Ashville small businesses pay little attention to content when marketing their business through a website, blog, e-book, or any other online platform. We commonly believe that good content is an excellent design to attract more audiences. While a good design and a picture gallery are essential for marketing home builders, a mechanic needs a different mentality. Regardless of the industry your small business is in. You need good content to rank higher in search engine results!
Content Marketing for Ashville NC, small businesses can be a tricky task based on what it is you do. If your field is highly technical and requires specific knowledge, it becomes difficult to market your content as your target audience may not necessarily have all that technical knowledge. This blog will talk about the lessons we have learned that can make your marketing content attractive enough to help you get more prospects.
Content Marketing Lessons For Small Businesses in WNC
In the competitive market of WNC small businesses, it is imperative to understand how to build long-lasting relationships with prospects and clients. All of this can be achieved if you can provide your target audience with quality and relevant knowledge and research. Higher quality content has been found to increase rankings and result in a better viewer experience. Small businesses can market through these channels:
- Websites
- Blogs
- Guest blogs
- Press releases
- Social media platforms
- Videos
- FAQs
- Email newsletters
- E-Books
- White papers/Case Studies
1. Think About the Questions Your Clients and Potential Clients May Have
Adding content to your marketing platform needs to target your clients and prospective clients in the best possible manner. For example, clients may be interested in knowing the procedures involved in staging a home for sale or the types of pests they may encounter on their property. At the same time, some might be more interested in knowing why their brakes squeal.
You must identify those commonly asked questions. Once you have identified those questions, use your expertise and knowledge to answer them most simply and understandably. By answering these questions, you have the opportunity to build trust and provide them with the information they are looking for.
2. Use Different Mediums for Content
We all know that a picture is worth 1000 words. Hence, the content that focuses on the visual representation of work attracts more audiences as most audiences are not interested in reading heaps of paragraphs.
Although Asheville small businesses may find text the easiest form to reach out to clients, in many cases, it is more beneficial to use videos, pictures, and infographics to get your message through. Videos and photographs are vital as they allow you to showcase your skills and talent. If your audience sees a video of you changing brake pads, they will understand the process and get a clear idea of the skills used behind your work.
Another advantage of having visual representation is that it connects you with your client better by promoting the feeling of personal affiliation.
3. Make Sure to Remain Location Specific
Most small businesses operate in a specific geographical area, which requires you to focus on content related to that area. We refer to these as local landing pages or geographical landing pages. With them, you will want to avoid generic information and provide as much area-specific information as possible.
Providing location-specific content about Asheville, Hendersonville, Black Mountain, etc., will help you attract local audiences that are more likely to turn into clients. People looking on the internet to hire someone to fix a leaking faucet or change the oil in their car are only interested in those who service their area or are close by. Therefore, if you want to create the audience’s trust and want them to hire you for your services, you need to focus more on area-specific information.
4. Keep Your Website Updated
One of the biggest mistakes that most WNC small businesses make in marketing their business is not updating their blogs or websites. Often they plan to post once a month, then they get busy, and the next thing you know, it’s a year or more later, and they still have “Welcome to Our Blog” as the only post. Or they post their content only when they think they have something interesting to share with their prospects and clients. Unfortunately, this is the primary reason that their rankings are affected on search engines in a negative way.
If you are interested in maintaining good rankings, then you should constantly update your content. Search engines like Google aim to provide users with the most relevant and updated results, which is why they prioritize the newest and best content. Constantly updating your content and having an active blog will let Google know that you have the latest and most relevant content on your site that needs to be shared with your clients.
Please note that updating content does not always mean updating text. You can also share pictures or videos of your latest work or projects. This is the easiest way to keep your content updated and engage your clients.
5. Do Not Forget to Recycle Older Content
Recycling content is important if you have maintained a blog for many years. Even if some old content gained popularity and was very successful, you need to update and polish it with the latest content. Alternatively, you can upgrade the information in that blog and post it again.
The latter approach is easier and more convenient to create new content that would save your time and help you rank higher on social media and search engines. Many Asheville small businesses seem to be unwilling to recycle content for various reasons, such as the need to keep a record. They believe keeping old content will add to their reputation. But the truth is that majority of the users give more value to the latest content.
6. Write Long-Form Content
Although writing long-form content may be a little more complicated, let me tell you that the effort will be worth the return. A good rule of thumb is that a blog boat should be 800-1,200 words. Long-form content usually consists of 2,500 - 5,000 words. My best advice is to use as many words as you need to cover the subject. You will also want to look at your competitors and see what kind of word count they have. The search engines tend to rank articles or blogs with better information, which may be the longer articles.
7. List Articles Help Readers Skim
List articles or listicles (such as this one) are easy to read and skim. This makes them highly popular among a variety of audiences. Most users have very short attention spans and may leave your content if there are no subheadings. People prefer listicles as they give them a chance to look at the headings and perhaps read a few sentences under each subheading to understand what it is about. In this way, they can skim the content in less time.
However, ensure that the subheadings are informative and the content is well organized. The whole idea behind list articles is to allow the audience to get the gist of the post just by looking at the subheadings. It is beneficial for prospects who do not have the time to read the whole blog post.
8. Social Media
Social media platforms can be where trust is built between the small business and the client in Asheville or Western North Carolina. They need a platform to contact you conveniently when they are ready to hire you for your services. Social media platforms are great at helping to promote yourself to most clients.
A word of caution, don’t build your entire business on social media platforms. They are just a means to an end. You wouldn’t want to build a house on rented land, nor should you build your business on social media (rented land).
9. Emails
Email is a great way to build trust between you and your prospects. Many prospects will contact you to discuss the possibility of hiring you for your services.
Final Thoughts
We at Cube Creative Design are determined to help Asheville small businesses grow with the best marketing content across all online platforms. We can certainly help you with SEO to target and attract maximum traffic. We have vast experience in marketing and have successfully helped businesses grow significantly. If you are interested in marketing your small business in the best possible manner. Contact us as we would be happy to have a free, no-obligation conversation with you.
