By Jacqueline Zote
With the right content strategy, you could effectively promote your business, drive traffic to your site, and eventually drive conversions using minimal resources. And the right content strategy involves choosing the best types of content for your small business.
To do this, you need to consider factors such as your budget, workforce, time, and available resources. Based on all these factors, here are some of the best types of content that you can use to promote your small business:
#1: Infographics
It’s not just a common assumption that visual content is engaging. Venngage’s Nadya Khoja surveyed 300 online marketers and found that 41.5% of them experienced the most engagement through original graphics such as infographics.
So if you’re planning to promote your small business through informative content that’s also engaging, you could try producing a few infographics every now and then. Compile some studies and stats relevant to your business and publish them in the form of infographic content. Or come up with some bite-sized tips that your target audience will find valuable.
How to Do it: Infographics are fairly easy to prepare and you don’t even need to invest in a graphic designer. You just need to pick a topic, collect the information, and then compile it into a 300-word or 400-word piece of content. Make sure to keep your sentences short and get straight to the point.
After this, you can turn the content into visuals using tools like Piktochart, Canva, Infogram, and Easel.ly. There are tons of pre-designed templates to choose from or you can create one from scratch.
#2: Case Studies
If you want to win the trust of your prospective customers, you need to prove yourself to them. One of the best ways to do this is by showcasing how your previous customers have benefited from your products or services. This works because people trust other people.
According to a BrightLocal study, 84% of people consider online reviews to be just as trustworthy as personal recommendations. And 74% of respondents would trust a local business more after reading a positive review about it.
Go a little beyond reviews and testimonials by developing case studies that your prospective customers or clients could read. Case studies will provide more detailed information about how you helped your previous clients.
The case study just needs to outline who a certain client is, what they do, and what challenges they were facing. It should also talk about the solutions you presented them and the kind of results they experienced afterwards. Take a look at how CLEVER presents their case studies for example.
How to Do It: Pick a client and then collect the information that you need for a case study. Ideally, you need detailed information about the problem, the goal, the solution, and the result.
Write a short paragraph with 2-3 sentences introducing your client, and another 2-3 sentences explaining what challenges they were facing. Add some points about the client’s goals and then a few bullet points explaining the solution you introduced. Finally, list out the results they experienced after you helped them.
#3: Influencer Interviews
People who are considered as experts in their respective niches hold a certain sway over their followers. These experts are commonly known as influencers. You can find them in every industry – whether it’s in consumer electronics, fashion, health and beauty, travel, financial services, or B2B products.
Gen.video conducted a study and found that social media influencers are the most trusted sources for shopping by 33% of respondents. Friends and family were the third most trusted sources, with only 17% of respondents voting for them.
Even your small business can channel their influence in your promotion efforts. While paying influencers to promote your business can be a bit expensive, interviewing them would cost you a lot less or nothing at all.
You can do a full-fledged interview with one influencer or collect the expert opinion of multiple influencers to create a round-up post. The influencers will ideally share the content with their followers, which could bring in a lot of relevant traffic. Brian Lang managed to get 4,000+ social shares for one of his expert roundup posts.
For instance, you can find influencer interviews on the J.Crew brand blog. They recently interviewed style influencer Karl-Edwin Guerre, who has more than 45,000 Instagram followers.
How to Do It: You start by picking a topic that would interest your target audience and then choose an influencer that your target audience would like. Compile a list of relevant questions that you will be covering for the interview.
After this, you send out an outreach email to the influencer and explain to them how much you’d value their insights. Influencers are busy people so they might take some time to respond. In this case, try sending a follow-up email but never follow-up more than twice as you might come off as pushy.
Conclusion
These are three of the best types of content you can use for promoting your small business. As you can see, they’re not too time-consuming and they can be done in-house by you or by some of your team members. You won’t even need to spend anything extra except for your time and effort, making these options perfect for small businesses like yours.
Jacqueline Zote is a content writer who writes about online marketing and small businesses. She has a mélange of interests ranging from pop culture and mythology to content development and social activism. Her pet peeves include loud chewing, slow-loading websites, and bland content. After having dealt mostly in ghost-writing, she has recently started publishing her expertise and professional observations on Medium. @JacquelineZote
Content stock photo by one photo/Shutterstock
