If you’re reading this, you’re probably looking for answers to a lot of questions relating to creating content for your business. You may also be wondering how you create different types of content that can help attract well targeted traffic to your website.
How to get started with writing content for local businesses? What are the various content types? Which ones are the most effective at attracting visitors to the website?
This guide will provide you with ideas and resources that will help you produce result-driven content suited for local businesses. But first let’s explore what exactly is content marketing.
In the context of local businesses, it’s basically a marketing strategy that is used to attract the right target audience and retain them by sharing valuable pieces of information relating to the business offering and services.
Importance of creating different content types for local businesses
For a local business, content marketing can help businesses communicate their offers, services, promotions, and important business information that the audience would find useful.
It’s a strategy used to entice customers to use the local business’s products or services while building long-term customer relationships and brand value.
Content marketing can also help businesses target and attract the right audience by providing valuable information relating to their services.
This can be useful to build authority and trust which can come in handy as you try to improve your conversion rates.
This is because your online content can help you connect with potential customers. If you are using a blog to bring in traffic, be sure to use original graphics so that people will be able to connect with your brand more easily.
You can also include CTAs within your content that encourages action.
Finally, publishing the right content can also help build topical authority and help you get found on Google for the relevant keywords.
Using content to attract leads at different stages
The objective of creating different types of content is to attract leads who are at different stages in the conversion funnel.
The diagram illustrates the different types of content that you need to be creating for the visitors at different stages in the funnel. In other words, it’s important to understand the intent of the reader when formulating the content marketing strategy.
The content marketing funnel maps the journey that potential customers take when making a decision, and it’s part of a larger overall content marketing strategy.
The content in each stage of the funnel supports the customer’s journey, and good content pushes your leads closer to purchasing your product or service.
Broadly, a prospective lead goes through 3 different stages; awareness, interest and desire.
Each stage represents their willingness to engage with the business and the content would suit the readers accordingly.
Depending on the target audience, content marketing can be seen as a long-term strategy used by local businesses to attract traffic to the website.
Types of content suitable for local businesses
As a content marketer, there are many content types for local businesses that you could choose from. It’s important to test each one out to understand which type of content will help you attract the right target audience across different platforms.
It only makes sense to design a marketing persona that is targeted at the proper demographic; otherwise, you risk getting the wrong traffic or none at all. As a result, choosing the correct type of content for your local business is crucial in content marketing for SMEs.
Let’s deep dive into some of the main types of content in marketing techniques that will help your local business grow on the internet.
Blogs and Articles
Blogs are an excellent approach to raising brand awareness for a local business while also delivering authentic, tailored, and unique content that will appeal to the proper audience who are looking for helpful content.
It also ties in well with the strategy to optimize the website for local SEO by publishing articles relevant to the niche.
Writing articles on various topics relating to specific niches can help local businesses to increase their website visitors by 55% and a 126% growth in leads.
It is however important to adopt certain strategies that can help capitalize on the benefits of blogging consistently. Some of the strategies include:
- incorporating relevant keywords that the businesses want to target;
- developing a good internal linking structure that keeps visitors on-site and engaged.
- building backlinks for the posts published to improve the relevance and build authority in the niche.
Case Studies
Similar to testimonials, case studies is a type of content that can help gain the trust of prospective customers. They work very effectively as it helps them directly relate to the problems they face which the business can help solve.
Case studies basically provide a detailed explanation of the problem faced by a client, actions taken to resolve and then the ultimate outcome. They have an expected structure that includes case descriptions, goals, steps taken toward those goals, and results.
Here’s how you can create an effective case study:
- Summarize the problem the customers were facing before they engaged with the business.
- Next, go over the actions taken by the business to solve this problem step-by-step.
- Provide a summary of the results that the customer achieved by using their services.
- Explain how the readers can use these services to solve the problem of their own.
The audience would find this very useful as it provides a reassurance that the local business can help them solve similar problems that they are facing.
For instance, an interior designing firm can showcase the various projects they have completed including information relating to the design brief, industry they operate in, budget, timeline etc.
Emails
Emails is a marketing channel used by most businesses that want to nurture and engage with prospects who have already shown some form of interest i.e. via subscribing to a newsletter, scheduling a call etc.
This content type can help local businesses continuously share any promotions or offers to potential leads or even past customers who may still be interested in the services.
The idea here is to increase the long term value of the customers by retargeting leads that have already been acquired.
Guides
A guide is a long-form blog post that covers a topic comprehensively. These could include how-to guides, troubleshooting, beginner guides etc. For certain businesses, this content type can work wonders.
For example, a plumbing business could publish cost guides for each of their services. A real estate agent could write a beginner’s guide on arranging a mortgage facility with the bank etc.
Research shows this type of content can provide better results in terms of search results as well.
The strategy here is to create guides for the business’s main areas of focus, and to then link them to relevant pages on the website. This will help people find the information they’re looking for and boost topical authority.
Videos
With the popularity of Tiktok and YouTube, videos have become increasingly popular. Its brief but impactful demonstrations by social media personalities to promote a company have gone a long way, and Tiktok is now considered one of the most powerful marketing and promotion tools available.
Businesses can use videos to showcase the various services that they provide or even short stories posted on TikTok or Instagram to keep the audience engaged.
It can also be used to demonstrate certain features that provide more information to the audience. The speed of the internet and the quality of videos have now made it extremely easy to watch videos and connect with people across regions at the convenience of their mobile phones.
Along with social media content, videos have the potential to be a powerful marketing tool when linked to the blogs or posts of the company. This would help connect the message to the website and brand and increase the website traffic.
Additionally, by utilizing both geotags and hashtags, social media celebrities can target their promotions more directly to locals, allowing them to find your business more quickly and easily.
Social Media posts
Social media posts are seen as essential tools that could give creators the added benefit of learning about user preferences through user-generated content where users can participate in surveys. This is a great way to build an online presence regardless of one’s financial budget.
There is no definitive answer on what form of content is the greatest. Instead, choose the most appropriate content style that appeals to your target audience.
The types of content you create will depend on the type of local business you run and the products or services you offer.
You are likely not going to have an idea of what works best, but it’s always good to publish various forms of content to find out what works and what doesn’t.
Press releases
Last but not least, press releases work great for local businesses as the objective here is to inform the media and general public about any specific announcements relating to the company. These include any new product launches, upcoming events, and so on.
These press releases provide free publicity and have the potential to create a buzz around your local community which can eventually increase brand awareness through word-of-mouth.
You need to make sure that you:
- Choose topics that are relevant to your audience
- Entice the media to share content that they think is relevant to talk about
- Cover all the relevant information relating to the update including the who, what and hows.
