You know you need to market your business online, but the process can feel daunting and overwhelming, right? Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. Think of it as a three-legged stool: content marketing, social media, and search engine optimization are the three components that are necessary for your online marketing.
Why are content marketing, social media, and SEO so important? It’s simple: none of these can work without the other. Good content needs SEO to be found and social media to spread. Social media needs good content to share in updates. SEO needs good content and social media sharing to be found, because those are two important factors for the search engines.
Content Marketing
Content marketing consists of creating and delivering content that is relevant to your prospects and helps to meet your business goals. Your content marketing should provide information that is useful for your ideal client. It’s important to develop good content because most people go online when they’re looking for solutions to a problem; by providing good information, you’ll be able to help your clients while also demonstrating your expertise in your field. Generally the best way to create new content on a regular basis is through a business blog.
One way to think about the content that you can develop is to reflect on the questions that your current and prospective clients continually ask you. What are the questions that come up frequently? What are the issues that people struggle with? How can you share your knowledge and expertise to address these questions and issues? These questions are a great source of blog content.
Social Media
As you create new content, you’ll want to make sure that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Let people know about it by sharing it via your social networks. Aside from your latest content, you can update social media sites with quick tips and links to more information on your site. Also, make sure that you have social sharing buttons on your blog so that people can easily share your posts with their own networks.
You’ll want to be sure to identify a goal for your social media activities. Are you trying to drive traffic back to your website? Do you want to increase awareness of your brand? Effective social media takes time, so you’ll need to make sure that the time you spend on this helps to meet your business goals. Getting more likes on Facebook or followers on Twitter is useless unless it’s helping you to meet your business goals.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization refers to optimizing your website so that it can be found on search engines. In short, it means that you implement some practices that make it easier for the search engines to include your site in the search results. Without SEO, your website may be like the proverbial tree falling in a forest if no one is there to see it… does it really matter?
To be found online, it helps to understand what small business SEO is all about. It’s not about tricks or gimmicks. It’s about developing a good content strategy, using social media, optimizing your blog posts, and tracking it all, usually through Google analytics.
SEO, good content and targeted social media usage are important when you’re marketing online because they help your website get found and talked about online. One can’t exist without the other two. The best way to ensure that you are using these three resources effectively and strategically is to develop an online marketing plan for your business.