A robust digital marketing strategy requires several components - from social media to email to search engines and much more. While each competent is equally important to advertise your business online, content is unarguably the most important part of these efforts.

Are you a small business owner wishing to increase your audience and boost your brand recognition? If yes, then you must try content marketing.

Content marketing involves the creation and dissemination of online materials such as blogs, videos, infographics, whitepapers, and social media posts with the purpose of stimulating interest in the services or products of a business. It helps grow traffic to your website.

In this blog, we will discuss why small business owners should build a powerful content marketing strategy and how to craft one.

The Importance of Content Marketing For Small Business

Content marketing enables you to create and share timely and useful content. It allows you to build loyalty and respect among consumers and become a thought leader in your industry.

You may wonder how. Content marketing offers your audience something that has value, developing trust among your prospects and customers.

Another way content marketing aids you is by recognizing the pain points of your customers. It also helps build a customer base you can engage with for the purpose of driving sales.

Additionally, another benefit of content marketing includes the evergreen content you produce. For instance, a blog post that talks about the history of your industry. Such an asset will not become outdated.

Businesses today have recognized the importance of content marketing. As per the latest marketing stats for 2022, 70% of marketers are active investors in content marketing.

All in all, with the help of content marketing, you gain a competitive advantage over your competitors who are not using content marketing. You also get a chance to grow your brand awareness and establish and maintain a successful brand identity.

Content Marketing For A Small Business: 7 Tips For Success

Let's discuss the tips every business owner should follow to build a successful content marketing strategy for their small business.

1) Start a Blog

Companies that consistently write blogs get 67% more leads per month on average.

Blogging is a free way of marketing your capabilities and services. So, if you want to know how to market a small business, blogging is a route that you can opt for. It also helps you become an industry expert.

Blogs help in different ways, such as:

• Boost your SEO rankings
• Drive traffic to your website
• Provide increased value to your consumers
• Add to your brand’s exposure
• Get leads and increase the likelihood of conversion

2) Stay Active on Social Platforms Your Audience Uses

You may have a social media presence if you are actively involved in selling a service or a product. However, simply being present on social channels is not enough. You are required to stay active on all the social media channels your audience spends their time on.

Now you may wonder how to select the right social media channels for your business. For this, you are required to identify your target audience. On social media platforms, you are speaking to a set of consumers who have specific interests and not everyone. After you learn about the individuals you are speaking to, figure out how to reach them.

Tip: To check where your audience is active, you can do the following:

• Use existing consumer data to determine where your audience hangs out online.
• Check out the social profiles of your competitors to know where their most active users are.

3) Deliver Content as per the Stage of Your Customer Within the Marketing Funnel

To reach the conversion phase, individuals go through a process called the marketing funnel. From learning about your business to conversion, this funnel includes everything. These are the four steps most marketing funnels have:

• Attention: Consumer views your social media post, ads, or learns about you via word-of-mouth
• Interest: Consumer is interested and wants to learn more
• Desire: Consumer is at a stage where they want to convert
• Action: Consumer takes action (for e.g.- subscribing to your email newsletter or purchasing your product)

To align this process with your creation, ensure you provide relevant content to the target customers present at the different stages of the funnel. For instance, an in-depth asset can overburden a potential customer who is currently at the attention stage of the funnel.

4) Conduct Keyword Research to Find Great Topics

An important step is to optimize your blog for SEO. You must conduct keyword research as a part of SEO. Keyword research is a crucial part of content marketing because:

• It helps identify trending topics individuals are interested to know more about.
• It helps improve your search engine rankings.

Watch this video to know how to do SEO keyword research -

Note: The keyword strategy for your business is the most critical part that determines your ranking on the Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP). However, you must also know that SEO-friendly websites rank higher on the SERPs, too. If you do not have an SEO-friendly website, it is time to build one for your business.

If you need an SEO-friendly, professional, niche-based website, you should know that it takes many days to build one. We recommend that you use DashClicks' Sites tool that helps you make an SEO-friendly, custom-branded agency website in just a few seconds.

5) Create a Content Calendar

Monthly content calendars include blog posts, emails, social posts, and any other content you wish to produce in that particular month. It helps you stay organized. Also, with the help of a content schedule, your readers get comfortable as it increases familiarity and trust for your business.

A content calendar is important because:

• It ensures that every content-related task is actually taking place
• It makes it convenient to collaborate with outside partners as well as your team
• It provides you a big picture of the upcoming stuff

Let’s discuss the steps that help you create your own content calendar:

• Decide the types of content you wish to publish, such as case studies, landing pages, e-books, opinion pieces, blog posts, etc.
• Discuss with your customer service and sales team to know the most asked questions by your potential customers. Then sit and brainstorm with your marketing team to determine different content strategies and more topics that you need to cover.
• Use the SEMRush Content Audit tool to analyze the current pages on your website and check what you should update, remove, or rewrite. Use this tool to analyze your competitors as well.
• Choose social media channels by checking the platforms your target audience uses. For instance, Facebook typically works great for B2C audiences.
• Before a type of content reaches production, define every step of the content process. Then, decide on a publishing schedule as per your content auditing and analytics data.
• Schedule evergreen content and publish them at a time when there are content delays.
• Don’t forget to add guest content to your content calendar.

6) Bring Your Reviews to Life

You may be surprised to know that 91% of people in the age group of 18-34 trust reviews published online as much as personal recommendations.

Also, a majority of consumers (58%) would pay more or travel farther to support a business that has positive reviews.

What's even more important is that 83% of consumers only trust relevant and recent reviews.

With these stats, you can definitely see the power of reviews. They help in driving a business, especially one that is both local and small.

Keeping this information in mind, we recommend you bring your reviews to life via social posts and testimonials that you can post on your website and blog.

Testimonials are considered one of the most effective content marketing tactics. Let's discuss how you can convert your blog post readers into buyers with the help of customer testimonials:

• Use screenshots of your client’s statements and place them within your blog posts.
• Use these statements as quotes in your blog posts.

Tip: To know how to get reviews and leverage them in your content marketing, read this blog.

7) Find a Unique Angle

Your competitors can indeed provide you with a lot of topic ideas, but avoid producing content that is too similar to the content created by others. The goal of content marketing is to provide information that is useful and adds value to your customers, not something that is already available to them on the web.

If you find a great idea, do not replicate it with tiny alterations. What you can do instead is to see it as a starting point and search for ways to incorporate your own unique angle. Doing so will only help you provide interesting content to your readers.

Bonus Tips:

• Start an email newsletter to let your readers know about an upcoming event, a new product, industry-related news, and much more.
• See what is resonating with your audience and create a variety of content types. Think about content repurposing as well.

How to Craft a Small Business Marketing Strategy?

Let's discuss what you need to do to craft a marketing strategy for your small business:

1. Build Your Buyer Personas and Fine - Tune Them

Create buyer personas to better understand your audience and their respective pain points. When you determine who is buying your products, you get to know the kind of content they need and when.

2. Solve a Problem

Consumers look for information that provides a solution to their problems. Identify the content assets that can fulfill the unique needs of your buyers. Do this after you have identified buyer personas.

3. Set Business Goals

Set business goals that align with the strategy. The principle of SMART goals makes your benchmarks attainable and reasonable, so do use the principle during this time.

4. Determine Distribution Channels

When it is time to share your content, determine which content piece is right for which channel. This is because not every content piece does well on every channel. Hence, to achieve success and reach, this step is important.

Check the image below to see how the three distribution channels - owned media channels, paid media channels, and earned media channels - overlap and the way in which you can combine them:

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Also, take a note of how you can distribute different content types:

• Distribute your interview content or podcasts through Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts.
• Distribute your infographic content through your blog and Pinterest.
• Distribute success stories and case studies through a dedicated website page.
• You can distribute your video content through YouTube.

Conclusion

Even though you run a small business, there is a high chance that you have huge competition. To grow your audience and help your business stand out, you require a content marketing strategy that will help you showcase your value to your current and future consumers.

When you build your buyer personas, you take a step forward towards building a winning content marketing strategy. After you do so, ensure you create content centered around your buyers' pain points and the stage they are at within the marketing funnel. Stay active on social platforms your audience uses and bring your reviews to life through testimonials and social posts.

Bottom line: Try implementing most of the above-mentioned tips for your business.

Now, it is our turn to ask you a question. Which of the above-mentioned tips do you think will be the most beneficial for your business?

Do you know the two major pain points for small-scale agencies? These are data retrieval and client reporting processes. So, congratulations that you have decided to automate your data retrieval and client reporting processes using a white-label platform and software.

To seamlessly execute your daily tasks and manage the workflow, you need to work on different platforms, access data from other sources, and access the login credentials of numerous third-party apps and software.

The smart step is to focus on your agency's growth, so you should invest your precious time in marketing and other essential activities that will help you grow and expand your market.

If you are busy taking screenshots and retrieving data all day long from multiple channels to prepare reports, you're wasting your productive hours. It's not smart work; instead, it is imprudent!

This article will help you share your client reports in no time using the power of automation.

About DashClicks' White-Label Platform

DashClicks' white-label platform helps you scale your agency by not just automating the workflow but also through the fulfillment services. The fulfillment services include all digital marketing services such as SEO, PPC, social media advertising, email marketing, content marketing, website development, etc.

Still, DashClicks' platform is available free of cost for limited use. However, if you want to serve multiple clients and campaigns, you can opt for a premium account.

So, you can be an agency owner, even without hiring expensive full-time professionals. DashClicks will assist you throughout your journey.

Watch this video to learn what DashClicks is and what services it offers.

How to Use the Free Trial?

Before moving on, kindly watch this video to learn how to build a successful digital marketing agency from scratch.

DashClicks' free trial doesn't refrain you from using any of its major premium features. However, it's for limited use. You can always upgrade it if you are using it to manage your campaigns. This way, you can drastically save your time and money spent on time-consuming & repetitive tasks that are a part of the daily grind in an agency.

Here's how DashClicks' free trial offer works.

Go to the DashClicks website and sign up for its white-label platform.

Signing up for an account is free, and DashClicks will never charge you for a base account. You will only be charged if you upgrade to the Pro plan or above.

Once the signup process is complete, you'll be directed to the dashboard.

DashClicks Starter Kit

If you are new to DashClicks, this video will give you a sneak peek at the platform and how it works.

From the top right corner of the dashboard screen, go to settings.

YouTube Video: New User Dashboard Crash Course: 4:10

On the settings page, you will find many options to add your custom domain, fill up your business profile, upload your branding, logo, etc., and change your business settings.

Apart from that, you can manage various third-party account integrations here, so you can import data directly into the DashClicks dashboard to generate automatic reports, etc.

On the settings screen, you can set up a payment and access all the useful apps such as:

• Contacts App
• Deals App
• InstaSites App
• InstaReports App
• Sites App
• Templates App
• Projects App
• Analytics App
• Forms App
• Inbound App

You can also visit White-Labeled Fulfillment Store here and order quality white-label SEO and digital marketing services. It helps you remain lean and thin while staying profitable.

Through the fulfillment store, you can order all digital marketing services such as SEO, PPC, social media advertising, email marketing, content marketing, website development, etc. We have a comprehensive team of full-time digital marketing professionals, so you get the best value from our services.

With DashClicks' forever free account, you get free unlimited features such as:

For more details about pricing and features, please visit our pricing page.

How to Use the Dashboard Application?

You can treat the Dashboard application as the home page for your entire platform experience. It gives you a bird's eye view of your campaigns and performance.

You can fully personalize your dashboard page to adjust the page view as per your needs. It means you will quickly get the most important updates as you open your account.

Accessing the Dashboard App

The Dashboard acts as your default homepage for the platform. So, even if you change the settings, you can navigate back to the dashboard using the app drawer in the top right corner. Here is what the app drawer looks like.

The dashboard provides you with the summaries of your campaign, so it's the easiest to navigate. Each widget is separated by easily visible boxes.

When you click the Deals app widget button, you get the option to customize the data displayed on the widget according to the specified period.

You can edit your Dashboard by clicking the Edit button in the top right corner. This way, you can customize your dashboard view.

You can also drag and drop any widget above, below, left, or right of other widgets to customize your view per your preference. After that, click on Save in the top-right corner.

You can create custom client dashboards and reports on the DashClicks platform. The data updates in real-time. Creating a dashboard is the prerequisite for using a white-label platform as it's the central location where you can manage the entire platform.

Here is the complete DashClicks software tour for your reference -

Final Words

DashClicks is a one-stop solution for every need of a digital marketing agency. You can use the DashClicks dashboard for everything from performance evaluation of your campaign to sending reports and fulfillment of digital marketing solutions such as SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, reputation management, local directory listings, and content marketing. So, sign up for a free account today and benefit from this incredible white-label platform.

This is no news that content is the most fruitful way of gaining organic traffic by providing customers solutions to their search queries. However, designing an SEO strategy that caters to both the search bots and the consumers' needs is equally important. SEO content strategy is essential for every business, even though most marketers believe if they have well-written and helpful content, they do not require an SEO content strategy.

Most companies focus on either extremely keyword-forward SEO or entirely ignore SEO to provide useful information to their consumers in the name of content marketing. However, this is precisely where most content strategies fail to impress search algorithms/bots and viewers. Creating content that brings humans and search bots together is an extremely crucial task that marketers should successfully carry out to generate expected results.

All this is achievable with thorough audience research and quantitative search data. Striking the right balance between SEO and content strategy is one way you can connect every piece of content to your consumers.

Why Do You Need to Bring SEO and Content Strategy Together?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is necessary for your website and brand visibility because, at the end of the day, what you need from beautifully put-out content is results in the form of conversions and traffic. And without SEO, all these efforts will go in vain because no one can find you when they search for products similar to yours on a search engine. Hence, the ultimate goals of needing SEO for your website content are relevancy and a higher rank in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

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If you don’t want to believe the words, here is data showing how SEO is essential for digital marketing to satisfy search bots-

• Organic searches are the primary source of business for B2B businesses, and Google alone counts over 2 trillion searches per year.
• According to a study conducted by SEMRush, 78% of marketers who believe they have a well-developed content strategy were highly successful in 2021.
• According to a study, 89% of marketers investing in SEO and content marketing rely on SEO as their most-effective content distribution channel.
• Another study also revealed that most internet users only click on the results available on the first page of searches and don’t even navigate to the second page. Moreover, the first page linked in the searches takes the trophy home with over 25% more clicks.

What we can conclude from the data above is that SEO and content strategy work the best when they go hand in hand to produce results that give investors ROIs. Other conclusions made from the above studies are-

#1- Organic searches are the primary means to grow businesses, especially B2B.

#2- More and more companies are showing interest in SEO and content strategy since a high percentage are investing in it.

#3- Companies investing in content marketing need to analyze their results to see the efficacy of their approach.

What Is an SEO Content Strategy and Why Do You Need It?

First and foremost, you need to understand what an SEO content strategy is. It is planning for your valuable content that addresses a few key questions, including –

• Who is searching for you or services similar to yours?
• What are their pain points?
• How can you provide solutions to their pain points?
• How will you conduct the required analysis of your progress?

Understanding the Basic Elements of an SEO Content Strategy

An excellent and implementable SEO content strategy is one that includes all the bases that can provide customers with solutions to their pain points and businesses with good results. To better understand the process, here are the basic elements of an SEO content strategy that you should design for your business.

Element #1 – Understanding Your Target Audience

While it may seem too much on the face, the targeted viewers are often overlooked when preparing an SEO strategy. This is because SEO primarily wants to impress the search bots to get your website a better ranking in the SERPs. However, the entire process can be quickly streamlined if you focus on your customers by understanding them better. It makes the task of SEO easier since search bots look for valuable information, something your target audience will also be looking for. Some ways you can get to know your target audience better are –

A. Designing a Customer Persona: If you already have a customer persona, great! But if you do not have one, you definitely need it. Customer personas are basically the essential character descriptions of your targeted audience. You can follow any format for creating these but remember to include crucial details like name, age, gender, location, job title, interests, personal preferences, and other information related to your products and services that can affect sales.

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B. Using Google Analytics: Google has multiple tools you can employ to help in your SEO and content strategy. One such tool is Google Analytics which can help you efficiently reach your goals. You can better understand your viewer by using the demographic and interest data in Google Analytics. Under the demographics section, you will find crucial information about your viewers' age, gender, and traffic and conversion data categorized according to the other information. At the same time, the interests tab will provide details regarding the various interests and preferences your prospective clients lean towards.

‍C. Analyzing the Sites Your Customers Are Interested In: The best way to make an impact on your clients is by getting their attention. And the most straightforward way to do that is by finding something they are interested in. You can find similarities in your audience niches by visiting the websites that are most popular amongst them. Creating the base of your advertising and promotional strategies with these interests in mind will perfectly mesmerize them into learning more about your business.

D. Using Surveys: Another method you can use to understand your customers better is by taking their surveys and knowing why they are interested in your products and services. You can accomplish this with multiple online tools that are becoming pretty popular today to analyze your viewer responses and feedback in real-time, like Google Forms and SurveyMonkey.

Element #2 – Needs of Your Prospects

Knowing the interests of your users is critical to providing them with better products and services. But how do you know what they exactly need from you? You can get this information by discussing such details with your customer service and internal subject matters team. The marketing team usually does not know much about the reviews of the customers, and this is where your customer service and internal subject matters teams come in. These are the best departments to provide you with information about your existing and potential customers as they frequently interact with them. They know how your customers feel about your products and services and can give you a better insight into this information.

Understanding why your customers like or dislike your products and services is essential to improve on them. Think of it like this – if you remove the existing pain points of your consumers that they may have with your products or that of your competitors, you will gain an upper hand by finding a solution. You can begin with the following questions-

• Who are your target customers?
• Why are your customers using your products and services, and how are you solving their concerns?
• Why do your customers face that problem in the first place?
• How are your customers using your products to solve their pain points?
• Why do your customers think your product can solve their problems?
• When do your customers purchase your products and services?

Element #3 – Aligning the Keywords, Topics, and Content With Your Sales Funnel

Users don’t directly search for the entire problem at once on a search engine. They use keywords that can target their pain point and provide them with quick solutions. Once you understand your prospect, you will also understand which keywords work the best for them and how you can direct them toward your website. When you have your keywords, you can develop topics and content similar to the interests of your consumers.

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With that done, you can then write content that aligns with your sales funnel to get the desired results. You can complete this by –

A. Understanding the Search Intent of Your Customers: As mentioned before, customers use the search engine to find solutions to their queries. The query may be finding a site they already know, getting information, or purchasing items. These goals are called search intent and are of three types; navigational, informational, and transactional.

B. Conducting Smart Keyword Research: Generally, organizations conduct their keyword research by finding keywords mostly searched by people related to the products or services they sell and sticking with the ones with the highest search volume. However, an effective and more straightforward way to do this would be to use tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush, which will find relevant keywords for you according to the primary and secondary keywords related to your business.

C. Prioritizing Topics: Prioritizing keywords and aligning them with your sales funnel is essential since most viewers do not exactly follow the expected sales funnel flow. You can do this by using keywords most relevant to your products or services, solving the pain points of your consumers, and adding keywords that are most searched by your targeted customers.

Element #4 – Your Goals and Measurement Processes

Every business has a set of goals they want to achieve no matter which industry they belong to. These goals may be higher rankings, more traffic, better conversions, etc. Once you establish your goals, you can then evaluate the success of your SEO content strategy. You can use tools like Google Search Console to check your rankings in the SERPs and Google Analytics to check your overall progress using the strategies employed.

In Conclusion

SEO and content strategies are dynamic and develop all the time as customer expectations from a business keep changing. However, the above blog should give you the evergreen basics of SEO content strategies that will keep the search bots and your consumers happy with your brand.

Lead generation is at the heart of digital marketing. The process of lead generation for digital marketing agencies begins with determining where your target market "lives" on the web. Fortunately, the evolution of technological advancements has led to the betterment of things by giving rise to a new era of digitalization and transforming the world into a global village.

However, regardless of the changes in the marketing and advertising industry, the fundamental objective is to drive effective traffic to your website to boost sales and conversion rates further.

How?

Most top-notch digital marketers believe building powerful lead generation strategies is challenging. Sadly, there is no magic dust that can assist in enticing your customers via the internet. The only key is to build robust lead generation strategies and develop high-quality content to attract and engage the targeted audience.

Point to Remember: Create calls to action that go beyond "contact us" to ensure the success of your business's website.

Why Is Lead Generation Crucial to Your Business?

Lead generation relates to deeply understanding your potential customer's preferences. As a digital marketing agency, you must incorporate a mindful approach to identify and guide your targeted audience via several stages until they engage with your business and turn into customers. Sounds confusing?

Let's give you a perspective.

Suppose you returned home after a long day at work, took off your coat, and prepared yourself a cup of coffee. Just as you are about to sit and relax, you get a call; there is the telemarketer on the other side of the call, and they say, "this call is in regards to a coffee maker machine." Now, regardless of how frustrating it sounds, the caller has already grabbed your attention, haven't they?

Despite your annoyance, you will feel the need to know why this person called you to talk about a coffee maker. This is known as inbound lead generation (where the prospects choose the time and place of interaction) - an effective solution to boost your sales.

Read on to find out some time-tested techniques to generate leads for your digital marketing agency to help your business achieve the desired results.

1. Optimize Your Webpage

Your website is a powerful platform that helps create brand awareness and promote your business to the targeted audience. Thus, ensure the proper functioning of your website as it is the principal source that pilots all the traffic to your site.

Determine your areas of improvement like lagging speed, page loading errors, or poor user interface, and make sure to repair them at the earliest. You can also consider using tools that can assist you in examining your website for any errors.

Point to Remember: Your website is the root of your business, so carefully nurture it to make it stronger and better!

2. Run A/B Tests

A/B testing equips you to experiment the efficacy of two different versions of a piece of content on your targeted audience. This will enable you to conduct the statistical analysis and determine which version brings more traffic. This technique ensures the efficacy of data-driven decisions and serves as an excellent help in boosting your website's user engagement and conversion rates.

So, if you are contemplating how to generate leads for your business, consider hiring a digital marketing agency to help you identify and implement the most appropriate lead generation strategies for your business.

Point to Remember: Testing is the key to improving and moving forward!

3. Conduct Routine Website Checks

Are you noticing a sudden drop in your website traffic? Chances are that your website pages are experiencing some technical issue or a breakdown.

While most businesses assume web designing and content creation as two critical components of website management, it is imperative to remember that websites are not to be launched and forgotten about!

Broken links or 404 error pages can negatively affect your audience engagement. Thus, run routine website scans to ensure everything is well-optimized and running smoothly.

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Point to Remember: Your website is the reflection of your brand! So, be proactive and make it presentable and user-friendly at all times.

4. Develop a Mobile-Friendly Website

For customers, your website acts as your business's 24x7 (always open) store. It lets them quickly go through your products and service offerings and buy what they need. With the booming number of smartphone users, making your website mobile-friendly has only become imperative.

So, if you notice that your website is not working properly on a cell phone, it can be alarming. The best solution is to run an entire website scan and optimize all the content to make it mobile-friendly.

Consider hiring a well-experienced web developer to help you build robust lead generation strategies and ensure result-driven web pages for your business.

Point to Remember: "DO NOT" make your customers wait while they are on your website, or you may end up waiting for them eventually.

5. Update Your Keywords

The principle objective of digital marketing is to target the right audience using specific keywords and terms that help them find you. One of the ideal lead generation strategies is to uncover the keywords your prospects and competitors are already searching for.

You can also add long-tail keywords to optimize your website's content and ensure a higher ranking in search engine results.

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Point to Remember: Keywords in digital marketing act as a mediator that connects businesses to their target audience. So, ensure to select the right ones!

6. Build Lead Magnets via SEO

Regardless of how alluring your web page is, it will not generate leads if it is not visible to your target customers. Luckily, SEO is here to your rescue! Developing an SEO-optimized website is another foolproof lead generation strategy that digital marketing agencies should use to acquire a higher ranking in search engine results.

Wondering What Lead Magnets Are?

These are the PDFs or recorded files containing specific content pieces that your viewers download in exchange for their contact details or email addresses. Hence, use these lead magnets to your advantage and create content you know your potential audience would relate to.

Point to Remember: While there are several kinds of lead magnets, they all have one thing in common; they enable you to engage with potential leads who are not yet ready to invest in your business offerings but can be convinced to do so.

Now it's your task to convert your potential leads into customers! You can also hire a digital marketing specialist to help you do the job.

7. Personalize Your Content

The secret to a high-performing website is its content, not colors. If you are assuming that your website's generalized content will bring traffic and boost your conversion rates, you are sadly mistaken!

Developing personalized content can work impressively in enhancing your business-customer engagement. It is an ideal lead generation strategy that allows you to collect accurate data along the way, further enabling you to segment your target audiences more meaningfully.

Wondering how to create personalized content for your customers? Hire a reputed digital marketing agency to help you develop customized content for your website.

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Point to Remember: Design your website so that your potential customer can confidently go to the cart without referring to your contact page for any clarifications.

8. Build an App

Introducing an app is the most straightforward way to get more traffic to your website. It significantly upgrades your lead generation strategies. However, keep in mind that while the app may make your services more accessible, you cannot expect your potential customers to download your app for no reason.

So, if you want your customers to install your business app, offer them unique services that your competitors lack. You can also take help from a digital marketing professional to effectively produce more traffic and assist your business in generating hot leads for your business.

Point to Remember: Creating an app to offer services isn't enough. Make sure to provide value to them!

9. Create Videos for YouTube

YouTube is one of the most-popular online video platforms that digital marketers should not overlook when advertising. So, if you are a business owner, use this multi-billion dollar video platform to engage with your target audience. YouTube has inevitably evolved as an entertainment tool that people also refer to find answers or product reviews.

Wondering How to Do It?

Consider creating "how-to" videos or any content relevant to your industry with the assistance of a professional digital marketing agency.

Point to Remember: Marketing is all about reaching where your audience stays. So, what are you waiting for? Incorporate video marketing into your lead generation strategies now to create maximum audience engagement with your business.

10. Launch Problem-Solving Blog Posts

Do you want to sell your products and services efficiently but don't know how? Here's your hint Stand in the shoes of your potential customers and think from their perspective.

Post blogs or start guest blogging to develop more personalized content or talk about how your blogs can help businesses drive more traffic. Make sure to research and target keywords that allow you to effectively attract and engage your customers. One practical way to create engaging content is by generating a bunch of "how to" articles on the top-notch niches of digital marketing.

Point to Remember: Check your blog feedback constantly and fix your areas of improvement to ensure optimum client satisfaction and a foolproof lead generation strategy for your business.

11. Make Social Media Your Best Friend

You already know that more than half of your audience spends most of their time on social media. Why not use it to your advantage then? Practicing the proper social media marketing techniques to boost lead generation is your direct road to reaching your prospects.

Point to Remember: A robust social media marketing strategy with a digital marketing expert's assistance can greatly help in engaging your audience.

12. Solve Problems via Chat-Bots and FAQs

You already have a separate "contact us for more information" page but still notice that your prospects do not bother sending in their concerns or doubts. This is particularly true because of two reasons -

• It is time-consuming.
• Nobody likes to wait for answers.

So, if you are wondering how to generate leads for your digital marketing agency, then the answer is to engage with your potential audience on the spot. Install a chatbot on your website and link your blog posts to your frequently asked questions page to ensure that your audience gets all the answers to what they are looking for.

Point to Remember: Your potential audience will only invest in your business when they get good content to connect with.

Conclusion

While the successful lead generation strategies may differ from business to business, the objective of the process is always constant ā€” create and optimize content that attracts your leads. However, consistency is the key! Keep in mind that generating new and effective leads is not an overnight task but a continuous process that is to be done throughout your business's lifetime. While this is strenuous, having a trusted white label marketing partner will make the entire process a cakewalk.

White label agencies know running a digital agency is a momentous task, and you shouldn't have to do it all alone. That is why, partnering with a reputable and trusted white label marketing agency will free you up from the everyday agency grind, while you get to focus on what you do best, running and scaling your business!

With mobile searches becoming a new normal, we frequently use keywords like "spa near me" or "best sandwich shops in New Jersey." These aren't just a few random keywords. Local search carries a strong purchase intent, it's growing, and it forms a major chunk of shopping these days.

Post pandemic, 82% of consumers will prefer to shop locally. However, their expectations aren't the same as before. So, businesses must be curious to know how they can thrive amid this disruption.

What are the top factors influencing a local marketing campaign?

These are organic traffic data, PPC, reputation management, i.e., reviews, etc.

To improve local marketing and advertising, you need to track the data gathered from various SEO and PPC tools such as Google My Business, Moz, and Google Analytics.

And using these insights, you need to create a great local marketing report to help your clients track and improve their campaigns.

This article includes everything you need to know to create stunning marketing reports for your local business's needs.

What Are Local Marketing Reports?

A local marketing report is a collection of insights you can use to track and measure all your local business strategies. You need to identify your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to assess your business performance, improve your local marketing strategies, and give them the right direction.

Things You Need to Know to Generate Local Marketing Reports

It would help if you had a wide range of metrics you can hardly find if you do it manually while generating marketing reports. Another challenge is to split these reports to separately show your client the ROI for different locations.

Businesses operating in specific locations need location-based metrics to analyze their ROI. Marketers look for location-wise comparisons to get clear and vivid pictures of their campaigns. Similarly, single-location services and businesses such as stores, outlets, salons, restaurants, spas, and shops also need location-based reporting to know whether their marketing efforts are helping them reach the right audience or not.

Most successful agencies prefer to use visual dashboards that generate easy-to-understand, user-friendly reports.

What Should Your Local Marketing Report Include?

Your local marketing report should ideally include all the relevant metrics from the channels used in local marketing.

So, you need the data and insights from the following channels.

• Social media metrics (both paid and unpaid)
• Organic traffic
• Local listings
• Reviews

The best part of these reports is that they arrange and present crucial insights that matter the most to your clients. All other less critical information remains in the dashboard.

To make it easy to understand, you can divide local metrics into five categories.

Here is what your local marketing report should look like:

1. SEO Metrics

There is a strong connection between a local search performed by a user and their subsequent store visit. 72% of consumers who did a local search on their devices visited the store within five miles, according to a HubSpot study.

Here are other stats that show just how powerful local searches are -

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It indicates that mobile phones are linked with high purchase intent. So, you should optimize for local SEO, but at the same time optimize it for mobile, too. So, when people use local keywords such as "babysitter near me" or "best pizza outlets in New Jersey" from their mobile phones, it reflects a strong purchase intent, and your local SEO should take care of such searches.

A solid local SEO foundation is necessary to run a location-based marketing campaign. So, the right keywords are essential to trap such local searches.

"U.S. retailers' conversion rates on the desktop are 2X as high as mobile conversion rates. Why? Because the purchase process on many retailers' mobile sites is still clunky."

[Source: Think With Google ]

Pro Tip: To improve your conversion rate on mobile, you should decrease your page load time.

Agencies need to focus on their clients' local SEO metrics because it will decide that they are generating the right kind of leads for them.

Let’s consider some local marketing tools and integrations that agencies should use:

•    Google Analytics
•    Google Search Console
•    SEMrush
•    Ahrefs
•    GMB Insights
•    Rank Tracker
•    Moz
•    Majestic

2. Local Search PPC Metrics

Local brands need high-quality local leads, so they need to focus on local PPC metrics. PPC generates high-quality leads. It also decides the ROI of PPC campaigns. But, agencies also need to set the correct conversion expectations. Otherwise, it can soon backfire on them.

For that, they need to share industry-based conversion rates from PPC to benchmark their performance against it.

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The stats reveal that the average conversion rate across Google Ads is 4.40% on the search network and 0.57% on the display network.

Now have a look at the average cost per conversion for Google Ads.

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According to the above graph, the average cost per conversion across Google Ads is $56.11 on the search network and $90.80 on the display network.

You can plug the metrics like average conversion rate in Google Ads and the average cost per conversion into a live dashboard.

Here are the PPC marketing integrations you can try.

•    Google Ads
•    Bing Ads
•    AdRoll
•    Google Local Services Ads (GLSA)

3. Call Tracking Metrics

Your clients would also be interested in call tracking as phone calls also mean a high purchase intent. For local clients, it becomes even more critical. Since these are hot leads, your clients must know callers’ contact information, such as their names, phone numbers, and locations.

Here are some popular call tracking tools you can integrate into your live dashboard.

•    CallRail
•    WildJar
•    Twilio

4. Social Media Metrics

Social media is core to building communities of fans and long-lasting relationships with your clients. It helps you establish direct contact with your audience and is growing exponentially.

You can use the following integrations to track your client’s social media metrics. Furthermore, DashClicks allows you to do it in one dashboard.

•    Instagram and Instagram Ads
•    YouTube
•    LinkedIn and LinkedIn Ads
•    Facebook and Facebook Ads
•    Twitter and Twitter Ads
•    Snapchat Ads

5. Reputation Metrics

You must have seen the reviews while looking for a spa, health service, restaurants, and other local services. According to a Search Engine Land study, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. People look online for advice to get authentic suggestions and recommendations about where to shop and what to buy. Thus, reviews are an essential ingredient of online reputation and local search. Agencies can help their clients build a brand reputation as it matters more than anything else during local searches.

Apart from that, there can be many other integrations you can choose for your local marketing client report. You can pick them as per your business goals.

What Metrics Should You Track in Your Local Marketing Report?

Depending on your local marketing channels, there are specific KPIs your local clients want to see,

Your clients must be interested in KPIs such as ROI breakdown by location. It depends on what local marketing channels you use as a marketing strategy. Again, adding multiple metrics can overwhelm an ordinary business person.

So, here are a few KPIs you can consider including in your clients’ local marketing reports.

1. Best Performing City/Location: The region that exhibits the best performance in terms of cost/conversion.
2. Cost Per Lead: This KPI reflects how much you’re spending on each lead you generate.
3. Traffic From Google My Business: It reflects the number of visitors Google My Business brings to your website.
4. Sessions by Landing Page: This KPI is crucial for brands that have different landing pages for each of your locations. It shows how much traffic is coming through local ads for each location.
5. Local Queries, Impressions, and Ranking: Google Search Console will help you get the data about the impressions linked with your local queries in a defined period. It also includes their rankings.
6. Search Brand or Category: It’s a crucial KPI that reflects your brand’s visibility on Google. So, it tells you the number of times your business profile was shown when a user searched for your brand or a similar one in Google My Business.
7. Channel Performance: This KPI helps you identify the channel with the best ROI and conversion rate, so you can increase your investment in it and reduce in other channels that don’t contribute as much to achieving your business goals.
8. Reviews: Reviews are a powerful indicator of your brand’s reputation. Check reviews on your Google My Business profile page.
9. Leads by User Type: This KPI tells you how many leads you generate through your websites, such as a newsletter sign-up or form submission.
10. Session From Organic Over Time: The organic traffic your website has received in a given timeframe.
11. Phone Calls per Location: It reflects the number of phone calls attended by each of your location-specific outlets. A call tracking software such as Callrail is all that you need to track this KPI.

You can track even more KPIs such as eCommerce KPIs, i.e., Total Sales

Net Sales, Total Refunds, and Sales By Channel.

How to Create Local Marketing Reports Almost Instantly?

Client reporting isn't easy. It is one of the best ways to express the value your agency is bringing onboard for your client. But, tracking all of the above KPIs and presenting them in a report can be extremely tedious and time-consuming.

Imagine going to each marketing platform, digging into its analytics, and copy-pasting the data into complex excel sheets.

However, with DashClicks, you can automatically fetch all the required data into a pretty and colorful report with easy-to-understand diagrams, charts, and tables. These ready-to-share reports can be created instantly using DashClicks' reports automation tool InstaReports. Your clients or boss will be pleased to see these professionally designed reports.

Here's how to create local marketing reports with DashClicks in seconds -

A. Sign Up for Your Free Dashclicks Account

To generate automated reports, first Sign Up for DashClicks' white-label platform for free and feed all your campaign details.

B. Integrate Your Digital Marketing Platforms

You can easily connect your online marketing platforms such as Google Search Console, Google Adwords, Google My Business, Google Analytics, CallRail, & Facebook Ads., etc.

C. Choose a Template

It's time to choose a template. Click on Templates, and you'll find various templates you can choose from, such as SEO, Google Ads, or social media.

D. Review Your Report

Your report will look like this -

Here is the detailed video you can watch to know how to use DashClicks' InstaReports -

Your report is now ready; you can export it in various formats such as XLS, CSV, and PDF.

It would be the most thorough yet concise and easy-to-understand report.

Final Words

Agencies want to ensure they generate qualified leads for their clients' sales pipeline. So, they are naturally inclined to create reports that help their local-centric clients consistently. They want to add value by infusing actionable insights and fresh qualified leads into these reports. Once a process is set up, the next step is to make it scalable. You can quickly achieve it by using DashClicks' automated reporting tool InstaReports.

As per the latest statistics, the top five organic results account for 67.60% of clicks in Google.

Keeping these statistics in mind, one can easily conclude that top Google rankings can help you attain success in your online business.

Owing to this reason, business owners are constantly searching for ways to improve their Google rankings without getting penalized.

The truth is, there is no one magic button that can help you directly jump to the top of the SERPs. However, there are certain steps you can take to achieve this. It requires dedication, creativity, and persistence to improve your Google ranking, especially because of the dynamic nature of the Google algorithm.

If you too are wondering how to rank high on Google without getting penalized by the algorithm, read on.

1. Learn About the Google Algorithm

As we already know, Google constantly introduces changes to its algorithm. Most of these modifications are not publicly announced, but if you spend time in the inner circle of search engine experts, you'll be able to figure those out!

Here are some major algorithm updates that you should know about:

• Core Update (May 2022): This algorithm update led to noticeable ranking fluctuations.
• Page Experience Update (June 2021): This update affected News alerts, Core Web Vitals, and organic results.
• Core Update (December 2020): This update laid focus on content relevance and quality.
• Mobile-first update (July 2019): Googlebot prioritizes websites that work well on mobile phones.
• Mobile-friendly update (April 2015): Favoring sites that have mobile-friendly versions.
• Pigeon (July 2014): This update worked at the integration of local search results such as Google Maps.
• Hummingbird (August 2013): Focussed on understanding the intent and context behind the search of the user instead of just taking into account the literal words they typed.
• Penguin (April 2012): Targeted spammers and sites that purchase unnatural links to increase their rankings.

Of course, there were other updates too. To learn about all the updates in detail, check out Google Webmaster Central.

2. Assess Your Current Google Ranking

In order to improve your Google ranking, it is essential for you to know where you currently stand. Luckily, there are several tools to help in this regard.

A. Use Ubersuggest to Know Your Website's Keyword Rank

If you have been targeting certain keywords in your page content, visit Ubersuggest so that you can assess your rank.

Firstly, you need to log in. Then, click on the Traffic Overview located under the competitor report. As a next step, enter your domain. Now, you can view the list of SEO keywords you rank for, an overview of your SEO keywords ranking, and the top pages.

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Scroll further down to see the SEO Keywords chart, which lets you know where you rank for main keywords.

B. Check Your Site Speed

Site speed is an important Google ranking factor. If your site loads slowly, you have a significantly lower chance of a high search position. It will impact your ability to convert too. According to the latest statistics, for every 100ms improvement in load time, Walmart witnessed a 1% increase in revenue. So, it is easy to spot the difference a change in load time can create.

To improve your Google rankings, it is vital to check your site speed. Run your own website speed test by using tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Website Speed Test, and WebPageTest to find out.

C. Check the Overall Health of Your Website

It is crucial to check the health of your site before you begin optimizing.

Have you seen a sudden decrease in organic traffic after years or even months of consistency?

Do you think Google has banned or de-indexed your site?

Thankfully, there are a lot of tools that can help you answer these questions.

For instance, use the MxToolBox Domain Health Report tool to check for major problems in five categories: blacklist, DNS, mail server, general site problems, and web server. You can work towards fixing them from thereon.

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Tip: To know whether you have been penalized by a major algorithm update, try out FE International's Website Penalty Indicator tool.

When you enter the necessary details, such as your domain and database, a graph appears showing your website traffic in relation to major update rollouts.

If you want to check for a Google penalty, you can try Google Search Console. Log in and search for the Security & Manual Actions report. It will tell you if Google has taken manual action against your website.

Note: The report is only shown if a human reviewer has determined that your website breaks the quality guidelines of Google. It doesn't tell you if a change in Google Algorithm has penalized your website.

In case you have a manual penalty, fix the problem and submit a reconsideration request to Google.

3. Assess Vital SEO Metrics

Now it is time to track and measure some of the most important metrics so that you know the areas that need improvement.

A. Organic Traffic

To know how many visitors land on your website, log in to your Google Analytics account. Then, check the acquisition channels report.

B. Organic Traffic Conversions

You must focus on the keywords that bring traffic to your website. Take the help of Google Search Console for the same. It shows the number of clicks you get for certain keywords in organic search results.

4. Ensure Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly

Your website must be mobile-friendly and prepared for a mobile-first Google.

Mobile devices account for about half of website traffic around the world. So, if you want a higher ranking, ensure your website performs well on mobile devices.

In January 2017, The Google Webmaster Blog stated:

“Starting today, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as high.”

In 2020, Google began sorting websites by mobile device friendliness (mobile-first indexing). In case your site is difficult to navigate, it will severely affect your rankings.

Fortunately, you can determine if your website is mobile-friendly by taking Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

All you need to do is enter your URL and click on “RUN TEST.”

The result states a “yes or no.” You even get a list of page loading problems. This way, you can take care of these issues and make sure your mobile website runs in a smooth manner.

How to make your Site Mobile-Friendly?

Here’s what you can do to make your website mobile-friendly:

• If your site is built on a famous CMS platform, such as Wix or WordPress, most of the themes are mobile-friendly. You may have to update your website to the most recent version to benefit from these features.
• Don’t use pop-ups that just won’t close.
• Ensure form fields and CTAs use huge, easy-to-tap buttons.

Note: These days, designers can build a mobile-friendly, professional, niche-based website for you if you don’t have one. But there is one thing you should know – they will take several days to build it.

Here’s a solution for this- use DashClicks’ Site tool and create a mobile-friendly, custom-branded agency website in just a few seconds. Pretty cool, right?

Listen Up: Mobile and local search share a strong connection. Google caters to hyper-local search, connecting brands and customers in the smoothest and fastest manner.

Therefore, ensure your Google My Business profile is fully updated and comprehensive.

For a person searching in your area, these profiles can serve as a deciding factor. Claim and update your business listing if you haven't already. Ensure you do the same for other local listing sites as well.

5. Look For Current Penalties and Fix Them

We have already discussed some ways in which Google can penalize you. Some other common practices penalized by Google include:

• Keyword stuffing or hidden text
• Hacked website
• Sneaky redirects
• Cloaking (full version of content is accessible to Google, but users get access to only partial content)
• User-generated spam

Note: You also risk a penalty if your website features less-than-valuable and thin content.

6. Do Keyword Research

If you want to get a lot of traffic and improve your website ranking, you should focus on using keywords relevant to your business.

Conduct keyword research and make a list of the best keywords to optimize your website. Do not forget to look for long-tail keywords, as they are used more often to search on Google.

Tip: To find long-tail keywords, you can use some tools such as keywordtool.io and Ubersuggest.

Refer to our Keyword Research for SEO Guide to find the right keywords to use in the content of your website.

7. Improve Google Rankings With On-Page SEO

After you determine which keywords you want to target to maximize your performance, you are now in the position to make meaningful on-page SEO changes.

How to perfect your on-page SEO to improve your Google rankings? Let's take a deeper look:

A. Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are short excerpts from a webpage that show up in search results of Google in order to quickly answer a question by the user. It is a great way to push your result to the top of the first page.

Here's how to target them:

Brainstorm and think of a question about your industry that searchers are frequently typing into Google. Then, figure out a way to incorporate the answer to it into your website's featured snippets.

B. Optimize Title Tags

Ensure all of your title tags are unique, descriptive, and cater to your targeted keywords. Do not use the same title tags repeatedly.

Some title tag optimization tips you should know are:

• Title tags can make-or-break traffic as well as conversions. So, put your potential visitors before Google.
• Use dashes ( – ) and pipes ( | ) between terms
• If you are an e-commerce company, you can use this format for title tags – [Product’s Name] – [Product’s Category] | [Brand Name]

8. Create Top-Notch Content

When you write amazing content, you provide real value to your site visitors.

When Google sees a large amount of valuable content which is neither filled with keyword stuffing nor spammy, it takes notice. Hence, you should definitely focus on creating top-notch content to boost your Google rankings.

9. Get Backlinks the Right Way

To determine the worth of your website, Google looks to other websites. When you list your website in spammy directory websites or pay for backlinks, you play with fire. Untrustworthy and spammy backlinks can lead to a Google penalty. It is something that’s just not worth it.

Instead of getting poor-quality backlinks, you must work towards earning high-quality alternatives. This way, you get to improve your website ranking.

High-quality links come from authority websites that have earned respect in Google’s eyes over time.

To get these links, you can do guest posting and then get an authority link back to your website.

Tip: To find blogs and websites to guest post for, search for your keywords or industry topics along with a phrase such as “Submit a Guest Post” and “Write For Us.”

Once you know a few blogs to submit a guest post to, you still have one more step to take. You want to see if writing the guest blog is even worth the effort.

For doing this, check the Domain Authority of the site by using a tool called Open Site Explorer.

A high domain authority is ideal, so consider websites that have a number at least larger than 30.

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10. Be Active on Social Media

Search engines such as Google try to take into account as much information available about you as possible when deciding whether to rank you. Social media is great in this regard. It helps search engines determine where they should place you if an individual searches for a topic that falls in your niche.

Search engines consider these questions specifically:

• How updated are your social media accounts?
• How active are your social media accounts?
• How many times does your site’s content get shared on social media platforms?

Also, as per the latest social media statistics, 4.59 billion people use social media around the world. This means, if you leverage social media, it can bring huge traffic to your site, and in turn, increase your search ranking.

Conclusion

After all is said and done, ensure you cover the following in order to improve your Google rankings:

• Dedicate time to entirely understanding your target audience and their needs.
• Conduct research for long-tail keywords and create useful content to solve their problems and make them return for more.
• Keep producing valuable content and promote it in every way you can.

Bottom line, to improve your Google rankings without getting penalized, you need to create valuable content, presented in a helpful manner. Also, keep in mind the things Google can penalize you for, such as bad linking practices, over-optimization, and duplicate content.

Also remember, it can take up to 6 months for your content to show up in the search results.

Now that you know how to rank higher on google without getting penalized, which of the above-mentioned ways you are going to start with first? Do let us know in the comments!