How To Do Content Marketing On A Small Budget

Content marketing is about building your brand’s reputation online with a view to pulling customers towards your brand.

Content marketing is different from direct advertising or a campaign by campaign approach.
 

Why Do Content Marketing?

Small business and local business owners may be a little bit uncertain about this new mysterious marketing technique. But really when it comes to the digital space, content marketing is less technically complicated than other digital advertising techniques such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, banner ads, YouTube video ads and so on.

And the trendlines are clear. Here is data from Google Trends.

(Google Trends result for ‘Content Marketing’)

The Basics

Content marketing at its simplest level may mean adding a blog to your business website and posting content there regularly.

So, if you are a famous (or a new) bakery shop owner, you may want to post some of your baking secrets or tips on the blog. Similarly, if you own a specialist seafood restaurant, you can post prawn and shrimp recipes to the restaurant’s blog and help people cook tasty seafood themselves.

Be the Gordon Ramsay, or Martha Stewart, or Anthony Bourdain, or Jamie Oliver in your niche.

If you sell hiking equipment, you can always post tips about safe hiking practices or safe whitewater rafting practices to your site’s blog.

GoPro, which sells action cameras, aims to differentiate itself from other camera companies by claiming to be a content company.

Once your business acquires a certain size, you can do content marketing at scale. Both employees as well as consumers can become participants by creating content for you — basically, becoming volunteer evangelists for your business.

Consumers may do this by writing about their own transformative experience with a product or service sold by your company. Or, consumers may upload a video to YouTube that showcases the GoPro camera or the ‘Insane’ mode of their Tesla or its ‘AutoPilot’ features.

There is more to content marketing …
 

ROI

You may ask: what return do I get on my ‘investment’ in content marketing? First of all, the great benefit and advantage of content marketing is that it suits the pockets and budgets of all sizes. It can be done free of cost or you may need to spend a few thousands of dollars per annum on your content marketing effort.

And the ROI will be there. With content marketing, it takes time for results to show. There are SEO and organic search benefits as your content spreads across different social media.

Content marketing is not like a traditional advertising ‘campaign’ or its digital equivalent.

If you spend X amount of dollars on a PPC campaign or a banner ad or a Facebook campaign, the ROI on that will be measurable but clearly any gains of that campaign will be short-lived.

Think of the effect of such an ad campaign as being like the chart below:

(Benefits of Digital advertising plotted against time)

With content marketing, the reach, engagement, and trust keeps increasing over time.

Think of the benefits of content marketing over time as being somewhat like the chart below:

(Benefits of Content marketing plotted against time)

There is no fixed duration of content marketing as it is not a traditional advertising ‘campaign.’ It is more of a persistent, ongoing effort to capture the mindshare among your target audience and convert them into potential customers.

The primary purpose of content marketing is to enhance your brand’s online personality. Once your audience is hooked on the useful, engaging, or entertaining content from your brand, it is a matter of time before you can convert them into your customers.

The ROI after six months of a content marketing campaign can easily reach 300% and it keeps increasing over time. But the ROI depends on the quality of content.
 

Outsourcing Content Marketing to A Digital Marketing Agency

You should perform a cost-benefit analysis of which approach to content marketing works best for you.

Your options are:

✓ As the founder/owner, you do all of the content marketing yourself including writing the blog posts, replying to the blog comments, posting to social media, keeping tabs on the different social media reactions and conversations happening

✓ You put someone in-house as the guy in charge of content marketing and she takes care of all of the above tasks noted in point No. 1 above

✓ You hire someone to a full-time position to be in charge of all of your company’s content marketing

✓ Or, you outsource your content marketing efforts to a digital marketing agency such as Mind Digital.

Experienced digital marketing agencies will be able to expertly manage your content marketing campaign while ensuring all the right boxes are checked such as:

✓ Good quality content

✓ Presenting the content in a variety of forms such as blog posts, pdfs, slideshares, podcasts, videos, etc.

✓ Maintaining a regular content calendar

✓ And regularly posting to social media.

For small business owners, it may be better to focus on the core business rather than on creating content and so on. Similarly, having a full-time content professional in-house may be an overkill for a startup.

Outsourcing content marketing to a digital marketing agency is the most cost-effective solution.
 

SEO And Content Marketing

With Google growing more sophisticated in how it ranks websites in the organic search results, having good quality, fresh content is one of the best ways to rank well in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

When your content is shared widely on social media or has good quality backlinks from high authority websites, Google gets the ranking signal it needs.

You simply cannot conceive of an SEO campaign without content these days. And content — properly executed content campaigns — always carries an SEO signal or contains an SEO message for search engines.

Your content needs to have the target SEO keywords sprinkled in it as well as the LSI keywords and Google will do the rest.

One of the benefits of outsourcing content marketing to a professional SEO agency is that they are well acquainted with the necessary keyword density requirements as also how to avoid keyword stuffing.

With the right keyword research using tools like the Google Keyword Planner, you can really get to the high return long-tail keywords. SEO professionals at SEO agencies such as Mind Digital will have experience with finding out the correct long-tail keywords by conducting keyword research.
 

How To Do Content Marketing On A Small Budget

Adopt a multi-pronged approach to content marketing

This benefits your readers some of whom may like to read blog posts while others may prefer to download content in pdf format for reading later. Still others may prefer podcasts while short YouTube videos may be the format of choice for others.

So, present your content as:

A. Blog posts
B. Podcasts
C. Slideshows
D. Videos
E. PDFs
F. Infographics.

When you push the same content out in different formats, you should also study how they are doing relative to one another.

If you have invested your own time as the business owner/founder in writing the blog posts, creating the podcasts/videos, infographics, pdfs, and so on, then you would be interested to know which of these activities represented the best investment of your time.

After all, making a slick video or a good looking infographic will require time even if you have created the content while writing blog post.

On the other hand, if you have outsourced content marketing to a digital marketing or SEO agency, then evaluating the cost and performance of each type of content becomes even more important so that you can smartly allocate your content marketing and digital marketing budget.
 

Quality Over Quantity

You should not worry about how often your competitor posts content. Some bloggers may be able to post good quality content thrice a week: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. That’s great! But you may find that pace difficult to sustain initially. Not a problem! You may opt for two blog posts per week. No point in having blog content that does not provide exceptional value or have some useful info for your readers. You should only try to post content that is likely to gain traction across social media and that will oly happen if your content is top notch, unique, and exceptional.

Think of the Olympics. There are teams from more than 200 nations playing in Rio at the moment. Probably the United States will be at the top of the medal tally at the end of the Games. Or China will be.

Look at the size of their teams. And also look at the team sizes of the UK and Australian contingents. Remember that the population of these four nations ranges from 1.4 billion to 20 million.

Which country out of the above is likely to win the most number of gold medals or any medals on a per capita basis? Most likely, that country will be Australia.

You can then say that Australia is the highest quality nation in terms of athletic prowess and excellence.
 

Don’t Waste Money on Trying to Create Viral Content

There is no secret formula to guessing the correct Powerball combination. Otherwise, everybody — or, lots of persons — would guess the correct combination.

Similarly, there is no secret formula to creating viral content. A Buzzfeed watermelon bursting experiment goes viral but you cannot plan that in advance — it is likely that hundreds of copycat viral video attempts have failed.

Sure, if you can have two men in jet packs flying over Dubai, the resulting video will get millions of views on YouTube, but that video means huge expenses. Drone videos are cheaper to make. Drone videos of theconstruction progress of Apple’s Campus 2 get good hits on YouTube as also videos of people boiling an iPhone in Coke.

Your challenge is to come up with something that is both creative and cheap. Philippe Petit’s stunt from 1974 where he walked across the top of the towers of the World Trade Center would probably be a guaranteed viral sensation today but tougher security would probably make the walk impossible in the first place.
 

Repurpose Great Content

Repurposing content means converting one form of content into another. If you have a blog post, if it easy to convert it into a slideshow or infographic, or a podcast, or video. It depends on your level of familiarity with these different content formats.

By presenting your informative content in multiple formats, you are able to get the maximum return on your research effort that went into writing the original blog post. Also, you can reach a larger audience by presenting your content in different formats.
 

Guest Blogging as A Source of Free Content

You can create a guest blogging page on your site where bloggers can pitch their blog posts. Of course, you reserve the right to accept or reject these pitches. You may end up rejecting about 90 percent of them but you may find a few good pieces occasionally that are worthy of publication and make the effort worthwhile.
 

Content Marketing Tips

Become A Better Writer

It’s always a good idea to improve your writing skills. If you are planning to handle the bulk of content marketing yourself, you can work on improving your writing skills so that you can produce increasing better content over time.

One of the key enablers for you to become a good writer is of course to read good stuff — whether online or offline. There are lots of long-form content that is published regularly online on an ongoing basis: The New Yorker is one good source and there are content aggregation services like Pocket and Longreads Weeklywhich will send the best of the day and best of the week email newsletters if you subscribe to them.

Here are a few tips to write persuasive, compelling online content:

✓ Online content should be presented in easily digestible form. You need to craft a really good headline to pull the reader in.

✓ There should be good subheaders as well.

✓ Short paragraphs with up to four sentences is the name of the game.

✓ Use active voice and avoid passive sentence construction.

✓ Use short sentences with not more than twenty words.

✓ Use the word ‘you’ to address your reader.

✓ Make it punchy.
 

Ensure Your Content Is Factually Accurate

Donald Trump may have come quite a long distance despite many plainly inaccurate claims on the campaign trail — and he continues to venture into uncharted territory — but you cannot hope to make an impact as a trustworthy and informative writer if you do not care about accuracy. So, skip the hyperbole and be sober.
 

Ensure Your Content Is Grammatically Correct

Having silly grammatical errors creep into your content can detract from the impact it can have on the reader. So, find someone — your spouse or kids who might do a quick proofreading of your content before or after you hit publish; but preferably before.
 

Develop A Unique Voice

This is probably easier said than done. You can present personal anecdotes in your writing or talk about politics or be unique in some way. It should reflect who you actually are — be authentic and people will likely love it. Social media such as Twitter is a great tool where you can reveal the informal side of yourself to all.
 

Make Content Easy to Engage With

You should enable comments on your blog posts so that your readers can provide feedback or ask for clarifications. You should engage with your community. You can add ‘Click to Tweet’ functionality to your content to make your content more shareable. There are WordPress plugins available as well as various other solutions you can find by a Google search.
 

Different Formats For Different Folks

We have already talked about the benefits of presenting your content as blog posts, email newsletters, PDFs, infographics, podcasts, YouTube videos, and so on.
 

Rich Media Content

Make content attractive to look at. Use Instagram and Pinterest images, video embeds and so on to make your blog posts attractive.
 

Conclusion

The battle to capture eyeballs in the online space is huge and digital ad spending is expected to overtake television ads in 2017 or 2018. Along with the growth in digital advertising, content marketing is growing non-stop. Here is a useful overview of the whole content marketing landscape.

The biggest benefit of content marketing as a digital advertising technique is that it can be done as cheaply as you want. Whether you choose to do all of it yourself or opt to outsource your content marketing to adigital marketing agency or SEO agency, you should remember that this is something for the ‘long-haul’ and the benefits will show eventually.

Reference:-https://www.minddigital.com/affordable-content-marketing-ideas-and-techniques/

Make Social Media Work For Your Business

Social Media is all the rage these days. Companies can benefit from viral social media campaigns — and sometimes get burned by Social Media as well. What companies hope for is to create something viral like the Ellen DeGeneres Oscar selfie but not every company can do that or have an ad budget equalling the GDP of a small country.

Social Media marketing has got to be a part of the overall brand building process for any company. This is a long term process and cannot be a one-time or a short term thing. The best Social Media marketing campaigns combine SEO, online marketing and above all, effective storytelling.

The Internet has levelled the playing field for businesses of all sizes. A viral YouTube video that can cost nothing that can be seen by millions on YouTube or shared by the billion plus users of Facebook or nearly half a billion users of Twitter can have a huge impact on your business. Social Media includes Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram and more.

Social Media not only can help your business gain traction on Social Media platforms it also has an impact on your SEO rankings on Google. An important thing to remember is that you need to ensure that your business has a Google+ page so that users can rate, review, and share your business online. Besides gaining reviews, Google is now serving up these profiles in the search results to users as well as it has become a ranking factor within your SEO.

Businesses of all sizes small or large should hire a professional Social Media marketing services firms for the best Social Media marketing results or even consider doing it in-house themselves. The bottom line is Social Media can have a huge impact on your business and is something that needs to be taken seriously.

A good way for a company to create Social Media buzz is by running Facebook or Twitter contests and rewarding these participants through prizes or coupons. In return, they can get to see their hashtags trend on Twitter if there’s enough buzz and enough tweets. If you can create interesting content that Social Media users love, they’ll share it with their network on Facebook. If you create great content on the company blog, it will get shared on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and so on. Pinterest and Instagram are image-driven; hence, they are appropriate for businesses such as restaurants, bakeries, florists and so on whose products can be highlighted via great photos. YouTube videos can be great tools to provide product training or ‘how-to’ tutorials.

Creating great content is a key part of Social Media marketing. Content marketing and Social Media marketing therefore go hand in hand. Content marketing has become even more important considering the changes Google has made to its ranking algorithms. With changes such as Google Penguin, Google Panda and Google Hummingbird, Google has made it clear that it loves fresh content and discourages meaningless backlinks or duplicate content. Your Social Media marketing strategy has to take into account the fact that nearly half of the visitors to your website are likely doing so from mobile devices and this will only keep growing with the rapid adoption of smartphones. For online E-commerce businesses as an example, they need to ensure that customers are able to make purchases online from mobile devices.

If you choose to hire a Social Media company, make sure to opt for a company that has the experience and expertise you need to stay ahead of your competitors. Remember that SEO and Social Media marketing should be an integral part of any business’s marketing efforts. If you do it on your own or have a company do it, the choice is ultimately yours. All in all, Social Media marketing is a key weapon in the overall marketing battle that needs to be taken seriously. If you have any questions or need any help with your Social Media, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.

Reference:-https://www.minddigital.com/make-social-media-work-for-your-business/

Activities A Search Engine Optimization Specialist Performs

Search Engine Optimization has a lot of mystery surrounding it and there are many people who do not understand what exactly a Search Engine Optimization Specialist does. While the technical details of this process are certainly not very interesting to someone who lacks technical knowledge. The misconceptions surrounding this industry often cause people to get scammed by unscrupulous SEO professionals who claim to be a Search Engine Optimization Specialist but provide their clients little or no benefit. In addition, sometimes clients hire a SEO specialist who partakes in black hat SEO which is looked down upon and can seriously hurt your rankings. It is important that you know what an SEO specialist really does in order to help your website get a good search engine ranking so that you can avoid being scammed. In addition if you understand what an SEO specialist does, it can help you pick a good SEO company out of the many options presented to you.

Basics of SEO
You do not need to become an SEO expert in order to tell which SEO company will provide you the best results. As long as you have basic knowledge of what a Search Engine Optimization Specialist really does, you can safely pick a quality SEO professional to assist you with your rankings. SEO is divided into on page and off page optimization and before you delve deeper, you need to understand what they are.

✓ On page Optimization – Any changes that a Search Engine Optimization Specialist makes to your website are part of the on page optimization. Usually this involves ridding the website code of errors and ensuring W3C validation. In addition, an SEO specialist will also add proper tags throughout the website and complete all metadata so that search engine spiders can analyze and classify your website with greater ease. He or she will place to correct tagging on your site so that the search engines know what your site is about as well as what to rank your site for.

✓ Off page Optimization – A large portion of time that a Search Engine Optimization Specialist spends on SEO for a website is spent on off-page optimization. Off-page optimization includes sharing links for your website on social networks, popular websites, developing links for your website and getting them placed on websites with a high PageRank. In addition SEO specialist submit articles relevant to your company on different sites, embed quality anchor text links which help you get high search engine ranking for the keywords that you want and more.

Summary
Search Engine Optimization is a time taking task that needs to be handled by trusted professionals who have the experience and expertise to deliver good results. It is something that is a long term task and cannot be done overnight. Any company or individual who claims to get overnight success will be using black hat unethical tactics which you should stay far far away from. If you need any assistance or advice with your Search Engine Optimization or any other digital marketing, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.

Reference:-https://www.minddigital.com/activities-a-search-engine-optimization-specialist-performs/

Social Media Is Here To Stay

Social Media has been perplexing for most companies. On one hand it is a network for people who share their daily lives on it and has little to do with business or work, on the other hand, it opens up a direct line of contact with potential customers and can become a priceless source for invaluable leads. This was the challenge that most companies faced when Social Media first took off. Today, more and more companies are trying to be more “social” in order to achieve the same growth and sales that popular brands have managed to achieve through Social Media. We can say for sure now that this is not just a flash in the pan and that social media has already proven that it is here to stay. Today, even small businesses are using Social Media to interact with their potential customers and existing customers. People are talking less and less on the phone but are engaging with each other via Social Media channels. As a result, companies of all sizes need to be engaged with where their customers are spending there time which is Social Media.

Why Social Media Matters & How to Leverage it
Do not think of Social Media as your employees wasting time on the Internet as they chat with friends or relatives. Instead, consider this as an opportunity to reach out to people in every corner of the world. There are several benefits of engaging in Social Media marketing, one of which is a boost in your Search Engine Optimization rankings according to some experts. When you engage in Social Media marketing, you ensure that anyone who has a query or complaint about your product or brand can contact you directly. Sending a message on Facebook or Twitter is always simpler than drafting an email to your company. An active Social Media presence also ensures that people reach out to you whereas when it comes to email, people might wonder if they will even get a reply. You essentially make yourself more available and thus become a more likeable brand. In addition, ensure that any complaint or compliment you get, respond back to those people who contacted you via Social Media channels. The worst thing you can do is not respond at all to a complaint for example on Social Media as it can sometimes seriously spread like wildfire.

Promotion Through Social Media
By simply creating an online presence, you make sure that people can tag you when they are talking about you. Create a catchy profile, engage with brand loyalists, and they will promote you to their entire extended network. When you launch a new product or service or announce a special deal/offer, these same loyalists will inform their friends and share your updates. It will therefore give you a wider reach than you could ever have achieved otherwise. All of this is not just hypothetical, it has been successfully implemented by several businesses, both big and small. There are hundreds of companies that get more website traffic from Social Media channels than they do from search engines and that alone is enough to tell you how powerful this medium can be. There are so many examples of Social Media campaigns that have gone viral such as the Oreo’s tweet during the Super Bowl blackout which is a perfect example of what can happen when you are on the money with your Social Media.

✓ Create a brand image in the mind of people

✓ Announce new products or services more effectively

✓ Interact and engage with your customers/potential customers

✓ Build trust and loyalty with your customers or potential customers

✓ Get free brand promotion from existing customers

✓ Get great SEO advantages as well

Summary
Social Media marketing is the future of online business and for the coming years for every business. You will be giving up on invaluable information and potential sales leads if you do not manage and engage in Social Media. Already, one is hard pressed to find a big brand that is not active on Social Media as all of these organizaitrons see the value that Social Media can have on your brand. If you need any assistance or advice on your Social Media, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.

Reference:-https://www.minddigital.com/social-media-is-here-to-stay/

Breaking SEO Myths – SEO Is Simpler Than You Think

More and more people think that Search Engine Optimization is an immensely difficult technology that only a very few can master. This myth has helped SEO companies demand high fees from their clients and also ensured that more and people are coming to companies for SEO services. The bottom line is that SEO is not rocket science however it is not easy either. It is a step by step process that anyone can learn and get a reasonable command over in a short period of time. You need to put in time, dedication and have the drive to learn all about SEO involves as it’s a very deep subject matter. However, true expertise in this field requires a lot of effort and time which is the case with every field of work.

When you hire a professional SEO company, you pay them for their time, efforts and expertise in this field of work. You can learn to perform SEO on your own but differentiating between facts and myths of SEO is one of the biggest challenges for those who start down this road. An authoritative guide that can help you figure out the proper way of optimizing a website is not easy to find and there are thousands of people who try to sell SEO guides that promise to teach everything about SEO. If someone has a basic understanding of how a computer system and the internet works, it will not be a big leap forward for them to learn how to perform SEO.

For most small businesses and professional bloggers, simple Search Engine Optimization is more than enough and you can easily learn to do this on your own. You can follow well-known blogs and industry veterans such as SEOMoz, Search Engine Land and a host of others which give reliable SEO information. It is only for the more extensive websites, especially the ones for companies that are operating in intensely competitive industries that professional SEO services are needed.

The first step towards figuring out whether you are capable of handling your SEO needs on your own is learning what all constitutes SEO and the time that you will need to spend in order to see the desired results. SEO is not difficult, it is, however, very time consuming. Even the slightest change in the ranking of the website that you are trying to promote can sometimes take weeks. SEO is time consuming and you cannot expect results overnight by any means. This is the reason that businesses tend to hire SEO services company for promoting their website as these companies have the skills and the resources to ensure that the desired results are obtained.

Employ the services of a capable SEO service provider and give them the time that they need to do their work. There is nothing more frustrating for an SEO company than a client that expects results within days of assigning the Search Engine Optimization project to them. Learning about the basics of SEO will help you know what can or cannot be done by an SEO company. This will also allow you to know when the SEO company you are considering or working with is making false claims. It will also give you an advantage when you are picking one company out of the several professional SEO companies you are looking at. If you need any assistance or advice on your digital marketing including SEO or any type of web development, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.

Reference:-https://www.minddigital.com/breaking-seo-myths-seo-is-simpler-than-you-think/