Why Content Marketing is Critical for SMEs

These days, it’s a must for businesses to establish an online presence to achieve their goals, both short term and long term. But this task needs consistent effort to ensure they build trust with their clients and customers and relay the right information to them.

Getting online goes beyond just building a website and social media presence. It’s important as well that small and medium enterprise (SMEs) create useful content they can share with people through blogs, social media accounts and article directories. This should boost their marketing efforts in addition to their advertisements whether online or offline. Also, this should help them compete with the large companies that are also embracing mobile technology today.

In this digital age, people rely on the internet for information that can help them solve problems, be it minor or major ones. As such, SMEs should make a way to create content that will achieve this purpose and engage their customers. It would be a good idea to come up with a strategy to make sure that you are creating the right content targeted at your specific audience and interesting ones that would keep them coming back to your site.

Do understand that when people are able to get free useful information about products and services they need, they are more likely to purchase from you. Consumers of today are smarter owing to the internet that provides them a vast amount of information on a daily basis. For this reason, they are able to distinguish between informative content as against the direct promotions done by traditional advertising. This means that while they may be affected by advertisements they see online and offline, the chance of them taking action is greater when they are able to obtain information targeting their emotions through interesting blog posts and articles.

Studies have shown that consumers do their research first before making a buying decision. According to Copyblogger chief executive Brian Clark, “people these days want to learn before they buy and be educated instead of being pitched to.

The Steps Involved

Content marketing basically involves four steps. These are content creation, content optimization, content distribution and content analytics.

When creating content, SMEs should make sure to focus on their industry. Topics can cover updates and trends in your industry, benefits of your products or services, related studies and other interesting facts. You can also include statistics and special reports. Also if you don’t have any reliable staff in your company to write your content, you can always use services available online including the freelancers.

In line with this, SMEs should use the right keywords and phrases for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. These need to be words that your customers would normally use when searching for your business offerings. Keywords can be included in the title and body of your articles or blog posts.

Once your content has been published, it also needs to be distributed to other channels such as article directories. You can also share them through your social media accounts including business pages. On social media, SMEs have the option to share the link of the blog post with a short description or create a note (Facebook) or an article (LinkedIn).

From there, determine how your content is doing after being published. This can easily be traced through the analytics features of the platform you’re using and your social media accounts.

Keep in mind that consistency and fresh content is key in driving traffic to your website or blog and in other places online where you are publishing your articles. People want to gather information they can use in their daily lives and if your business is able to do it, you can be sure to keep your followers and sustain your enterprise moving forward.