Content marketing has truly reached its peak, and brands can no longer attract and engage customers with only content in their campaigns. Customers are looking for more in terms of value addition, which has given rise to branded content in marketing. However, branded content is not as new as you might think. It has been around since the late 1940s, but has become more mainstream recently. If your business hasn't jumped on the branded content bandwagon yet, it is high time to do so.

Read on to know more about branded content and incorporating it into your business.

What Is Branded Content?

Before we move on to how and when to use branded content, it is critical to understand what it means. Many people confuse branded content with adding logos and images of their brand to showcase their content. However, branded content goes far beyond that. Branded content is about sharing your company's value and vision with your customers through your content.

Branded content is not simply about generating sales or revenue, but eliciting an emotional response from your customers so that they feel connected to your brand.

How Is Branded Content Different From Content Marketing?

Content marketing is using your content to achieve your marketing goals. It is created with the audience as the focus in mind. However, branded content is more about showcasing what your brand stands for to attract people who share similar ethics and values.

Branded content usually generates relatively quick and effective actions from the customer, whereas content marketing produces more gradual results.

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Why Does Your Business Need Branded Content?

If your content marketing strategies are doing well, you may wonder why you even need branded content. There are several advantages to introducing branded content to your marketing roster. The major ones include:

1. It Helps Build an Emotional Connection

Humans are emotional beings who listen to their emotions more than anything else. By creating branded content that speaks to people's emotions, you can build a solid and lasting connection with people and turn them into loyal customers. It is seen that users who feel an emotional connection to a brand spend 2x more on that brand than those who don't. Therefore, it can significantly impact your business if you build that emotional connection with your audience.

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2. It Acts as a Reminder

In this age where competition is remarkably stiff, leaving your mark is one of the most challenging things to do. Market monopoly is not something brands achieve easily, so you have to rely on standing out from the crowd to be memorable to your audience. Branded content has 59% more recall than other digital ads. It leaves an imprint on people's minds that makes you unforgettable long after a specific ad campaign is over.

3. It Helps Improve Your Branding

Today, almost everything is digital and competition is cut-throat. Hence, the customer must be aware enough of your brand so that they pick you over your competitors in a flash. Branded content helps you frame your brand identity and makes your business recognizable to people quickly. Studies show that people support brands that take a stand for social causes.

4. It Creates Engagement and Loyalty

If you are tired of making posts after posts and running campaigns after campaigns with no real attention from people, it is time to switch to branded content. 27.5% of millennials block ads, and your audience often won't even see your ad. However, branded content is created in such a way that it pushes the consumers to give a response. People are more likely to support a brand after consuming its branded content through purchases, social media promotions, and other forums.

5. It Can Go Viral

In this age of digitization, becoming ‘viral’ is one of the easiest ways to capture market and audience attention. Branded content can easily make your brand go viral on social media platforms and snowball your popularity in a short amount of time.

6. Promotes Traffic and Leads

Getting traffic and leads for your website from various sources is critical to achieving business goals. They help you generate sales and revenue for your business. Branded content, although not created to generate leads and traffic, can produce enough curiosity among people to visit your website and even convert to your customers.

How to Create Branded Content for Your Business?

There's no one-size-fits-all rule when it comes to creating branded content, as no two businesses are alike. It is all about connecting with your audience at an emotional level. However, there are some specific tips you can implement to create the perfect branded content. These are:

1. Create Meaningful Content

When talking about branded content, quality will always overrule quantity. You need to focus on creating content that touches the minds of your audience so they remember you for a long time. That can only happen when you incorporate emotions, values, and knowledge into the content, no matter the format. Taking a social stance over an issue is one of the most common ways brands try to create branded content.

Here are some must-haves to create meaningful branded content:

• A unique and original concept.
• An emotional facet that connects with the audience.
• A gripping story.
• A big NO to sales pitches.
• A focus on current social and cultural issues.
• A drive to engage the audience.

2. Choose Your Platforms Correctly

Your platform also plays a vital role in establishing your brand identity. Creating excellent content isn't enough to reach your audience. You also need to find them at the right place to send your message. Be strategic about choosing your platform and ensure you have the right audience group on your chosen forum.

3. Have a Definitive Tone and Voice

When creating branded content, it is essential to set the tone of your content, as it will reflect your brand values. You need to follow a consistent style in all of your branded content, so be careful about what you want to depict and ensure that the message you're conveying is clear.

4. Have a Deeper Understanding of Your Target Audience

For your branded content strategies to work, you need a deeper understanding of your target audience's psyche. Consider their opinions on various social and intellectual issues and find out what would resonate with them the most to capture their attention.

5. Ensure the Content Has Visibility

Creating a single video or blog post on your website may not gather enough attention to achieve the desired results. You must build your branded content frequency across various platforms to ensure it receives ample visibility.

6. Diversify Your Content

Although your brand values and ideologies remain the same, giving your audience similar content will reduce its impact. You must find diversified and unique ways to send your message to your audience. Think out of the box and create innovative ideas for your content.

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7. Look Out for Your Competitors

Your competitors play a vital role in the effectiveness of your branding strategies. You must ensure that your branded content is different and better than your competition's. If all of your competitors are saying the same thing, you won't be able to capture the attention of your audience. Studying your competitors' branded content helps you determine what to do and what not to do.

8. Monitor and Measure Your Content

Like every other marketing strategy, having measurement mechanisms in place is also critical for branded content strategy. You need to determine the effectiveness of your branded content campaigns. For this, you can utilize various social media listening and other digital tools to monitor your progress.

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How to Create Branded Content for Different Platforms?

Branded Content on Instagram

Instagram is the choice of platform for many brands to showcase branded content, and not without good reasons. It is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms, with over 1 billion monthly users!

Branded content on Instagram is often created with the help of social media influencers. These influencers have many millions of followers who place a certain amount of trust in them.

By collaborating with these influencers, you can post videos of them using your products/services to capture the attention of their follower base. The influencer can tag your brand in their posts and share links to your products/website to promote your brand.

A great example of branded content on Instagram is the #meetanowner campaign run by the high-end automobile brand Subaru. For the campaign, Subaru found a few existing customers who had an influence on Instagram and asked them to post pictures with their Subaru vehicle and hashtags of the brand. The campaign was intended to show people that Subaru vehicles are designed for adventures and are reliable partners to take on your thrilling off-road travels. The fact that the people who owned the vehicle championed it made the claims much more reliable and realistic among adventure seekers.

Branded Content on Facebook

Right behind Instagram is another social media platform that rules the branded content forum. Facebook is one of the most influential social media platforms, with over 2.934 billion active users globally.

Creating branded content on Facebook is different from Instagram. Facebook requires you to get permission to become a sponsor or creator of branded content. The influencer who uses your content or products and tags your brand must also announce their partnership with the brand before they post your branded content.

We can see one of the best examples of using Facebook for creating branded content with Nike, one of the most popular sports brands in the world. If you check out the Nike Facebook page, you’ll ‌see that there is a great balance of product launches, scientific research around their products, charitable events that they are a part of, and sports personalities who wear their brand as they cross milestones in their career. Their page shows ‌they are reliable and way ahead of time than their competitors with the efforts they put into each product, all without even directly promoting any product through over-the-top sales pitches.

Wrapping up

Branded content is one of the most prominent ways to leave a mark on your customers in today's times. It shows the customer who you are and what you believe in, creating bonds far deeper than a high-quality product shoot or an engaging sales pitch could ever do.

You can get started with simple yet effective forms of branded content “ such as videos and banner ads “ before building up toward other forms of content gradually.

Ultimately, it is all about what you want your customers to believe about you.

Whether you are a small business, startup, or a multi-national corporation, branded content is effective for all.

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?

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.

There's a powerful marketing strategy you've yet to utilize effectively.

The best part of this technique is that it's absolutely free.

Using customer reviews in marketing is a powerful method of swaying an audience. While skeptics may hesitate to believe your words, they have little reason to disregard third-party opinions.

First, we will talk about how you can get customer reviews at no cost. Then, we'll show you the best ways to use that content for satisfying results.

How to Get Customer Reviews?

Obtaining honest reviews from customers is a simple task.

However, the exact process will vary depending on the method you intend to use to gather data. We recommend that every business take advantage of every review and testimonial channel that the internet offers.

Let's start with arguably the most important platform.

1. Google My Business

Every business is eligible to create a Google Business Profile.

A Google Business Profile allows business owners to control their online presence and any data about business operations.

Your profile will allow you to:

• Add business photos
• Establish NAP information (Name, Address, Phone Number)
• List your website
• List business hours
• Post status updates
• Collect and respond to customer reviews

Google's study purports that 60% of customers utilize a GMB profile found in search results to contact a business.

This is because a business with a complete GMB profile appears more legitimate than results without one. Additionally, the accessibility of information makes choosing one of these results, particularly from the local 3-pack, a no-brainer.

Furthermore, those featured brands show off their customer reviews with ease. These require a star rating, at a minimum, while also often featuring direct statements from the user.

Any brand can get customer reviews from its Google Business Profile. To create or claim one, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Google Business Profile Manager here.
2. Search for your business. Even if you’ve yet to use this tool, it’s possible that a profile already exists.
   If your business appears, look for the link that reads Claim this business. Click this. Then, skip to step 5.
   If your business does not appear click on Add your business to Google.
3. Enter your business name exactly as it’s registered. Then, select the most appropriate industry category.
4. Add the necessary information to complete your business profile.
5. You will now need to verify business ownership with Google.

In some scenarios, Google may choose to validate your business instantly. In all other cases, you will need to provide a verification code sent to your phone or email address.

Just like that, you now have your own GMB profile! Any time a user searches for your brand or uses related keywords, they can find your profile and leave a review.

To gather more customer reviews, you want your profile to show up in rankings. To achieve better rankings, be sure to optimize your profile frequently. Ensure that you fill out information for all categories and that it is consistent with other descriptions of your business online.

2. Get Your Brand on Social Media Platforms

Social media is an excellent way to get customer reviews. Although, the method will differ from the process described above.

The only social media platform that provides aggregated reviews like GMB is Facebook. There, like Google, you can create a separate page and profile for your business. This allows you to distinguish your profile from the business entity.

To create a Facebook business profile, you'll first need to create a personal profile. You can do so here.

Then, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your account. At the top of the page, click on Pages.
2. Click Create New Page.
3. Follow the step-by-step prompts to create and categorize your business page.

You can similarly use this page for your GMB profile. You can upload business photos, add business information, and post regular updates.

Customers will then be able to post reviews and comment on your updates freely.

Though other platforms may not allow for a similar experience, audience interaction remains invaluable. These next ideas apply to platforms like Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, etc.

Users will still be able to search for businesses on these social media platforms. While they cannot find obvious star ratings or a dedicated review section, follower comments are still visible.

These comments effectively act as reviews and testimonials. You may also ask your followers directly to share their experiences, positive or negative, in any given thread.

3. Sign Up for Local Directory Listings

Though listings sites may not be as powerful as they once were, they still offer legitimate SEO value.

Examples of local directories are Yelp, Yellow Book, and Foursquare. These sites categorize local businesses by industry to help local customers make connections.

These platforms function similarly to Google My Business or Facebook. You'll need to create a new profile or claim an existing one for your business. You'll then need to verify yourself as the owner.

After claiming or creating the profile, proceed to optimize the page with up-to-date business details. Then, users can readily find your company and leave reviews about their experiences.

Keep in mind that certain industries also have niche platforms available to them. For example, restaurants can sign up for services like UberEats, which lists your full offerings along with qualified customer reviews.

Be sure to run a quick search and investigate which directories apply to your brand. These sites are generally free and offer potential benefits to your overall SEO strategy.

4. Business Rating Sites

Business rating sites are not unlike directory listings. However, these tend to be primarily focused on consumer education and holding businesses accountable.

Examples of the sites we're referring to would include the Better Business Bureau or Trustpilot.

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Because these organizations take business ratings seriously, maintaining high review scores there may prove valuable for your success. They carry trust with consumers simply due to their brand power alone.

You can create your profile for free on sites like the BBB. While you're at it, you can also apply to get your company accredited by the BBB itself.

5. eCommerce Reviews

This tip applies specifically to brands that sell products or services online.

If you sell your products through a third-party distributor like Amazon, Overstock, or eBay, a customer review feature is available by default. Those platform owners want customers to understand the quality and trustworthiness of their sellers upfront.

If you choose to build your eCommerce site through Shopify or Weebly, you should enable customer reviews for each listing. After all, as much as 90% of customers search for reviews first before buying. Listing reviews right next to the product not only helps you collect more of them but may help to drive sales overall.

6. Direct Customer Surveys

Our final tip may seem obvious, but it's often underutilized.

If your brand is looking for new reviews, ask for them.

Too often companies focus purely on the data collection aspect. However, talking with your customers or prospects about their experience is an excellent way to show that you care and are listening.

One strategy is to utilize email marketing to fetch reviews from existing customers. Not only will it benefit you, but it can be an effective way to re-engage customers and keep them thinking about your brand.

If you're having a tough time getting cooperation, consider presenting a limited-time offer. This could be exclusive discounts or vouchers they can obtain in exchange for leaving a customer review.

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Using Customer Reviews in Content Marketing

Now that you've amassed a healthy number of customer reviews, it's time to put them to use.

Customer reviews serve as a persuasive marketing tool. These reviews can offer and help with:

• Social proof that your products or services are quality
• Relatable stories to help customers identify use cases
• Attracting new followers
• Generating new, compelling content
• Opportunities to show you care (particularly when responding to negative reviews)

Customer reviews can offer these benefits by simply existing on any of the aforementioned platforms. However, you can leverage them for even greater effect when leveraging the following strategies.

1. Feature Customer Reviews on Your Website

Your website is like a dynamic business card.

It's the core way that new and existing customers learn about who you are, what you offer, and how you can help them. Website content serves to educate, while also calling your audience to take action toward a purchase.

Customer reviews can help with that act of persuasion.

Consumers are savvier than ever. They're well aware that every brand is going to speak to their believed strengths and how they're better than the competitor. While that's all well and good, letting your customers do that work is more effective.

It's up to you how you choose to present reviews throughout your site. You can choose to have a dedicated section for them. However, we recommend interspersing them throughout the content to drive home key selling points.

For example, if a paragraph is speaking about a specific service, it features a related review. That testimonial serves as the exclamation point and can push prospects to take the next step.

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2. Leverage Customer Reviews in Paid Campaigns

This functions effectively the same as using them on your main website.

However, you’ll want to dial in on reviews that primarily speak to the campaign offer or promotion. These then offer the same powerful social proof as to the ones on your business profiles.

Once you have the review in hand, the creative possibilities are endless. You can utilize the review within the ad itself or disperse them throughout the landing page.

Specifically, try to create video content out of your reviews. If you can, ask clients to shoot a quick view of their experience. Almost everyone carries a smartphone with recording capabilities, and a basic video is all you need. In many cases, a “budget” video may appear more authentic and trustworthy than something that’s produced.

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3. Utilize User-Generated Content

User-generated content is any text, pictures, or videos created by your audience rather than your team.

Thanks to platforms like social media, the everyday individual has more of a voice. They might use that voice to express loyalty or passion for the brands they love. If you're doing your job well, you may find yourself receiving UGC periodically.

You can also incentivize your audience to create UGC.

For example, some brands may choose to promote giveaways. The giveaway itself promotes attention and brings in new leads simply because you're giving back to the community with free goods.

However, rather than just asking for names and numbers, task your followers with content creation.

You can start with something as simple as asking for real customer stories. These are like reviews, but give your followers a greater opportunity to elaborate about themselves and how your company impacted their lives.

Alternatively, you can prompt followers with a creative prompt. A great example of this is Coca-Cola's #ShareaCoke campaign. They added names to all of their bottles and asked users to show themselves sharing a coke with someone in their lives. This resulted in a massive influx of user photos posing with the drink.

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Even though those photos don't have text, the photo tells the entire story. That's the power your brand can have with UGC.

4. Use Customer Feedback to Guide Future Content

This final tip focuses less on presenting reviews to others. Instead, you'll be reading the testimonial for feedback. This applies to both positive and negative reviews.

Look carefully at what your audience is saying. Identifying negative patterns is particularly important as it indicates a problem worth addressing.

Let's look at our own company, DashClicks, for inspiration. While most of our clients fully understand the tools we offer, others may need more direction.

Rather than ignoring and alienating potential customers, we created a video series showing off various use cases for each software. Not only does this allow us to get ahead of potential concerns, but it also helps us create legitimately worthwhile content for our audience.

Look to your reviews and customer experiences for similar inspiration. Then, plan out new and compelling content that speaks directly to what your audience needs.

Get Customer Reviews to Work for You

Customer reviews are a requirement for businesses to survive.

In a world where the internet gives access to so many options, audiences need proof that your brand is worth the cash. Few things are more persuasive than the opinion of an outside party.

Remember, customer reviews offer:

• Social proof that your brand offers quality
• Insight into how others use your products or services
• Emotional connection from hearing audience stories
• A final push to convince prospects to become buyers

You can leverage these benefits in several ways. Primarily, you want to always seek out ways to disperse relevant reviews into your existing content. Let it serve as the punctuation on any selling points.

If you need more customer reviews, make sure that your brand is listed on the available listing sites online. That also includes social media platforms, business review sites, and more. Finally, ask for specific stories from your customers when possible.

As your brand grows, you'll find that more customer reviews will appear organically. Be sure to stay on top of these reviews, respond to your audience, and become a business that puts the customer experience first.

Content marketing has become a trend, especially in the highly competitive B2B marketing landscape. More and more companies are now investing in it as it works wonders for all types of businesses and produces better results than most other marketing tactics.

Content marketing is also a proven strategy to grow audience engagement, enhance your brand authority, and drive sales. For many businesses, content marketing works even when other tactics stop working.

Producing consistent & high-quality content can be a game-changer for your business. Here are some of the major benefits of content marketing that you should absolutely consider.

1. It Improves Organic Visibility & Search Traffic

To rank higher on Google, you need to have higher domain authority, and for a higher DA, you need to publish content that can earn quality backlinks. Google also prefers authoritative content and ranks it higher.

To earn Google's love, your content should also meet the E-A-T factor, i.e., Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

You can check the overall content quality of the page based on the following factors.

• The Purpose of the Page: Your page should have a beneficial purpose. It should offer value and information that helps users. Let's discuss what it means.

• The Beneficial Purpose: It's a major quality indicator according to Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (SQEG). According to these guidelines, you should create a page to help users and provide them with the relevant information. In other words, it shouldn't be designed just to make money.

• Expertise, Authoritativeness, and TrustworthinessLet's see how Google determines the E-A-T of a page.

• The E-A-T Factor:
• Ā Expertise: It stands for the expertise of the main content creator. Adding information about the website or the main content creator helps a page rank higher, as Google will consider the creator's credentials while evaluating the content.
• Authoritativeness: It refers to the authoritativeness of the main content creator, the main content itself, and the website.
• Trustworthiness: It refers to the reliability of the main content creator, the main content itself, and the website.
• Quality and Volume of Main ContentBoth the quality and volume of main content are crucial for ranking. You can also create pillar content for this purpose.
• ReputationGoogle also considers the reputation of the website or the author of the main content.

Traffic also increases along with improvement in rankings and search visibility.

To attract tons of traffic, you should do the following:

A. Create quality content

B. Optimize it for the relevant keywords

C. Offer a beneficial purpose to the readers

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The SEO advantage you get through these activities is one of the major benefits of content marketing.

2. It Builds Brand Awareness

Brand awareness defines your customers' level of familiarity with your brand. So, beyond a basic knowledge of your brand and its logo, brand awareness conveys everything that differentiates your brand from others. It also entails why someone should choose your products or services from the different options available on the shelf.

New brands have a long way to go to establish their brand identity. They can start by asserting their presence and getting their "foot in the door."

Pro Tip: Use content to build brand awareness and differentiate your brand from others.

Here are a few steps to build brand awareness.

• Know your audience and analyze their behavior
• Determine your goals and create a content strategy
• Create brand awareness using your blog content
• Create communities and regularly interact with them
• Leverage email marketing to amplify your reach

3. It Increases Brand Affinity

Brand affinity is synonymous with a customer's natural liking for a product or brand. It's the kind of customer relationship every business strives for. It represents the collective feeling that the customer feels while experiencing different brand elements such as content, quality, user experience, website, sales, customer support, etc.

Since it's directly related to the utility, it also conveys that the brand is relevant to the buyers' needs and best suits them.

Forging such affinity adds loyal customers to your brand who are most likely to make a purchase. Content marketing helps you achieve brand affinity if you consistently publish quality content. Remember that your objective shouldn't be limited to assisting the customers. Rather, it should be to delight them.

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4. It Helps You Build Thought-Leadership

Some business leaders go beyond the traditional route and attract the limelight by building thought leadership. Seth Godin, Oprah, Anthony Robbins, Dave Ramsey, and John Assaraf are thought leaders who are highly acclaimed professionals and experts in their respective fields.

As a marketer, people expect you to be an expert in your field so that they can trust your word. Apart from that, thought leadership is not limited to personal branding; it's much more than that. To establish yourself as a thought leader, you must exhibit some social proof. It includes driving traffic to your website, building brand authority, and nurturing and converting leads.

Thought leadership is also used as a strategy by content marketers to build credibility and differentiate themselves from others. When someone is recognized as an expert, people consider them a go-to resource for advice and information in their field. It leads to hundreds of marketing benefits. Therefore, they are expected to create and promote tons of educational content to help others and strengthen their position as a thought leader. They are also supposed to be active in their community and social media.

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Tips to Implement Thought Leadership

• Know your audience well and keep on learning about them
• Be active on various social media platforms
• Publish educational content and distribute it aggressively
• Do thorough and regular competitor analysis
• Create content that adds value and helps people stay on top of trends
• Be original and genuine

5. It Helps You Establish Your Expertise and Brand Authority

You may not be able to achieve brand authority overnight, or even after a lot of time, yet it's essential to succeed as a business. It comes with unmatched benefits. The biggest challenge for a new business is to build trust, which you can easily overcome by building brand authority.

At some point, trust leads to sales. Here are a few tips for building brand authority through content marketing.

• Use your content to answer people's queries in your niche
• Develop case studies and create newsworthy reports and updates
• Collect proof of expertise by promoting reviews and case studies
• Collaborate with other brands with authority
• Leverage the authority of experts, both in-house and freelancers
• Share secrets, strategies, and tips that are not so common

Apart from the above tips, here are other ways to help you build your authority:

• Pick a topic and conduct in-depth research on it
• Increase your knowledge through
• Attending training programs and courses
• Networking
• Attending industry events, seminars, and webinars
• Reading reputed blogs in your niche
• Tracking the latest trends through social media
• Keeping yourself updated through forums and channels like Reddit
• Creating unique content based on the insights gathered

6. It Allows You to Use More Touchpoints to Generate Quality Leads

A viable sales lead requires 6-8 marketing touches, and you need content to create these many touchpoints. Unlike a few decades ago, when a customer had exposure to just the print media or TV, they go through lots of digital content these days before making a decision. So, the path to purchase has become complex. There can be many twists and turns here, and you never know which touchpoint can turn out to be decisive in helping them make the final purchasing decision.

Customers' apathy towards traditional marketing and advertising methods is increasing. Sales methodologies are also changing rapidly. People don't trust advertising completely these days; instead, they prefer to conduct more independent research before getting convinced. Since different people are exposed to different touchpoints, their journey is also not always the same.

Here are some popular brand touchpoints:

• Product reviews
• Videos
• Blog posts
• Ads
• Social media posts
• Business Listings

Content marketing ensures that the prospects pass through the appropriate interactions to determine sales-readiness. At the beginning of the buyer's journey, customers need more informative content to raise their awareness about your products and services. But, this information is often inadequate.

At the next stage, they need detailed information to compare your product with other similar products available in the market.

Pro Tip: Create content according to the different marketing and sales funnel stages.

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7. It Helps You Build and Maintain a Loyal Customer Base

According to MarketingProfs and CMI study, 75% of B2B marketers have successfully used content marketing to build trust and create a loyal customer base.

The ultimate objective is to create a foolproof reputation for your business that makes customers' purchase decisions easier. Content marketing allows you to build a loyal fan base that regularly engages with your content. A powerful content-led brand can achieve its objectives and maintain an existing customer base, all the while adding new customers.

Here are seven steps to building a loyal customer base.

• Define your target audience with vivid detail
• Establish honest dialogue and have an authentic voice
• Maintain high standards of content quality
• Use storytelling wherever possible
• Discover your passion and focus
• Entertain, inform, and engage using your content, don't just sell
• Offer outstanding customer experience and incredible value

8. It Leads to Improved Social Media Engagement & PR

Social media engagement is measured using likes, comments, and shares. The number of followers is always a positive indicator of your success on social media. Ultimately, the engaged audience drives tangible results, sales, mentions, click-throughs, and revenue.

So, what should you do to improve engagement on your website and social media channels? Here are a few tactics to try -

• Use social media analytics and track the sudden ups and downs in engagement
• Define your social media engagement goals such as conversion, changing the customers' perception of your brand, and attracting business leads.
• Know your customer, so you can define the language, tone, and resources that resonate with your audience
• Keep the conversation going
• Show your human side
• Keep your response timeless

Knowing your customer will also help you figure out the right social media channels and brand voice for your campaigns. It also allows you to determine the type and timing of publishing content.

To know more, read the 30 Content Marketing Tactics You Can Try.

9. It Helps You Build a Robust Sales Funnel

Content is not created just for its sake. Every piece of content that we consume is created for a specific purpose. Online content is produced for several objectives such as:

• To achieve a business goal
• To create awareness
• To get sign-ups for a newsletter
• To educate readers about a product
• To help customers make a purchase decision

Even the seemingly funny and silly pieces of content are created to stimulate a specific response. The content we consume online 24x7 is part of a specifically crafted content marketing funnel strategy. The ultimate objective is to attract customers' attention and make them loyal towards a brand.

What is the Content Marketing Funnel?

When a potential customer considers a purchase, he goes through a journey, which we can visualize using the content marketing funnel. It is now an integral part of content marketing strategy formation.

Different content pieces are needed to support the customer journey at different stages. For example, a person who is not yet familiar with your brand will not be interested in a product comparison study.

It can happen at a point when the customer is fully aware of the product and the brand. Good content pushes the customer to the next stage in the sales or marketing funnel.

The four major stages in the content marketing funnel are categorized as follows:

• Awareness
• Evaluation
• Purchase
• Delight

Every customer has a different journey as there can be more touch points involved before someone makes a purchase. This is what creates a diverse customer experience. As each stage has a distinct purpose in this journey, you should present different types of content in those stages.

Here is an overview of how content can be used to match different stages in the overall customer journey ā€” right from discovery to purchase. This customer journey map will help you leverage content marketing to achieve your marketing and sales objectives.

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10. It Helps You Save Money on Your Marketing Strategy

Content doesn't come cheap, so content marketing is considered expensive and beyond the reach of startups and cash-strapped small businesses.

A blog content might cost you around $150 to $3000 a post if you hire freelancers to write it for you. However, hiring a full-time writer will be more cost-effective as you need content regularly.

Content marketing wins the battle over other forms of marketing such as paid ads and traditional marketing in the long term, so investment in high-quality content will always pay you back.

Conclusion

To drive results from content marketing, you should have a well-documented content strategy, and you should audit it periodically. There is no reason for it not to work if you implement it in a wise, timely manner. Regular audits and measurements will ensure that you are working in the right direction. It will also help you discover what works best for your business.

If you are new to content marketing, please go through this Beginner's Guide to Content Marketing.

Further reading:If you want to know how content marketing helps businesses, go through the following articles.

11-Point Content Marketing Checklist Proven to Boost Your Engagement

Ep.3 ā€“ How We Multiply One Piece of Content and Overflow the Web to Get High Valued Incoming Leads

Almost every organization is developing unique and engaging content these days, which is why there's a shallow entry barrier for content marketing. Though easy and cost-effective, most brands are unable to utilize it to the fullest to achieve their organizational objectives.

It happens partially because the bar is getting higher and higher every year. What worked yesterday may not be working today. High-quality and appealing content receives the lion's share of traffic and eyeballs, and the remaining brands end up fighting for a tiny amount of traffic.

According to a 2020 AHREFs study, around 90% of all content online receives almost zero traffic from Google. It might not sound very comforting for the startups, especially those not having sufficient cash to spend on content marketing.

This article discusses how to implement content marketing in the lowest budget to achieve the desired results.

Plan Your Content Marketing Campaign

When you begin implementing online marketing, you are confronted with multiple choices. Running PR and social media campaigns and creating podcasts and videos can be on top of your mind, but soon you may find it overwhelming. It can grow even more overwhelming when your budget is tiny.

According to a Microsoft study, people start losing attention after about 8 seconds, and it is falling further every year.

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Content is exponentially increasing in volume. So, to grab the user's attention, you need to be diligent and focus on quality and engagement.

The sheer number of online marketing channels used for your online marketing campaigns can be devastating as it decreases focus and leads to poor management.

In this competitive environment, you need to choose one or two channels and put in your best performance.

To compensate for the users' decreasing attention span and content visibility, you may run short-term campaigns like getting featured on prominent platforms, news sites, and channels.

For example, you can promote your products on Product Hunt or increase your visibility by getting featured in Hacker News.

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Find opportunities to speak in industry events. Create podcasts and share them on different platforms.

Through these action steps, you can increase your market understanding and create better opportunities to be in front of your target audience.

Here are the four tips to crack the content marketing code for startups.

1. Set Your Goals

Goal setting is a crucial step as it serves many purposes, such as communicating the business objectives to the team, tracking progress, and team management. It also helps provide direction and focus to the team and optimize team performance.

Your organizational goals keep your team motivated even after a setback.

Pro Tip: You will find your goals easy to achieve if you split them into smaller objectives and even smaller targets for better measurement.

Setting goals is essential to keep your eyes on the bigger picture and prevent your team members from feeling overwhelmed.

To create awareness and buzz around your brand, you can do the following:

• Organize an industry event for better networking and build industry relationships
• Organize PR activities
• Build a blog or set up a podcast channel to create awareness and drive traffic to your website

2. Define Your KPIs

With well-defined content KPIs, you can easily measure your performance. It would help if you had exact and specific targets to easily track your performance. Here are some of the content marketing KPIs you can follow:

• Unique Website Visitors
• Downloads
• Time (spent) on page
• Inbound Links
• Shares
• Comments and interactions
• Cost per Click (CPC)
• Cost per Lead (CPL)
• Number of Leads
• Annual Contract Value (ACV)
• Influence (Leads, opportunities, or closed deals)
• Conversion rates
• Followers and subscribers

You can have specific targets such as publishing 30 press releases by September or 10 keyword-oriented blog posts every month as pillar content on your website. You can also set marketing targets by hosting five meetings with micro-influencers every month.

3. Use Appropriate Messaging

Your marketing messaging is crucial to your startup's success as it helps you convey the value and benefit your product or services offer your target audience. You should carefully plan it as it's used everywhere, from social media posts to ad scripts and blog posts.

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Conveying the right message moves your prospects down the sales funnel, helping you convert your prospects into leads and paying customers. You can engage with your audience by discussing their pain points and how you can offer a unique and practical solution for the same.

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Pro Tip: Content marketing messaging should be educational and not salesy.

Pro Tip: Every time you create content, your audience anticipates a story from you. So, be a storyteller.

Your messaging should vary according to the stage of the user in the marketing funnel. The message for the first-time website visitor shouldn't be the same as you would like to flash in front of someone who is in the consideration phase and have already received a couple of drip emails.

4. Use Various Promotion Techniques

When you plan to implement online marketing, you are confronted with numerous choices. Running PR and social media campaigns and creating podcasts and videos can be on top of your mind, but soon you may find it daunting when you realize you have budget and time constraints.

Would you like to know the secret recipe of success in content marketing? Publishing more and more content is not a standard formula. On the flip side, it can be counterproductive. To drive maximum value and ROI, focus on generating fewer content pieces. What you can do instead is to repurpose and reuse this content into various other forms of content and take it to the audience by scheduling and rescheduling it on social media.

For example, we can create a webinar or a long tutorial video and split it into small videos and audio clips. You can reuse these small clips as social media posts or blog posts to turn them into rich media. People work hard on producing content, but once content is published, they gather dust on their website or YouTube channel.

The best content strategy for startups is to extract the maximum juice from your content by repurposing it into a blog post, pro tips, actionable insights, a slide deck presentation, an infographic, a picture message, a small video, a podcast, etc. This way, you will have enormous content to share on social media for a long time, eventually decreasing your content product cost and increasing your content marketing ROI.

So essentially, you can implement content marketing for startups without an astronomical budget if you know how to effectively reuse it.

The success rate in content marketing is relatively low because the bar is getting higher and higher. With 79% of the marketers using content marketing, the competition increases almost every day. People are no longer happy with regular content that adds little or no value. They want powerful yet compact content that adds value. Such content also increases engagement and ROI. Complacency can kill you even if there is no entry barrier in content marketing.

The big brands produce excellent content because they have the funds and resources to invest. It has raised the bar for midcap and smaller companies. Apart from that, millions of writers, marketers, and brands create free content because they want visibility.

How to Make Content Marketing Work for Your Startup?

Another major issue responsible for the deteriorating visibility of content is people's waning interest in branded content. So, unless your content resolves the reader's issues and addresses their pain points, they are unlikely to spend time reading your content. Here are a few things you can try to make content marketing work for your startup.

• Focus: Don’t work on multiple channels as it may overwhelm you and bring down your overall performance. Master just a few channels and put in all your efforts.
• Quality: Acquiring proficiency and producing quality content takes time. So, rather than focusing on the metrics, you should focus on the quality, especially in the initial phases. When quality becomes a habit, it becomes easier to produce content people love.
• Consistency: If you think the compounding effect is applicable only to finance, you might be wrong. Content marketing is also an excellent example of the compounding effect. As you start building your content repository, you start getting noticed by the search engines and attracting traffic through them. Gradually the traffic starts increasing exponentially. That is probably why the big brands term content marketing as miraculous.

But, simply because content marketing is so effective, you shouldn't deduce that producing more content is akin to achieving the best results. Holly Pels says that creating more content can be counterproductive as your cost shoots up and quality worsens.

Create Memorable Content

Startups use content marketing to produce their go-to marketing messages. But here's the catch. Lots and lots of companies are making similar content to get noticed. So, to differentiate your content from others, you need to create remarkable content. That's perhaps a significant reason why startups don't succeed in content marketing.

SEO and social clicks should lead to fan following and conversion. If it doesn't happen, your website fails in its ultimate objective ā€” brand building.

Writing is about crafting content that matches your audience's interest, resolves their problems, embodies your tone of voice, and creates a fan base. Uniqueness is the essence of successful content marketing.

Pro Tip: Create unique content and make it memorable. Creating poor quality or generic content equals creating no content at all. With the run-of-the-mill content, you won't succeed in content marketing.

Good content strengthens your brand and makes a product top of mind when your prospect decides to buy the products or services similar to yours.

Some famous brands share a slice of their office life, employee stories (workplace storytelling), and an inside look at company culture, which often generates curiosity. It also helps make the content go viral. It works both ways. When employees are encouraged to share their stories online, it builds an attractive and lovable work culture. On the flip side, your customers trust and respect your organization when they see that employees are valued, and the information comes directly from them.

Pro Tip: To automate employee advocacy programs, you can use an employee advocacy tool like EveryoneSocial.

Buffer's Open Blog and Vanguard's employee stories are great examples of how you can use employee stories to enhance branding.

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Adobe's workplace storytelling on the Adobe Blog and social media is also an excellent example of it.

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Content marketing is highly effective for startups, but you shouldn't expect immediate results for keyword rankings, links, or views. However, in the beginning, it will help you get market validation for different ideas.

In the later stages, you'll learn how to leverage different content pieces to attain your SEO, lead nurturing, and PR objectives. Startups have an advantage over established brands in terms of agility, so they should focus on building a community first. Later on, you can produce 10X content to beat your closest rival.

How to Do Content Marketing on a Small Budget?

Here are a few things you can try to implement content marketing for startups at a small budget.

• Create a YouTube channel
• Join or launch an industry podcast
• Seek speaking opportunities at industry events and conferences
• Host and record webinars and share them on social media
• Create branded content
• Leverage influencer marketing
• Join online communities
• Create industry reports, stats, manuals, and trends
• Exert your presence on ProductHunt
• List your products on AppSumo and eBay
• Share your blog posts and articles on LinkedIn Pulse and Medium
• Repurpose your content into different content formats
• Split large content pieces such as a long video or a blog post into small social media posts

Conclusion

Content marketing is the best strategy for building communities, conducting online marketing, increasing organic visibility, and generating and capturing demand. Still, many people don't succeed because they lack focus, commitment, and consistency.

The key to success is focusing on a limited number of channels and initiatives as soon they start getting overwhelming. Choose your initiatives according to the interests and preferences of your audience, so you can get immediate feedback and leads.

Choose the channels where your target audience spends most of their time. Try to master one channel before jumping on to the next. If you try to manage too many things simultaneously, even the best startup marketing campaigns will fail.

Continue tracking and measuring to explore what works best in your niche and repeat those activities with a fresh perspective.

Suppose you canā€™t afford quality content or have a problem finding excellent writers. In that case, you can avail DashClickā€™s white-labeled content services to deliver your clients beautiful and unique written content like clockwork. Itā€™s the best way to generate more organic traffic and leads.