build a company, it's likely around a shared belief that others can benefit from what your team provides. To confidently know what a community need is to know why they need it and what types of problems they face on a daily basis. Because you understand those problems and face them yourself, you are a part of that community as much as you are the people providing the solution.

Instead of aiming for mass appeal to generate maximum profit, understand that your company exists to find its niche. The individuals and the collective that make your brand have a place among real people in your community. Your job is to understand exactly how your company complements those people and uplifts them as opposed to simply taking.

This type of genuine connection is the sort of thing that fosters the trust and loyalty that lays the foundation for a successful brand. No one can appeal to everyone and it's a wasted effort to ever try. Instead, look at the individuals who embody your company, understand their values, and look for those in your community that can connect with those ideas on an emotional level.

2. What Distinguishes You from the Competitor?

A vital part of analyzing your community is closely examining other local businesses. Particularly, you want to focus on direct competition that markets the same products or services that your brand does. You cannot create a realistic or dependable plan without understanding the strategies that others use to be successful with the same target audience.

Not only does competitor analysis help you with strategy development, but it can illuminate key areas that you can utilize to elevate and distinguish your brand from others.

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As a basic example, two brands might exist to sell a piece of technology. Brand A emphasizes its branding to support the everyman and promote value, while Brand B utilizes branding that emphasizes luxury and status. What typically ends up happening is that both brands are able to find their niche and succeed even though they are competitors in the same industry. With effective branding, both are able to further segment audiences with similar needs to focus on their unique community.

Of course, your brand can emphasize other unique elements depending on the communities you aim to serve. Understanding what you can use requires you to understand the real problems that your audience faces, how your competitor aims to solve them (or fails to understand them), and what your brand values over the opposing solution.

3. Tell a Story and Find Your Voice

If you look closely at how the top brands market themselves online, you'll find that storytelling lies at the heart of their success. That storytelling not only applies to the ongoing history of the minds that make up your brand, but of the people that buy your products and keep your success going.

You'll quickly discover that even with a strong sense of branding and a great strategy, it's easy to get lost in the flood of digital marketing. Despite your best efforts, every person on the web is absolutely inundated with marketing emails, display ads, interruption ads on videos, and much more. In the age of media overload, an impression may only last as long as it takes to see another ad from another brand.

Understand marketers need to find new ways to penetrate the noise. One of the most successful ways of doing this is to foster an emotional connection with the audience. While someone may not remember the words written or spoken in an advertisement, they will remember a profound feeling if there is one to be had.

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Telling a story is not only an effective way of forging emotional connections, but it is a guaranteed way to authenticate and differentiate your team. No two people are the same, and even competitive entrepreneurs in the same industry may have two completely unique stories to tell in how they got to where they are. That journey along with the understanding of their hard work and passion to serve others will go a long way in helping your audience to connect an emotion with your brand. When there's brand storytelling, there's a feeling a person will forever associate with your brand identity as opposed to forgettable words that change with the times.

It's also not just what your story contains, but the voice you use to tell it. Does your brand foster a no-nonsense, professional, get-it-done attitude? Or, does it promote a relaxed, humorous tone that reminds the audience to laugh and enjoy the little things? While something like a brand voice might seem simple, that's exactly why it's so effective. Simple is easy to understand and absorb. Be sure that your story and voice are authentic to who you are and people will thank you for it.

4. Content Defines a Brand's Digital Marketing Strategy

If you spend any time at all studying digital marketing, you will inevitably learn the phrase Content is king. This is because the content is the driving force behind every digital marketing tactic from paid advertising campaigns to blogging. However, it's also a powerful tool for promoting and growing your brand in an effort to engage with more prospects and customers.

Your content must always contain a consistent, reliable voice for your audience to identify. In this way, your audience connects with the brand in a similar way that we all do with people. If someone presents oneself as a trustworthy, dependable, and funny individual consistently, we will eventually trust that the individual is who they claim to be. Conversely, if that same person fluctuates in personality upon each meeting, it makes us hesitant, distrusting, and uneasy in their presence.

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Regardless of how you choose to voice your brand, consistency is ultimately the key. The repetition gives you a better opportunity to create a following with the right community and will ensure that your brand generates highly-qualified leads instead of connecting with disinterested persons.

Furthermore, content marketing is a strategy that will not only boost your SEO and website ranking, but gives your audience further opportunities to discover and explore your brand. Longform blog posts provide a unique platform for you to express new stories, ideas, and information that fosters the connection you want between brand and audience.

Not only will unique, branded content builds brand awareness, but it will also foster loyalty among those who identify with you and play a large part in driving future conversions.

Remember that content and how it defines your brand applies to everything you publish online. Don't try to present a sudden shift in personality or tone in an effort to capture more leads on that new landing page. Stay true to who you are, what your brand values, and the value you can provide to the audience that needs your company's products or services.

5. Marketers Don't Define Your Brand, They Support It

This idea is not necessarily about developing your brand identity, but how you can most effectively express it throughout the digital media landscape. If you choose to leverage the help of expert marketing agencies, understand that it is not their role to create or define your brand, but to expertly present it to your target audience online.

What occurs at an alarming rate is that businesses will solicit the help of marketers to begin scaling or driving conversions. However, when it comes time to complete their onboarding, they have no brand identity of note to express. What we're left with are a cold list of products or services or an offer that promises nothing of note aside from discounts or savings.

While it's not necessarily your responsibility to know exactly how to leverage digital marketing tactics, it is your responsibility to understand how you want your brand to be represented. Leaving an outside source or partner to define your brand for you is the definition of unauthentic, which goes against the previous principles discussed in this article. What results is tension and conflict between two partners that should be elevating one another toward greater success than they could not otherwise achieve on their own.

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Instead, you need to be an active collaborator in your own marketing success. While you won't be the one creating your ad sets or writing your landing pages, you should be highly critical of any elements that do not meet the image and voice standards that you and your team have set for your brand. Your marketing collaborators will feed off of this critical feedback and further improve their processes as they become more understanding of your branding.

You will retain creative control and work with your new partners to communicate what your brand needs to express. The marketing experts on the other side can then synthesize that messaging into well-written articles, highly-engaging ads, and high-converting call-to-actions that get actual results. When those leads arrive at your door, you seal the deal by doing what you do best - being the embodiment of your brand.

6. Always Manage Your Reputation Online

When you start to promote your brand online, you become something tangible for audiences and other businesses to act upon. You'll quickly discover that if you do not take the initiative to define your brand, others will be more than happy to do it for you. What results is that new audiences will make pre-determinations about your brand and company values regardless of what you have to say otherwise.

You can find examples of this even at the top level when using the Google search engine. We typed in what's in McDonald's meat? and looked at the top results. What we found is that the website Mashed takes the top result in answering this question with the McDonald's brand itself falling second.

The clear and pressing issue for McDonald's is that an outside identity now has the power to define one of their products, a major element of their branding. Curious parties will generally select the first result in Google, meaning that this website gets the opportunity to create their image of the McDonald's brand instead of McDonald's itself.

Effective digital branding and marketing tactics require you to stay in control of the narrative at all times. This example not only illustrates the importance of utilizing strong branding principles, but also emphasizes the need for a complete digital marketing strategy including great content and search engine optimization. While this niche example likely has very little impact on this giant corporation's bottom line, it can definitely harm smaller businesses that have yet to cement their footing in the digital landscape.

You not only need to look out for external content sources, but also the opinions of previous or existing customers. Word of mouth spreads quickly in the age of social media and users can find data quickly about your business within online directories, aggregator websites, and social media platforms. Several mediocre or low-star reviews can also impact brand perception without so much as a word for others looking for a quick solution.

However, you can fight back and retain control of the narrative by managing your reputation among customers. Part of your digital marketing and branding strategy should be to respond to and oversee reviews and testimonials regarding your business online. If a customer expresses dissatisfaction or a clear issue, make an honest effort to understand and solve the problem. Not only can the overall interaction boost positive perception for that one individual, but your actions will be seen by every other user scrutinizing your reputation.

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Don't forget about your positive reviews, either. Let your satisfied customers know that they are valued and appreciated, and watch as they spread the good word about your brand to others.

7. Continue to Evolve

Finally, it's important to know that the land of digital marketing is a rapidly evolving landscape. The strategies that were effective five years ago are long outdated, and what works today may not work at the same time next year.

While your core branding, identity, and values won't change, the manner in which you deliver your message will. To ensure that your company is able to establish generational success, you'll need to constantly be aware of how new and existing audiences are able to discover information about the brands they choose to do business with online. If there's a more convenient way to learn, audiences will find it. It's the brands that not only stay on top of, but ahead of these trends that leap ahead of the pack and claim the number one spot.

Conclusion - Take These Digital Branding Strategies with You Into the New Year!

The brand identity is not just a box you need to check to start marketing online. It's the single most powerful tool you'll use to both identify yourself to audiences and distinguish yourself from the competitor they may also be examining. It represents both the individual and the collective that embody your company's values and its desire to aid the community with its unique solutions.

Identify who you are, decide upon the voice and tone you want to use, and look for engaging ways to tell your personal story. Manage your reputation and don't let others define your brand for you. By remaining consistent and authentic with whom you want to appeal, you will find naturally discover your niche and your audience will come to you.

Content marketing is more competitive than ever. While 78% of organizations are approaching content strategically, more than half do not or are not able to due to workflow issues, lack of resources, and failure to prioritize either.

In this article, we want to show you how to scale content creation with minimal to moderate time and monetary investments. You’ll improve your team workflow, the quality, and the quantity of your posts, and learn how to repurpose content for widespread marketing success.

How to Create a Step-by-Step Workflow for Content Marketing?

Many businesses make the mistake of failing to allocate the appropriate number of personnel and resources to creating great content. You are often seeing one individual left with the responsibility of researching keywords and topics, writing 3,000+ words, proofreading their own content, finding or creating graphics, uploading the content, addressing SEO, etc.

Not only does this overburden make it impossible to scale content creation, but it also ensures that each of these processes is not optimized and lowers the quality of your post overall. While you may have staffers that are capable of these tasks with varying degrees of skill, you want an expert to oversee the various steps of content creation to ensure the best results possible. By breaking down the process of content creation into multiple steps, you can better visualize the process and delegate tasks as necessary to your team.

The typical process of creating a single post entails the following:

SEO Keyword & Topic Research →  Gathering Data to Outline the Post →  Writing the Post →  Editing the Post →  Creating Graphics or Selecting Images →  Formatting the Post on the Site →  Proofreading & QA →  Revisions →  SEO Page Optimization → Schedule for Publishing → Scheduling Your Emails or Social Posts for Content Sharing

Assigning all of these tasks to one individual is not ideal for scaling. Instead, take each step as a unique task and assign it to a person that is capable of accomplishing the task efficiently. For our team, we lean on our SEO specialists to perform research well in advance. This gives us a content calendar complete with keyword research so that our writers can plan their writing efforts.

Graphics and images are also assigned to an appropriate specialist capable of producing high-quality content. Assigning a separate individual for editing and/or QA provides a highly-valued second or third look to remedy all errors. An SEO specialist will then format and schedule the post, while ensuring that the page itself follows SEO best practices on the front and back-end. Finally, the social media team can utilize our calendar to coordinate their posting to promote the latest posts.

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By appropriately divvying up your workflow, you ensure that your experts can do what they do best, while giving your writers more time to produce additional posts. Your workflow does not need to mimic ours, but instead should reflect adequate use of the resources your company has at its disposal.

1. Research in Advance and Create a Content Calendar

With your new and updated workflow processes, you'll need to start generating your keywords and topics well in advance to avoid unwanted interruptions. Your old method of looking for one or two topics at a time will do little more than leaving other members of your team with no ability to help push the content creation process further.

Instead, you need to create your company's content calendar immediately. This can be an actual calendar or a company-wide spreadsheet that details numerous topics and the supporting keyword research. We recommend dedicating several days to research, so that your writers and media team can plan months in advance if necessary. Instead of listing 2-3 posts at a time, start thinking 2-3 months worth of posts at a time.

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The content calendar provides a host of benefits including the assurance that you will always have new posts moving through your workflow pipeline. As your writers push their post for editing and graphic creation, they can begin working on the next post immediately. This reliability works its way to each team member and ensures that no backup occurs that could delay your posting strategy.

A calendar also allows your team to better visualize opportunities to enhance your strategy beyond the benefits of a single post. Many companies utilize an approach called clustering where multiple posts within a given period relate to a central idea or theme. It's easy to internally link these posts due to their relevancy and helps promote returning visitors that express interest in the initial post. This type of momentum is what you need to ensure that you get the necessary readership to support your content scaling.

Visualizing your future posts in advance also allows your team to identify any potential problems long before they interrupt your processes. If you identify a problem with your calendar at any point, it's easy enough to supplement these posts with others that are planned for a different date.

In short, the content calendar allows for clear and effective communication between all departments. Communication prevents issues and work delays, which presents the greatest opportunity for the successful scaling of content creation.

2. Write on Topics with Firsthand Experience

The best way to ensure that your content is unique and of high quality is to allow your writers to focus on topics where they possess firsthand experience. While it's not always a possibility, it provides a litany of benefits that are key to expediting the process of scaling your content marketing.

If you were to ask a writer what type of content they like to write best, it is certainly going to be materially related to a subject to which they have familiarity. If someone is an expert in programming custom style sheets, it would take little to no research to create a quality piece of helpful, informative content that demonstrates their expertise in the area. Conversely, that expert would likely have a very difficult time writing something authoritative about HVAC equipment without additional, extensive research.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the latter approach. In fact, most content on the internet is created this way as companies lack the ability to write or the resources to create content with firsthand knowledge and experience. However, performing that research effectively enough for content adds a substantial amount of time to your content creation workflow. What can hurt worse is that content written from a third-party perspective is generally apparent as nothing can substitute for hands-on knowledge. It will be that much more difficult to tap into what that audience wants, so that you can answer their most pressing questions.

For that reason, you may want to rethink who on your team can fulfill the role of a writer. For example, an article on advanced SEO tactics would fare better if scribed by an actual SEO expert on your team. You'll still have your editors and QA personnel available to ensure that the piece is presentable for audiences. In exchange, you'll have the unique insight of a seasoned expert, which is far more valuable to your success than a particular writing style.

3. Where You Lack Experience, Do Your Research

The reality is that many companies will lack the resources to write content with firsthand experience, at least all of the time. However, you can still give your content the best chance of success by using your content calendar and looking into future topics well in advance. Rather than starting on a foreign topic a week in advance, give your writers what they need, so that they can appear as authoritative as possible on the subject matter.

If this is your business situation, you'll want to revisit your own workflow process we explored in step one. You'll want to account for this additional research time and incorporate it into your regular process. Failure to create content that demonstrates authority and is backed by the appropriate sources will do little more than clutter your blog and harm your overall website value.

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Your writers should also look to work with an expert for an opportunity to ask questions and get a little hands-on. For example, if an HVAC business from the previous example hires a freelancer, it would be worthwhile for them to work closely with the content creation team to ensure they have a strong understanding of the topic they are writing about. The expert can provide the unique insights you need, while your writers can adequately translate their thoughts into well-written articles.

An alternative method is to network and partner with experts on the subject matter that do have the time and resources to write content. This not only provides your blog with excellent, unique content, but presents new opportunities to establish relationships and support a link-building strategy. These types of partnerships aren't typically paid, but are transactional by providing guest content for one another to obtain the coveted SEO benefits.

4. Start Writing Content with an Outline

The act of writing a content piece requires deliberate strategy and planning. Making the mistake of starting with a blank document and attempting to write beginning to end will likely result in a confused mess of unrelated thoughts. Even if there are good ideas to be found within, it will be difficult to trace a throughline and even harder to focus your ideas around the relevant keywords.

Instead, you should always begin the process of writing by creating a solid outline of what the article will contain. This way, you can plan your ideas out in a list even if it is initially disorganized and unstructured. I, personally, will create bullet points that capture the key concepts that should be expressed for the topic at hand. With a clear visual, I can look for any elements that may be lacking and look for ways to incorporate them into the overall picture. After I'm satisfied with the elements I have, I then look to align them in a way that helps the content flow naturally to the reader.

SEO experts recommend a blog post to contain at least 3,000 words of high-quality content in order to boost the page value. With our outline, that large document suddenly becomes many, interconnected smaller ideas that are more approachable. While you build out these ideas, you'll keep your guideline handy to ensure you're writing those thoughts in a way that connects to other ideas and the greater subject. Even if you need to step away from the article and create it over the course of a few days, your guideline will always ensure that you stay on track.

An outline not only helps you to stay on task, but ensures that your content complies with SEO best practices. This outline should contain each of your H1 headers, any H2s or H3s if applicable, which keywords to highlight in each section, and any other technical notes of importance. The outline creates the blueprint and all that's left to do is fill in the blanks with your ideas.

5. Expand Your Team with Content Creation Experts

We broke up our typical content workflow in the first step, so that we could determine who we needed on our team at this point. With your content calendar planned, your research complete, and the content written, you're well on your way to publishing your content. However, instead of leaving your writer to deal with the technical aspects of finalizing the post, you need to delegate the remaining tasks to content creation experts that can help you get the most mileage possible out of your article. If you do not have these individuals on your team, you need to start looking if you want to take scaling your content creation seriously.

The number of people your content department needs depends entirely on how large you plan to scale and how quickly. Skilled individuals that are able to focus completely on content marketing may be able to generate several high-quality posts per week so long as the necessary roles are covered. You are likely looking at writers, editors, graphic designers, SEOs, social media managers, and a project manager to oversee everything. It's possible to see some of these areas fulfilled by one individual, but consider the impact it may have on your unique team and their ability to produce.

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An expanded team will enable your writers to focus on writing to the best of their ability. Your graphics experts will boost the value of your content by creating unique images instead of using boring, stock photography. Your SEOs will ensure your website receives the maximum benefits, and your social media expert will look to boost your post around the web.

6. Utilize a Variety of Content Delivery Methods

When you invest all of the above time and resources into creating high-quality content, it's a waste to let it die after hitting publish. The top-ranked websites for content generation utilize the strategy of repurposing their high-performing content for use on other channels and in different formats.

Think of a great piece of video content you love that's well scripted and well-rehearsed. There's an excellent chance that the script, or at least parts of it, began as a blog post. Efficient companies do not generally have teams creating editorial content, video content, and social media content separately. Instead, they repurpose ideas that they've already put together and reformat them to fit a different medium. A high-performing blog post that's run its course can suddenly get a new lease on life as a well-edited YouTube video.

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Understand that despite your best efforts, even your greatest content may not appeal to your entire audience in long, written form. By converting your hard work into unique formats such as videos, PDF eBooks, an email series, or a series of social posts, you get more out of your investment by reaching out to new audiences.

The key to successful scaling is increasing your output and returns while spending as little additional resources as possible. Therefore, you need to capitalize on the various content delivery methods available to help you maximize your ROI out of each new piece of content that comes out of that department.

7. Revise Your Outdated Content

Carrying on from the point above, you don't want your existing, older content to go to waste either. Furthermore, older content that's outdated or contains irrelevant or inaccurate information can actually harm your website's overall SEO value. It's in your best interest to ensure your content team dedicates time to revisiting and revising older content on your website or social media channels.

Revising older content requires a minimal time investment. As long as the article was previously well-researched and optimized, the bulk of the content should still be applicable in the current time period. Instead, you'll want to comb through the content and look for any facts or figures that have since changed since the time of posting. Additionally, you could update the article with news or discoveries that directly impact the material that is discussed in the body.

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This is especially important for content that previously performed well and has tremendous SEO value. When users search for that keyword, there's a great chance your article will still appear high on search engine results pages. Google will recognize updates to the page and potentially push your article higher among its list of relevant content. You can also alert users that may have previously read the post that it contains new content by adding Updated or YEAR Update to the page or post title.

Keeping an organized content calendar for every year or every period will help you to easily keep track of any content you have that's relevant to a topic or keyword you're researching. If there is an opportunity to boost your existing content library by making simple updates, you need to do so to continue extracting additional ROI.

8. Optimize Your Content for All Devices

Most, if not all of your company's content creation likely occurs on a desktop or laptop device. However, those engaging with your content may utilize technology with much smaller viewports and slower processing such as mobile devices or tablets. For this reason, you must ensure that your content, videos, and web pages are optimized for on-the-go viewing.

In fact, a Statista study indicates that over 50% of all worldwide web traffic comes specifically from mobile devices. As content generally takes longer to load on mobile, especially if it's complete with high-quality images or video, your content creation must include mobile optimization to ensure your scaling efforts are worthwhile.

To make your mobile experience better, be sure to highlight your most important ideas in smaller paragraphs that can fit completely on a mobile viewport. You can also utilize lazy loading methods to hide bigger files such as photos from view until the reader scrolls closer to that section of the article. If possible, you'll want to use AMP (accelerated mobile pages) to enhance the content viewing experience.

If you're unsure if your page is properly optimized for a mobile experience, be sure to use Google's free tools such as the Mobile-Friendly Test. You can enter any URL and the software will automatically scan for errors and recommend options for improving your performance and eliminating errors.

Scaling Content Production with These Easy-to-Follow Steps!

By following these guidelines, any business can begin to take steps to scale its content creation. These ideas will guide you along the process of not only coming up with and writing new topics but how to squeeze every last bit of engagement you can out of both your new and old content.

If you take nothing else away from this post, ensure that you have a plan in place both via a monthly content calendar and through a guideline for each individual piece of content. To enable your writers to create at a high volume without sacrificing quality, you'll need to expand your content creation team to include experts in SEO, editing, graphic design, content planning, and content promotion be it through email marketing or social media.

To become a content powerhouse, make sure your library is a living, breathing entity that continues to foster engagement and empower the community. If you create content worth reading, it will take a life of its own and continue to circulate around the web. The more engagement you attract, the easier it will be to continue growing your audience and to justify expanding your content team even further.

Business marketing is competitive. It can feel exponentially more difficult for small businesses that lack the budget or resources that large enterprises possess for massive outreach.

Digital marketing doesn't have to be a nightmare for small teams and companies. Take a look at our list of 17 actionable marketing tips that will help small businesses gain more traffic and conversions online in 2021.

1. Pinpoint Your Target Audience

If you take nothing else away from this article, know that precisely identifying your target audience is essential for any other marketing channel to have a positive impact on your business.

The reason why emphasizes this is that many small businesses fall into the trap of using their limited budget to pay a local marketing team for their service. What they often end up with is an increase in web traffic, which is exciting at first, only to realize that they have earned no additional conversions or sales with their spending.

It doesn't take a tremendous amount of effort to boost numbers like traffic or clicks that can mostly amount to vanity. What takes more effort is taking that traffic, filtering out the noise, and discovering the individuals who are actually interested in or could benefit from your products or services. If you haven't created a clear picture of who your target audience is, it may be easier to determine who is not your target audience.

When you perform research for your content creation, you'll likely see high search volume for a wide variety of topics that can appeal to a wide variety of people. However, you only want to focus on the keywords and topics that would serve an actual customer. An example of this might be a photography company that makes the mistake of focusing heavily on creating content that discusses the technical aspects of what they do. However, this type of content would primarily appeal to fellow photographers or other photography businesses. A better approach might be to focus on creating content that addresses the needs and concerns of your target audience, such as email marketing for photographers which can help them understand the benefits of working with you.

Due to the misunderstanding of search intent for those keywords, they're not likely to see any sales. Instead, their content should be focusing on the needs of customers. In this case, they would want to think about content that would appeal to audiences that need professional photography such as the newly engaged, brand-new parents, or parents of high school graduates. This better describes the desired buyer persona and provides a foundation for whom to pursue with all future marketing endeavors.

With this in mind, it is worth taking the time to create your own buyer persona. This starts at an individual level and allows you to think about why this person would want to buy your services. Consider their needs, their wants, and what they would rightfully expect out of your product or service. Then, begin formulating a pitch that indisputably describes your brand as the solution to their problem.

2. Use SEO to Optimize Every Page on Your Website

SEO is an effective, but a long-term marketing strategy that every business should consider employing online. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of editing and updating your website both on the front-end and back-end in an effort to rank higher within Google search results.

Google utilizes a highly-sophisticated algorithm that automatically crawls through every page on your website. It will examine everything that a webpage features including the written content, images, URL structure, hyperlinks, metadata, and much more. The more optimized your web page is, the better the algorithm is able to understand what type of content you are offering with each page. As this understanding improves, it is better able to serve this page to users who are searching for this type of content online.

Search engine optimization is a cost-effective marketing strategy, but the process is quite deep and requires a level of expertise to implement correctly. Marketers are consistently discovering new techniques and opportunities to further improve a web page's search value. However, here are some basic principles to provide you an overview of what you need to do to get started:

• Perform extensive keyword research and select terms that yield a high search volume and a reasonable cost-per-click
• Create a map of your site and choose which keywords you want to be the focus on each page
• Create high-quality content that matches the search intent behind each keyword you choose. The amount of words required depends on the page subject matter, but anything less than 1,000 words is too little and can be flagged as thin content.
• Update your site navigation and ensure that each page has a clear, easy-to-read URL
• Ensure that the website is fully responsive and optimized for mobile viewing. Use tools like Google Search Console and Google PageSpeed Insights for this purpose.
• Complete the SEO data for each webpage including writing your own custom meta descriptions that contain the primary keyword.

This is merely the basics of what is required for SEO best practices. If you would like to learn more, you can read about how to create an SEO-friendly website here. You can also learn more about how you can have our team fulfill your website SEO by heading over to the DashClicks storefront and examining our pricing plans.

3. Create a Content Blog and Post Regularly

After you've optimized your existing website pages and filled them with great content, you need to keep moving to push your rankings higher. One of the most effective ways to do this is to continue creating high-quality, SEO-optimized content that targets different aspects of your audience's various needs.

You can do this by adding a content blog or news feed to your website. This will provide you with endless additional opportunities to create meaningful content that targets new keywords for search rankings. You can and should also utilize this content to naturally present your business as a solution to the issues or problems being discussed in an article. At the same time, the reader also obtains something of value for no cost that can help them make educated purchasing decisions or solve the problem themselves entirely.

Content blog posts can vary greatly in length, but the average website owner should look to write as many as 3,000 words or more in a post if possible. Shorter content can and does work for some creators, but this generally works more often with those who already have an understood value associated with their brand or the author's name.

It's for this reason that many blog networks utilize the same person as the author of every blog post. However, the chances are that this person writes a very small amount of the content if they write any of it at all. The name simply gets used as this is the person that audience associates with the brand, which brings us to our next tip:

4. Get Someone to be the Face of Your Brand

Audiences get savvier every day when it comes to recognizing the tools and tricks used by marketers to earn their attention. They recognize that a business exists primarily to make money from the consumer, which doesn't exactly start you off on the basis of trust. For this reason, you should utilize a sole individual to be the face of your brand with most communications.

People want to purchase, but they don't want to be taken advantage of. They want to build relationships, not just become another transaction. Whenever the audience is able to attach a face and a voice to what they're reading, the content suddenly acquires a completely new tone of approachability that would not exist otherwise.

You don't need to do any further research than looking at some of the top brands that employ this strategy. While he was still with us, Steve Jobs embodied this philosophy for Apple. He commanded attention at every company event and was largely responsible for the success of many Apple products we use today. Other examples of this include Phil Spencer at Microsoft's Xbox and Kim Kardashian as the face of her own beauty supply line.

However, you don't need to be world-famous to become the face of your own brand. These individuals didn't become famous until the company made their product world-renowned. What you do need is someone who is known for being sociable, charismatic and a great salesperson. It's great if your head writer fits this bill as they're the one creating the content, but other company leaders can fit the bill if appropriate.

If you're not comfortable using anyone at your company to fit your desired voice, you can employ someone outside of the company as a spokesperson. While big-budget companies can afford to pay celebrities and famous actors, a wide variety of companies large and small now turn to social media influencers to great effect. This is because these individuals already have built-in followings with trust already established. They then transfer that trust to any brands or products they promote using their own social media accounts. Be sure to follow the proper legal guidelines when taking this route to avoid any unwanted issues.

Whichever route you choose will produce better results than attempting to emerge as a robotic, faceless entity. It will be tough for your small business to break out and get noticed, so make it easier by getting personable with your audience whenever possible.

5. Create an Email List

A widely used strategy by businesses of all sizes is to incorporate an email listing somewhere on the website. Signing up is completely free for users and generally promises news updates, exclusive offers, or some other type of incentive in exchange for the email. Obtaining a list of emails from your prospects is critical for marketing success.

Whenever you acquire a list of emails from a percentage of users that visit your site, you have a self-made directory of better-qualified targets. The reason for this is that the user demonstrates an extra level of interest in their willingness to exchange their personal data to learn more about your offerings. With the email added to your CRM, you can now start making a plan to create highly-targeted email advertisements that turn prospects into conversions.

While you won't personally email every person that signs up, you can utilize tools to automatically personalize an email based on the contact information you received during the signup process. When an email from your brand appears in their inbox, they see a highly personalized letter addressed to them informing them of whatever offer or update you have to share. As we discussed in the section above, personalizing your communications has a huge impact on a person's willingness to do business with you.

• Nurture Your Signups

Emails are also the best way to keep your brand fresh in a person's mind long after they stopped visiting your website. Even if some time has passed, it's easier to convince a previously interested person to commit to future purchases than someone that has no experience interacting with your brand. Sometimes all it takes is the right email with the right offer at the right time to score an easy sale.

With that said, you need to stay on top of your email list and continue to nurture those who sign up. You can do this in a variety of ways including sharing weekly business or store updates, providing exclusive offers to members, or giving early access to product or service promotions. You can also experiment with other tactics such as writing and providing exclusive content at set intervals or asking them to provide direct feedback on how to improve their experience.

• Segment Your Email List

Studies indicate that further segmenting those who sign up for your email list can produce higher positive results than using standard emails for everyone. By segmentation, we mean to categorize every person who signs up by certain factors including location, age, sex, and interests. You can either require these details or present them as options during the signup process.

When you have these details on your side, you gain a clearer picture of the buyer persona. With that on your side, you can create multiple types of emails for your various lists that cater more to their personality or interests. The more refined you can make your targeting, the better chance you have of getting the person to interact. The link to the studies above indicates that segmented emails get 10.44% higher open rates and 15.69% higher click-throughs.

Do what it takes to make your email listing appear attractive and obtain those details. Understand exactly who your audience is and watch your conversion rate begin to climb.

6. Sign Up for Every Business Listing Directory

Business directories are a free and easy way to gain some additional brand recognition while acquiring some valuable backlinks for SEO. A backlink is any hyperlink that exists on another site that links back to another website. Whenever a Google-trusted website provides a backlink to your domain, Google sees this as a vote of confidence that the information provided on your domain is accurate.

The number of directory listings available to you depends on where your business is located. Popular examples of these websites include Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Foursquare. None may be more important than Google My Business, which allows you to register and detail your business directly within your Google account. When you fully optimize your GMB profile and improve your site rankings, you stand a chance of having your website appear in Google's local 3-pack any time a user searches for keywords relevant to your business.

There are also a number of automated tools online that can automate the process of creating directory listings like Yext. DashClicks also offers a similar listings manager service within its platform as an add-on subscription within the Analytics application.

You can learn more about link-building strategies and how they impact your website's SEO here.

7. Manage Your Customer Reviews Online

While we're on the subject of business listings, know that it's vital for small businesses to proactively manage their customer reviews online. These testimonials can have a substantial positive or negative impact on your brand reputation. However, by being proactive online, you can manage your reputation even in situations where you discover unflattering comments about your business on a website.

You'll want to look out for these reviews and testimonials on all of the business listings we suggested you sign up for above. Other sites that allow audiences to submit reviews are social media websites, industry aggregators, and sites like the Better Business Bureau. Customers have the legal right to leave an honest review of their experience with your business regardless of the impact it has on your success.

However, these websites are aware of how subjective a review can be. Disgruntled individuals can also leave inaccurate reviews for no other reason than to stir up trouble and cause headaches for your employees. In these cases, it's important for your team to respond to these reviews in a respectable, professional manner.

If your team or an employee was in the wrong, apologize for the mistake and offer a possible explanation for what happened. Validating the user's opinion and offering to touch base and correct the issue can go a long way with managing your reputation. In some cases, the customer may update their review. Even if they do not, other users will see that your brand remains active and shows concern for the customer's wellbeing.

In the event that a review is inaccurate, dishonest, or otherwise needlessly harmful, you can actually present your case to the website team. If they decide that the review does not represent an accurate picture of your business, they may remove the negative review entirely. They may also do this for outdated reviews that lower your overall score so long as you have a consistently positive history of customer service since then.

Your ratings and history matter to more than just public perception. When your pages are being rated for quality, Google Quality Page Raters may look into your testimonials to inquire more about your expertise and trustworthiness as a brand. Maintaining a positive public persona is important for all of these reasons, which is why this is a great tip to follow for every small business.

8. Explore Paid Digital Advertising

Paid digital advertising, sometimes referred to as pay-per-click advertising, is an effective way of obtaining an immediate ROI. This is especially important for smaller businesses that are getting started as you need to start turning a profit as soon as possible. While we highly advocate for the strategies mentioned above, the time they can take to get results is less desirable than what a PPC campaign can offer.

Facebook is by and large the most accessible platform for creating and managing your paid ads. The cost-per-click remains fairly low regardless of the industry and the reach the platform offers is unparalleled on social networks. Statista reports that the platform possesses as many as 1.93 billion daily active users. While you'll still need to work to find your target audience, that number presents a lot of potential business opportunities for any brand. Furthermore, you can cross-post your ads to Facebook and Instagram simultaneously.

That's not all that's out there, however. Google also offers a paid ads management platform and is considered by some to be the pinnacle for paid advertising. You can also pay for ads on Bing, Twitter, Amazon, LinkedIn, and a wide variety of additional platforms.

These platforms allow businesses of all sizes to advertise by setting your desired amount for monthly ad spend. You'll need to devote some of that budget to discovery campaigns, which allow you to gather the data you need for further audience targeting. Much of this is now driven by AI automation that uses more or less of your ad spend depending on how your ads are performing. If you're not getting results in a reasonable amount of time, the platform will automatically dial back your ad spend to avoid wasting your money.

These platforms also offer built-in analytics and A/B testing tools, so that you can better track what aspects of your campaign perform well and which do not. Rather than just scrapping your hard work on an ad entirely, testing and tracking the results can help you pinpoint weaknesses in copy, page design, headlines, and other key areas. It will then automatically shift your ad spend to advertisements that are pulling in the best results.

It may be intimidating to start spending money when you're just getting started, but it's by far the most effective way to start gaining traction for your small business quickly. In the meantime, have your team focus on implementing those organic SEO strategies. With time and a great strategy, you'll start earning those organic clicks that can allow you to start spending less on paid advertising.

9. Give Away Free Items to Encourage Signups and Future Purchases

We touched on this idea when discussing email lists, but free item giveaways are an effective way of attracting new audiences. They can be implemented in a variety of different ways across different marketing channels depending on the immediate goal. Free items included with offers in paid advertising are often referred to as lead magnets. This is essentially a bonus incentive to sweeten the offer and encourage those on the fence to become genuine prospects.

However, it's important that the free item you give away is immediately related to your business and the offer at hand. You will often see brands giving away completely unrelated items such as a tablet or speaker. These types of giveaways genuinely provide an immediate burst in engagement, but none of those new signups or follows actually represent your target audience. They simply want the free item and show no other indicators that they are a qualified potential customer.

Instead, try to include something of value that matches a would-be buyer's intent. For example, if someone discovers a paid ad and landing page when browsing for landscaping services, that business would want to provide something related to landscaping, lawn maintenance, or outdoor property improvement. This could be something as simple as a free eBook that provides tips on how to keep your lawn and plants healthy in between professional visits. They sign up to get the exclusive content but do not have to commit to a purchasing decision. In exchange, you get a new contact for your email list and can begin segmented targeting from there.

Free giveaways don't always have to be items, either. Promising X dollars or a percentage off the product or service being discussed. You can then sell the merits of the advertised item and convince the prospect that the discount or offer is too good to miss out on. You can boost your signups further by describing the offer as exclusive or limited-time only. This creates the sense of urgency you need to get more leads.

10. Track Your Marketing Efforts with Analytics

Implementing marketing strategies without any sort of feedback is a senseless endeavor. Every action you take requires resources and funds. Without any sort of actionable data, you won't know if your methods are working until it's far too late. Instead, you need to take advantage of the free and paid marketing analytics tools that are available to agencies and small business owners.

These tools will keep track of a variety of metrics including daily website visits, page clicks, average session duration, likes, shares, and much more. More advanced tools even provide heat maps that will indicate what content is receiving the most attention based upon what spends the most time in the user's viewport.

The general metrics you'll want to measure for your website can be tracked for free with the Google Analytics tool. It's free to create an account and your data can be integrated into a wide variety of marketing and CRM platforms available to businesses around the internet, including DashClicks.

Image Source- Analytics Dashboard on DashClicks

Other marketing platforms will have their own analytics available to business owners that have accounts. Social media platforms will track analytics such as likes, shares, impressions, and monthly follows. The paid ads software available within those same platforms will keep track of your spending, clickthrough rate, conversions, and much more.

All of your analytics trackings are entirely automated with these tools. It will be up to your team to take the collected data and make sense of it as it applies to your unique business goals. You can alert yourself to issues with your website or marketing strategies and investigate what can be done to correct a particular issue. Understanding a problem is the first step in creating an effective solution, which is why analytics are a marketer's best friend.

11. Complete Regular Data Clean Ups

As marketing becomes increasingly reliant on customer data and analytics, it's essential to ensure that your data is accurate and up-to-date. Even small amounts of irrelevant or inaccurate data can begin to skew your results and begin the process of shifting your business away from an accurate buyer persona. This is why you need to make the effort to cleanse your data of unwanted data at least once a month.

The most basic thing you will want to do is to scan your CRM to ensure that your information is up-to-date. Life changes happen and your emails or telemarketing efforts can go to waste if you're spending time pursuing connections that are no longer up-to-date. You should purge these outdated contacts or at least the data that's inaccurate. If you're able to touch base in another way, ask the contact for their updated details so that they don't miss out on the latest offers.

You may also acquire invalid or incomplete data if your process of data collection doesn't match your strategy. This can happen if your different departments are not on the same page and using the same workflow formula. By checking your data regularly, you can easily identify these errors sooner than later. You will also be able to devise a plan to see your entire team better coordinated so that your marketing data is uniform across the company.

12. Treat Each Social Platform as a New Marketing Channel

55% of surveyed individuals claimed that they learn about new brands primarily through social media platforms according to a Sprout Social study. Billions of people utilize at least one of many social media platforms making it a premier location to build and advertise your brand.

While most small businesses won't dispute us on the power of social media, many go about utilizing these networks in the wrong way. Social media marketing takes commitment and should see an expert overseeing your accounts throughout the day. Because many teams lack the funds or resources to achieve this, they utilize cheap, crossposting tools such as HootSuite or Sendible. The problem with publishing a one-size-fits-all post across multiple platforms is that it fails to consider the unique demographics that utilize different platforms for different reasons.

For example, Instagram happens to be most widely used by women and those between the ages of 18-29. Meanwhile, LinkedIn attracts a professional audience, primarily those of ages 30-49. Research further segments social media platform audiences by education, income levels, race, and living areas. If you knew that specific locations didn't cater to your target demographic, you wouldn't bother marketing in those areas.

Likewise, your marketing approach will vary depending on the type of demographic. With this data on your side, you should devise unique strategies for each social platform in an effort to obtain the best results. For key updates and news about your brand, crossposting will do fine. However, you need to get up close and personal with each platform's unique audiences if you want to make genuine connections the right way.

13. Boost or Promote Your High-Performing Posts (and Rethink the Bad Ones)

It takes time to curate excellent content, whether it be for your blog or for social media. The trouble is that even a great post deserving attention is not guaranteed to get you results. Whenever a post does attract a significant amount of organic attention, you need to boost those posts to get as much mileage out of it as possible.

The way that social media works are that the more attention your content receives, the more likely it is to be seen by others. Content that earns likes earns shares, and the more shares a post has, the more likes it continues to earn. It will continue to propagate and grow in popularity until it reaches its natural peak. Social media platforms offer you the option to give a post a paid boost, which guarantees a set number of additional impressions to help that cycle last longer.

You can boost posts starting at $1 per day and can continue to increase your budget depending on the number of new users you would like to reach. It’s a quick, fast way to get some additional eyes on your content.

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The alternative is to promote a post that you want to gain additional traction. This allows you to create an advertisement within an existing campaign that directs users back to the content you want to promote. The added benefit of promoting a post is that the data gathered from the promotion will help feed the machine learning algorithm that’s already working in your campaign. The more data you gather from your posts and ads, the better you will be able to target specific audiences in the future.

Whichever method you choose, you’ll want to focus your efforts on the posts that are already performing well. Boosting a post with no activity will do very little and simply won’t be worth the ROI. Instead, re-examine your lesser posts and look for opportunities to improve the content within. It’s worth looking for new opportunities to represent the content you consider great before scrapping the idea altogether.

14. Repurpose Successful Content on Other Channels

If you’re new to marketing, there’s a secret we should let you in on. Excellent salespeople and marketers repurpose previously successful content all the time to great effect. It’s a sensible decision as well, as creating the ideal content takes time, effort, and resources. If you write an excellent, high-quality post that makes an impression, it’s a waste to let the positive impacts end there.

Instead, you can take that same content and find new methods of distributing the information across other marketing channels. For example, a 3,500 world article can easily be broken down into more palatable posts for different audiences. If that content contains multiple headlines that contain educational tips, you can distill that information into multiple social media posts that could carry your social media content throughout a set period.

Key elements from a blog post can also be used to create wonderful, engaging infographics that provide excellent visuals. The users still grasp the key ideas you researched and wrote but receive in a manner that’s even more shareable and engaging. You could convert the post into a script for a video or video series. Taking your ideas even further and formatting them into a PDF with custom-made graphics can also leave you with a well-crafted eBook to share with your email list or to use as a lead magnet in paid campaigns.

There are numerous possibilities for you to repurpose content that proves to be a hit with one section of your audience. It’s smart business to find ways to continuously utilize existing resources to maximize your ROI.

15. Eliminate Marketing Tactics That Don’t Work (But Don’t Give Up Prematurely)

If a marketing strategy is not working, then you need to know when it’s time to call it quits. While all of the unique marketing channels and strategies we pitch can and have worked for small businesses across all industries, it’s not a set guarantee. Every business is unique and has its own goals that need to be accomplished within its set time frame. While you can’t make money without spending it on advertising, you also need to know when it’s time to eliminate a tactic that just isn’t getting results.

Think of the primary audience that buys your products or services. If you primarily cater to a much younger audience, then researched blog posts may not be your most effective course of action. Research indicates that those types of users spend more time on social media and are more likely to engage in short-form content or engage with a dynamic paid advertisement. It’s not that blog content doesn’t work (in fact, we love it), it’s that you need to use your limited resources in areas that best help you achieve your goals.

The big asterisk on this tip is that you need to give a marketing tactic the appropriate amount of time to take effect. All too often business clients complain that SEO simply doesn’t work or get them more conversions. When you investigate, you’ll most likely find that the SEO work is improperly implemented or that they’ve only been doing it for a month or two at most. All knowledge indicates that even an excellent SEO strategy can take upwards of six months to truly take effect. Prematurely canning an SEO campaign you’ve spent time and money on will amount to little more than unnecessary waste.

Likewise, paid ad campaigns on a fresh account may take upwards of a month to properly gather and collect data about your target audience. Turning off a campaign after a couple of weeks is premature, cancels out the machine learning process thus far, and leaves you empty-handed and poorer for the venture.

Understand a marketing tactic before you implement and understand the timetable. After allowing the strategy an honest chance to create an impact, you can then analyze the results and look for where things went wrong. There are a remarkable number of analytics software available at your disposal for this purpose. If the data supports your claim that the job isn’t getting done, then you can look to cut out tactics that aren’t positively impacting your business.

16. Develop an Excellent Customer Service Strategy

Providing excellent customer service is one of the best ways to nurture potential customers and retain existing ones. Even a sour initial experience reported by a customer can turn positive when your team provides customer care and effective solutions promptly.

According to a Microsoft report, 69% of U.S. respondents said that customer service was important when choosing brand loyalty. 57% said that their expectations for customer service were now higher than they were in the previous year.

However, it’s not enough to simply show courtesy with your business’s customer service. Customer service also needs to be near-immediate in a digital world of immediate satisfaction. There are hundreds of businesses at any given moment vying for the same attention of customers, and if you can’t provide an answer or solution, another brand will.

It’s for this reason that small businesses are placing more emphasis than ever on developing an excellent customer service strategy. Not only are brands growing their customer service teams, but they’re also turning to automated solutions such as online chatbots. These AI assistants can help manage customer churn by providing an immediate connection. They’re capable of instantly locating answers to basic issues, which can often be enough to promote customer satisfaction.

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For more complicated issues, these assistants can identify the nature of the request and arm your team with the appropriate information before making contact. This enables your team to better prepare for the interaction and ultimately leads to a higher rate of customer approval.

Bear in mind that positive customer experiences are also reflected in online customer testimonials as discussed in point seven. A history of positive reviews describing your level of care and assistance can be advertising in and of itself for your small business. Likewise, poor customer care can lead to extremely negative reviews that are difficult to scrub away from your business profile.

17. Take Advantage of Marketing Automation Tools

Speaking of AI assistants, automation tools are changing the way marketers work forever. The bulk of all previously manual, tedious work can now be performed more efficiently and more accurately than ever by machine-learning algorithms. You can instantly gather analytics, auto-update your CRM for contacts and sales pipelines, and distribute funds automatically across your various marketing channels.

The more work that can be accomplished by virtual assistants, the more time you have to focus on doing what you do best – running your business. Depending on your needs, there are platforms that can help you build landing pages, create ads, create and automatically update workflows, and even write content. For the small monthly cost of a subscription, you could save countless hours and avoid costly mistakes by leaving your tasks up to automation.

DashClicks is an example of an automated marketing and task management platform. You can consolidate all of your contacts and deals data into one place, integrate other marketing channels like Google and social, create a beautiful website in minutes, and automatically assign leads to your sales reps as they come in through your marketing campaigns. All of your automation pool your data into one place, distribute it to the appropriate teams and leave your departments to focus on getting results.

Conclusion – Marketing Tips for Small Businesses in 2021

These tips cover a wide variety of marketing channels that can benefit your brand and change the way you advertise. While some are critical such as finding your audience, selecting the right marketing channels, and refining your task management, others can grant varying degrees of success depending on your goals, time allotment, and resources available.

Digital marketing is an ever-evolving landscape, which makes it essential for small businesses to stay in the know to remain successful. Follow these helpful tips today and start getting the results you need to be successful scale, and dominate the local scene.

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Out of all of Google's search engine ranking factors, link building stands side-by-side with content as the most important. Despite this fact, it is one of the most underutilized practices in SEO.

This is in no small part due to how difficult it can be to acquire valuable backlinks. It's one of the few strategies that, at least in some part, is partially out of your control. That's why most companies tend to focus exclusively on the content and internal linking on their side.

Link building doesn't need to be an impossible task. In this article, we'll provide a list of 9 easy local link-building tactics you can employ, so that your site can benefit from this powerful SEO strategy.

What is Link Building in Marketing?

Link building is a marketing strategy that involves acquiring a number of webpage links from both internal and external sources to your domain. Links that direct from one page to another within your own website are referred to as internal links. Whenever another website refers to a page on your domain, this is known as a backlink.

What Are the Benefits of Link Building?

As mentioned above, acquiring a healthy number of backlinks is one of the top-ranking factors in Google search results. However, acquiring backlinks from any old site won't suffice. Your backlinks need to come from quality, trusted sources in the eyes of Google's algorithm. In other words, if a high-ranking website links back to your site, the algorithm sees this as a vote of confidence in your favor.

The more backlinks you acquire from these types of sources, the more authority gets shared with your domain. The trick is that you still need to create compelling content of your own and utilize best SEO practices to be worthy of that backlink. Otherwise, a link back to your website could actually harm the other domain if your website is not up to par.

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In addition to being a direct ranking factor, having a link to your domain on high-traffic pages around the web will promote additional traffic to your site. Just with how you create new content pages to rank for additional keywords, the more gateways to your site that exist online, the more opportunities you have to improve your number of daily visitors.

The same concept also applies to internal linking. While internal linking won't give you the benefits of shared confidence, it's proven to increase the average duration of a session and the number of pages visited in a single session. This is because you are providing similar, relevant content to users in a natural way.

9 Easy Local Link Building Tactics

Now that you understand the powerful benefits of an effective link-building strategy, it's time to examine how we can acquire local links back to our domain. Some of these will integrate seamlessly with your overall SEO strategy if you're using best practices, while others will require some additional outreach within your community.

1. Create Content Worth Sharing

This is the most logical starting point and is one of the best ways to provide something of value in exchange for the link. Consider that the primary reason that anyone links back to a site is to share a compelling article or video they discovered. By creating interesting, unique content, you stand a better chance of seeing others spread your domain online. This applies to both individual users and other website owners that are sourcing the web for compelling content.

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Excellent content should appear both on your main website pages and your blog. If your website currently does not feature a blog, you should consider creating one. It's a personal platform that you can utilize to share a variety of content including industry news, opinions, the latest research, or other captivating topics. It's also a premier opportunity for you to build a library of data that builds your reputation and establishes your brand as an industry thought leader.

For acquiring local backlinks, in particular, try to feature pieces regularly that are relevant to your immediate surrounding area. Be sure to feature locations, features, and values that are specific to residents in that area. Google will identify the content, how it correlates to the local area, and provide that material to users searching for your topic in that zip code and surrounding regions.

Not only will locally-relevant content provide your website a boost in local rankings, but it presents opportunities for other local websites or businesses to pick up your content and feature it if it applies to their own site. You can also take a proactive approach by reaching out to those websites yourself and presenting your content should you find natural opportunities for it to benefit you both. Any time that another site features your content (even just excerpts), you have the right to request a backlink.

2. Get Your Site Featured on High-Ranking Aggregator Websites

There are hundreds of websites online that exist primarily to aggregate local business websites that are specific to a certain industry. You can try this yourself by entering Fort Lauderdale Marketingā  or Miami Doctorsā  in Google right now. This will pull up a variety of results including both direct links to specific businesses as well as directories.

Most of these aggregators provide convenient ways for you to sign your business up on their website. You'll need to provide the appropriate proof that you own and registered the business, but doing so will earn you an easy backlink to your website. These types of sites rank high and demonstrate high authority with Google as they are designed to primarily accomplish one task. These types of backlinks will always be reliable and you should make an effort to register your website with as many of them as possible.

For other high-ranking sites, you generally can't expect to get a backlink from a direct competitor. Doing so would be counterintuitive as it would direct their website traffic to yours, possibly resulting in lost business. Instead, high-ranking websites that deal with a similar subject matter, but do not necessarily sell the products or services you do, could still present a possibility to feature your content on their site as discussed above.

3. Fix the 404 Errors on Your Website

Many website owners make the mistake of failing to correct 404 errors found on their website. A 404 error is whenever a browser makes contact with the website server, but the server is unable to find the content being requested through the hyperlink. This is most commonly the result of the page no longer existing or the content being moved to a slightly altered URL.

The reason this often gets overlooked is because they do not negatively impact your SEO. Google explicitly states in their guidelines: 404's don't harm your site's indexing or ranking. Additionally, a 404 will likely not be very common on your end so long as you are managing your website and updating your links appropriately when changing URLs.

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However, a 404 does have an impact when another site backlinks to your site and vice versa. For example, if you backlink to an education article on a peer website, and that page returns a 404, it can then hurt your SEO. Likewise, if a website is giving you a backlink to a page that no longer exists, it hurts their SEO and you also do not gain the value offered through the backlink.

While fixing the URLs causing 404s on your own site is easy enough to fix, it can possibly prove a challenge to fix backlinks found on other websites. The simplest method is to simply email the website owner and explain the situation. By having them update their backlink to the correct URL, you will both benefit as you gain back the link and the referring website will no longer be harming their site's SEO.

Alternatively, you can set up a 301 redirect in the event that you cannot get the webmaster to update the URL. This will prove necessary if a piece of content on your site goes viral, for example. Instead of attempting to do the impossible and fix every single referring hyperlink, you can set up a permanent 301 redirect that sends all users attempting to access the nonexistent page to the correct one.

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Though it can take the server a bit longer to process the request, Google does not hold this against you as you cannot reasonably be held accountable for every broken URL that exists online. Therefore, you can feel free to set up as many 301 redirects as necessary so long as the situation calls for it. Once those links begin directing users back to your website, you'll retain the value previously gained from those hard-earned backlinks.

4. Sign Up for Online Directory Listings

Similar to the aggregators mentioned in tactic two, the internet features a wide number of local directories that categorize and list businesses by the industry for their users. These function as search engines that list out addresses, phone numbers, emails, business hours, customer testimonials, and much more. They are excellent resources for managing your reputation online.

They're also a quick and easy way to acquire a number of backlinks from high-ranking website domains. Examples of these sites include Yelp, Foursquare, Yellow Pages, Apple Maps, and Google My Business. A complete and optimized GMB profile also offers the potential to see your website featured in the local pack within Google search results. This shows the three most relevant businesses above all search results including paid advertisements.

Local directory listings can boost traffic to your website through additional channels, drive your call and email volume, and pinpoint your exact map location to users that prefer to do business in person.

5. Analyze Your Competitors' Link Building Strategies

Every high-quality SEO strategy involves some level of competitor research. These are not necessarily similar brands that sell the same products or services as your brand. Instead, they are the websites that are vying for the same keyword search rankings that your website is through content marketing, link building, and paid advertisements.

Many SEO tools will provide ways for you to check on competitor backlinks including SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Ubersuggest. Most of these backlinks will primarily consist of local directories and aggregators like we mentioned above in our previous tactics. What remains will likely be blogging networks or other local organizations. You'll also be able to view how much traffic they're gaining from each backlink to determine which ones actually get results.

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Rather than viewing the backlinks your competitors have as lost opportunities, look at them as a blueprint of which ones to pursue and which ones aren't worth your time. Remember that these referring domains are in the business of providing great content to their visitors, not partnering with or promoting any one business. If you see that a domain is channeling high amounts of traffic to a competitor, check out their site and look for opportunities to collaborate and earn your domain a valuable backlink.

Analyzing competitor backlink strategies will not only point out the high-value referring domains but will also show you what they're actually doing to earn those backlinks. This can vary depending upon your industry. If guest blogging seems to perform well for your peers, then you should dedicate some of your team's efforts into creating powerful content that is unique and exclusive for those referring domains.

However, don't make the mistake of cutting corners on your approach. Google both values backlinks and understands that businesses will look for the cheapest, quickest way possible to acquire them. Ensure that content you feature on other sites is distinct, of high quality, and is appropriate for that referring website to feature. Otherwise, these types of backlinks will do very little to boost your SEO.

6. Don't Forget About Your Internal Links

If you search the web to learn about backlinks and internal links, you'll find compelling arguments about which is stronger. The truth is that both very much have their place in SEO and support your website in different ways. While high-quality backlinks are seen as a transference of trust from one domain to the other, internal links help search algorithms better understand the layout of content on your website.

The primary focus of your internal links should be on pages deep within the site layout, primarily blog pages. This is because your core website pages already have a clearly identified navigational map at the top of the website. In addition to this, your home page is already the most likely to receive plenty of links from other sources.

You also do not want to make the mistake of linking too often to your Contact page. This page usually serves one purpose - to provide or collect contact details. It generally does not contain a high amount of SEO-optimized content and will do very little to boost your site's overall SEO value.

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Instead, you want to use your internal links to help Google's search algorithm understand how your different content pages relate to one another. This creates an interconnected map or web, which Google can use to get a complete picture of what your brand offers and how it is unique from other websites that deal with similar content. You can also manually communicate which pages you want to have a higher value but linking back to that page more often within your website.

However, be sure to avoid link stuffing and consider ways to utilize internal links in a way that feels natural to the reader. For example, if an article touches on a topic that relates to, but isn't critical to the main subject, you can provide an internal link to an article that explores that mentioned topic further. You are merely suggesting the opportunity to learn more to the reader while mapping out how the two topics relate to one another to the search algorithm. It becomes more challenging as you scale your campaign. Realistically speaking, building hundreds of internal links can seem like an endless task. This is where a reliable internal link checker becomes invaluable. It scans all your pages and identifies opportunities to insert relevant internal links. All you need to do is review these suggestions and, once approved, the tool will automatically deploy the new internal links.

7. Leverage Social Media for Additional Link Building

Social media is all about building connections. Unfortunately, businesses fail to respect or make time to leverage social media as a marketing strategy effectively. You've likely been witness to countless automated posts that appear robotic, lifeless, and automated. That's because they are.

Instead, a great social media strategy requires a proactive approach to building connections just as you would in your day-to-day life. The only difference is that your goal is to connect with like-minded brands, outlets, bloggers, and influencers that can help get the word out about your website's content. The question is, how can you use social media to start gaining new backlinks?

The simplest way is to start engaging with the content shared by the people you want to follow you. This includes commenting, liking, sharing, and doing other things that can help them drive their own engagement. The people managing those social media accounts will notice and, if they're also proactive, start digging into your website and brand.

If those social media accounts take notice of your content and find it worthy of sharing, they may do so without any additional work. In most cases, you'll need to do some additional outreach and ask about opportunities to develop a mutually beneficial relationship for both of you. You won't only be investing in those relationships, but can gain benefits by seeing your content widely shared by their followers, and so on. With a genuine, organic strategy, everyone can win on social media.

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You can also get more eyes on your content pages by making sure to leverage hashtags and trending topics when appropriate. However, don't make the mistake of forcing your content into areas of social media where it doesn't really belong. Social media users are aware of brands online, and you can develop a bad reputation quickly for dishonesty and deceptiveness. It's easy to make this mistake, but much harder to undo the damage once it's done.

8. Sponsor Local Activity Groups or Teams

Your local community has numerous link-building opportunities waiting for the right business to approach them. Consider the number of local communities and groups that require funding and sponsorships in order to provide meaningful experiences to children, students, athletes, and more. Most of these groups and organizations utilize one or more business partnerships to accomplish this.

In exchange, you receive premium local advertising online and offline by acting as a sponsor for these groups. Consider this is a low-cost addition to your marketing budget that helps spread brand awareness while simultaneously aiding your community in a meaningful way. In return for that sponsorship, you can generally work out agreements to see your business listed as a sponsor on their website, which earns you a backlink.

Serving as a benefactor to the community may also in some cases earn you a spotlight with local newspapers or magazines that need to report on the latest community happenings. It relies on the same principle as content sharing online. By providing something of value that you have to others in need, they can provide something of value back to your brand and everybody wins.

9. Guest Blog for Other High-Ranking Websites

This is another link-building strategy that focuses on social outreach. Rather than working out a partnership or dealing with another website, you can offer your services to provide exclusive, unique content that gets posted to their domain only. As long as you utilize your brand, your resume, and your expertise, webmasters may be thrilled at the opportunity to have a local expert create valuable content that they may not be able to create themselves.

This works both at the local level and at the international level online. You may have seen examples of guest blogs when visiting one of your favorite news or blogging networks. You can identify a guest article by looking for a brief excerpt that highlights the author, briefly describes their background and links back to their website. While you won't get to use the content for your own domain, you do not only get the backlink, but you get a brand-new platform to sell yourself by offering your unique insights as an expert in the industry.

Guest blogging can not only be an effective way to earn backlinks from trusted sources but can also help you acquire a following from audiences mutually interested in both parties. Some of the best content creators online are able to amass a huge following simply by looking for opportunities to spread their name and brand wherever they possibly can online.

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You can also look for high-profile content creators and work out arrangements to guest blog for one another. This connection not only gets you both access to new and distinct content but can further expand the target audience for both parties without any real drawbacks or downsides to your overall marketing strategy.

Use These 9 Easy Local Link Building Tactics to Boost Your SEO Now!

Don't make the mistake of overlooking link building. Collecting a number of backlinks and internal links where appropriate can prove to be a foundational piece of a successful SEO strategy. Be sure to stick to the fundamentals that we know work and slowly expand your reach to others online so long as your content team and social media teams have the means to do so.

At its core, the secret to acquiring quality backlinks is simply by creating high-quality content that's worthy of reading and sharing. So long as you stick to best SEO practices and ensure that your domain is healthy in the eyes of Google's search algorithm, other webmasters will likely be happy to explore opportunities that benefit both parties and will help you climb in the search rankings.

A website blog is a vital part of any SEO or digital marketing strategy. It has the potential to increase traffic, build brand awareness, drive sales, aid your customers, and establish you as an authority in your industry. However, when done incorrectly, your blog content can also provide little more than add additional pages to your website that clutter up your directory.

In this post, we're going to show you the fundamentals of how to create a winning blog content strategy in 7 steps. This will entail the processes of devising, researching, writing, and tracking your blog performance for the best results possible.

How to Create a Winning Blog Content Strategy?

According to a Content Marketing Institute study, 60% of businesses with a chalked-out content strategy reported achieving significant results, compared to only 32% who didn't have any specific plan.

Here are a few easy steps to create a winning blog content strategy:-

1. Decide on the Primary Focus of Your Blog

While you want to create a blog with good intentions, you need to consider why you will be writing and publishing posts. Of course, the primary goal is to increase conversions. However, your business success matters very little to those who will be visiting and reading your regular posts.

However, that doesn't mean that your blog should completely avoid any promotional intent. What we are looking for lies within a cross-section of what your audience wants to learn about and what your brand provides to alleviate those issues. Great content will not only educate customers on matters related to your field but should naturally lead them to conclude that your brand provides a valuable service that improves their life.

The easiest place to start is to ask yourself why readers would want to read your content. Consider the questions they ask and problems they search for when using Google. If you’re a personal trainer, your potential clients likely search for topics such as “how to lose weight.” As an authority in health and fitness, you could write a month’s worth of blog posts describing exercises and dietary tips that you would provide for your clients. If you work in business and finance, your audience may benefit more from the latest updates and trends related to that field.

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Your answer to “why” will differentiate depending on your industry and the nature of your brand. However, the common theme is understanding the biggest problems that your customers face. Your blog then provides real, actionable information and solutions to customers that provide true value and boost your reputation.

During your process of deciding the purpose of your blog, attempt to come up with several unique solutions. This is because where you finally arrive will depend upon the research you perform in the next few steps.

2. Understand the Strategy of Your Competitors

As with many aspects of your business strategy, you need to be highly aware of what your competitors provide to your shared audience with their blog. Bear in mind that a blog content competitor may not be the same as a direct business competitor. There will be websites online that target mutual keywords with their articles, but do not necessarily sell or provide products or services that your business does. Nonetheless, these will be the challenges in your way that will make you work for your traffic and keyword rankings.

With this in mind, your team should take a few hours to review blogs on a wide variety of websites related to the matters you want to write about. Look at the topics they focus on, how they outline their content, and how they compile every article within the blog. You are looking for any opportunities for your blog to provide something completely new and unique.

By pinpointing an approach that distinguishes you from your blog content competitors, you're already starting off with a unique value proposition. While audiences can find all kinds of articles based upon their query, they'll only be able to get your brand's different outlook on your website only. This is beneficial as it not only provides a strong foundation for keyword research but will actually allow your content to coexist and succeed independently of others.

Many brands make the mistake of adding blogs to their website only to copy the same old content you can find anywhere almost verbatim. It will take time, but look for those niche opportunities to create something unique. Even changing up the tone and attitude your company takes toward a topic versus competitors can provide a fresh, enriching experience for your readers.

3. Perform Extensive Keyword and Topic Research

Keyword research is your bread and butter when it comes to developing your blog content strategy. There are a variety of tools you can utilize to do this including SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz. These keywords serve as the basis for all topics you will choose to write about for your new blog.

While researching keywords takes time, it doesn't need to be overly complex. Consider the main focus of your business and its industry. Then, begin to create a list of items that are immediately relevant to the products or services you provide. You won't even need to come up with topics from these words or phrases, as most SEO software will also do this for you.

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For example, a local computer repair company might list out keyword ideas such as:

• Computer
• Hard Drive
• Graphics Card
• RAM
• Power Supply

When you enter these keywords into an SEO tool, you’ll receive a variety of information from Google including average search volume, the number of clicks, the average cost-per-click, and the keyword difficulty (how hard it is to rank for a said keyword). There is generally also a place for search suggestions and questions that show what types of questions users ask containing that keyword. Suddenly “graphics card” can turn into strong topics such as “How do I choose the best graphics card,” or, “how to repair a graphics card.” Because this local computer repair company has a lot of expertise in this area, these can prove to be high-value topics to write about if the keyword difficulty is appropriate.

A way to research topics outside of SEO tools is to get in touch with your audience directly. Social media is another component of a successful digital marketing strategy that allows you to communicate with your customers and audience at any time. Customers are generally more than happy to share their input about a service, a brand, or simply a problem that's related to your area of expertise. These issues could translate into great topics as your audience is explicitly communicating their desire to learn more in that area.

While keyword difficulty doesn't mean you necessarily should avoid a keyword, it will give you an accurate picture of how likely you are to rank for it. This is especially true for websites and blogs that are new and have no history with Google's search algorithm. For starting out, you'll want to shoot for topics that are of reasonable difficulty, show a high search volume and click-through rate, and provide a lower cost-per-click. You can still choose to write about higher-difficulty topics, but it will take time and consistent effort, which leads us into our next step.

4. Build a Content Calendar

You've decided on the focus of your blog, performed the keyword research, and generated a lengthy list of topics. Rather than just assigning your team articles to write, you should instead collaborate and create a content calendar for your company's digital marketing plan.

A content calendar offers a variety of benefits not just for your writing team, but for all arms of your marketing ventures. It is a monthly calendar where you can schedule due dates for topics, dates for posting, and the assigned team member. By keeping a strict outline of your regular blog posts, you can avoid issues such as duplicated or similar articles. Your writers will also have ample notice of what's due to ensure that your blog is always on time and up-to-date.

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Scheduling out your topics will also make it easier to visualize opportunities to group up subjects or create themes for your readers. As an example, let's revisit our local computer repair company above.

They started their blog with an article titled “How to Repair a Graphics Card.” Based on the remaining keywords, they may also be able to write “How to Repair” articles on a variety of computer component keywords. All of these articles are related, which creates an ongoing theme that teaches readers how to work with a variety of computer components. As a result, readers that engaged with the first post have a greater likelihood of engaging with future, related articles. This can create the ongoing momentum you’re looking for with your content blog.

Grouping articles like this also naturally lends your blog to internal linking strategies. This is an SEO retention strategy to keep visitors on your site for longer by linking to additional pages that feature similar content to what they are reading.

Content calendars can also help you coordinate with other aspects of your content marketing such as social media. It's that much easier to scout opportunities to promote and share blog posts on your social accounts when your various topics are outlined ahead of time. Your social media team can look for opportunities to generate shared traffic between your social accounts and your blog by capitalizing on grouped topic themes.

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Finally, a content calendar also provides you with a visualization of other events throughout the year that you may overlook. Keeping your blog articles timely is the best way to avoid inadvertently making your blog appear static or outdated. Content marketing in 2021 is a dynamic endeavor and coordinating your content with trending topics is the best way to keep active audiences engaged.

5. Create Your Content Bible

While the previous steps focused on the development of the blog itself, this step will futureproof the process of how your writing team creates the actual content. These are the rules that your team creates that dictate the structure, flow, and style rules for every article that goes up on your website's blog. While the idea of creating your own content bible or style guide sounds overwhelming, know that most publications use either the existing Chicago Manual of Style or AP Style as the foundation.

If you're unfamiliar, a stylebook is a list of guidelines for how content creators should utilize text, grammar, punctuation, sources, and other miscellaneous rules. However, every brand still needs its own style guidelines for additional matters. These can include what tones or attitudes are acceptable to use, whether or not explicit content is acceptable, how humor should be handled, etc.

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A style guide can make the difference between an amateur blog that casually features new articles and a professional writing outlet. It will ensure consistency across all of your pieces regardless of the writer and make your content easy to navigate for repeat readers.

It will also expedite the process of content creation by providing a template for all content as opposed to asking your writers to operate from a blank slate. The better they understand what you want from them, the more efficient content creation will be.Ā  This benefit will also apply to new writers that come into your company long after your blog is up and running.

6. Reinforce Your Written Content with Media

Everyday society shifts more and more to visual media as opposed to written text. Chances are that if you post a blog on your website that consists of text only, your readership numbers are going to be extremely low if not nonexistent. This is less of an indicator of the quality of your writing and more about the impact that original graphics have on marketing. That impact becomes exceedingly important for long-form articles where it becomes increasingly difficult to retain someone's attention.

Original, custom-made graphics tend to generate the best results. However, investing in an account with a stock photo website such as Shutterstock or 123RF is a quick, cost-effective way to get your hands on quality, copyright-free images to use in your blog articles. Any visual will offer positive results by injecting color and meaningful breaks from larger ideas throughout the body. Using best practices with these images will also present additional minor opportunities to boost your on-page SEO and potential search rankings.

In addition to images, alternative forms of media can have profound impacts on your traffic and conversion rates. This includes custom infographics that colorfully summarize and illustrate the key takeaways of your articles. It can also include personally-made and edited videos that in some way support the core message of the written content. You can further minimize your bounce rate by notifying readers that there is an infographic or video within the title or the beginning of the article.

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7. Track Results and Adjust Your Content Plan as Necessary

Content marketing is indeed a long-term marketing endeavor, but that doesn't mean you can't start tracking your performance immediately. The process may not be as clear-cut as calculating your ROI on your latest paid ad campaign, but it's possible when you know which metrics to examine.

You can start by using free tools like Google Analytics to keep a close eye on the traffic that visits your website. You'll be able to analyze which channels visitors use to discover your site as well as what keywords they are using in search. If you capitalize on high-volume keywords and use best practices to provide high-quality content, you should start to see an organic traffic increase with time. If you are not seeing an increase in visitors from your targeted keywords, it can be a sign that your content strategy requires a revisit.

Another indicator of your blog performance to look out for is the number of signups you have on your mailing list. There are few indicators more indicative of your audience's level of interest in the content you create. Your website and blog should feature some way to subscribe to the blog or sign up to receive notifications of new posts.

Additional ways to measure your blog's impact are to monitor the average time on page and average pages per session by the user. A 3,000+ word article takes on average ten minutes or longer to read, but your sessions will likely be shorter due to skimming. If the user is also making an effort to visit more pages, it can be an indicator of interest in the content you provide.

Finally, you can track the performance of specific blogs by setting up custom goals within Google Analytics. This is practical when the article aims to not only inform but to drive visitors to perform some sort of action. This could include filling out a form or making a purchase within the store. You'll be able to track which users complete this goal when accessing the site through the blog post. Be sure to provide plenty of call-to-actions in these types of posts to ensure your goal conversion rate is a proper indicator of your content quality.

If one or more of these indicators shows less than desirable results, then it will be time for you to revisit your content strategy. Experiment with new types of content or survey your audience on social media to learn more about what type of content they'd like to see. In addition to this, use tools like Google's People Also Ask to look into commonly searched questions that are related to your targeted keywords.

How to Create A Winning Blog Content Strategy Conclusion?

The biggest mistake we see people make when approaching their blog is not giving it the attentive and consistent strategy it deserves. Understand that even a great content blog will take up to six months to gain traction when starting from scratch. However, your results will vary depending on how effective your blog content strategy is for your brand.

Research your content competitors and look for any window of opportunity to differentiate your blog from others online. This unique foundation will lend itself to creating new and original content that serves your readers even when your competitors target the same keywords. Try to focus on keywords with a lower difficulty that still demonstrates a high search volume. Don't hesitate to look at commonly searched questions on Google to gain topic ideas or utilize the additional features within your chosen SEO tool.

After you narrow down what you need to write about, start to schedule those ideas into a content calendar. Stick to this plan as much as possible, but allow for flexibility to account for real-world events or trends that might be relevant to your industry. Then, create a style guide for your present and future writing team to ensure quality throughout every new article. Be sure to support all of your written content with engaging high-quality media that lends itself to shareability.

Finally, track your key performance indicators using Google Analytics. Pay attention to figures such as traffic, average time per session, additional page views, and your conversion rates for any relevant custom goals. Give your strategy the appropriate amount of time, then make adjustments if the analytics don't support your current approach.

With consistent effort and an honest approach to your content, you can create a winning blog content strategy that elevates your website above the rest in Google search rankings.