Content marketing is a huge field that many small business owners find overwhelming, and for good reason. It can be just as difficult to know where to start as how to best market to your target audience.

Part of the problem of narrowing down your options stems from the term “content” itself. Almost as vague as the word “life” or “beauty,” what are we really talking about when we say content? How about the word “marketing” for that matter? Lastly, why should you be concerned with answering these questions at all?

Creating the Right Content

Customers prefer small businesses that produce custom content and articles instead of ads. The custom-content approach feels more personal and fulfills customers’ expectations in terms of what they’re looking to get out of your brand.

Nearly four out of five customers also believes that small businesses dedicated to creating and putting out custom content are concerned about fostering closer relationships with their customers, according to recent statistics discussing the benefits of content marketing for small businesses.

Even giving some of your products away in the form of ebooks, complimentary trial offers and promotional demos can put you in the good graces of customers and lead to increased sales down the road. How? Customers “buy into” the relationship and decide to go with your company over the other guy’s.

Importance of Visual Content

An especially potent ingredient of content marketing is infographics. Infographics are simply charts and diagrams that your company can use to quickly educate customers in an entertaining way.

Called the perfect way to convey content in the age of big data, infographics couple elements of visual design, engaging images and explanatory text to get time-strapped customers up to speed of what your company can offer them.

Infographics are a great resource for small businesses to draw on for mostly practical reasons but also for a few deeper psychological reasons. The easy stuff first – infographics allow you to increase your traffic and brand awareness by reaching out to customers on a whole range of mobile devices.

Even if they can’t make out every word of text on tablets or Smartphones with limited screen space, they can definitely get the gist of what you’re conveying about your company or industry trends since you’ve included graphs, diagrams and other visual design elements.

The deeper psychological reason that people like infographics, though, is that text or visual, or content alone is increasingly seen as limited. Text can have customers reflect on issues more deeply while visual content gives an easily grasped thumbnail impression of the issue…yet each taken separately is limited.

By combining both, you can draw on the benefits of both and reach a synergistic whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Goal-directed Content Marketing

Focusing exclusively on gorgeous visual designs or trying to take on ten different types of content marketing in one month might actually be a fool’s errand. Your content marketing should have clear goals and market according to each customer’s phase in the buying cycle.

Some customers might know that they have a problem but not know how your company can help them find a solution. Other customers, more developed along the buying cycle, have moved past the awareness stage and have the intent to sit down and make an online purchase from your company.

These two kinds of customers are actually quite distinct from one another. Do you think that they want the same content, or would each benefit from customized content that addresses their current needs. Of course, each would prefer customized content, so for small businesses to blitz customers with generic ad copy is clearly counterproductive, and maybe even insulting to customers.

Create Content for Specific Customers

You still need to create and promote content with a broad appeal for customers at the awareness stage. This can be likened to the idea of “casting a wide net” on social media to increase general brand awareness and let potential customers know what you do best.

Create and market more specialized content to customers who are in the intent or purpose stages – i.e., ready to pull the trigger on a sale. You might want to create blog posts with more advanced Q&A topics for these kinds of customers.

To make it more personal considering just speaking to your customer about their current problems and conveying your professional expertise on the matter without pandering or, worse yet, hawking your products.

Making content marketing more customizable also depends on noticing current trends – if customers hop off of your site after one page, then you might want to offer a free ebook or offer right off the landing page. It’s all about your customers.

Contact us today to find out how you can optimize your website and have more content that suits your audience. WebTech Marketing Services is your go to marketing company to optimize your website for all the right reasons!