Integrate SEO and Social Media with Content Marketing – 5 simple hacks

In today’s age of ubiquitous connectivity, many small businesses have implemented a variety of online marketing efforts to attract new customers and increase overall sales. Unfortunately, results can vary significantly because tools are only as good as the expertise of the person using them.

The lure of the “next big thing” can create online marketing inefficiencies when small business owners try to be a marketing “jack of all trades and master to none”.

Content marketing growth statistics:

• Google sites handle about 100 billion searches each month (SEL)
• YouTube hosts nearly 14 billion videos (comScore)
• Facebook is now over 1 billion users (Mark Zuckerberg)
• Google+ has over 500 million users (Google)
• Twitter has over 550 million accounts (Statistics Brain)
• LinkedIn is at 225 million users (LinkedIn)
• Pinterest grew 4,377% in 2012 and continues to expand with 25 million users (TechCrunch)

Small business owners, employees and their customers use various social networking sites personally so in many cases the platforms are familiar. As a result, more small business marketers are starting to use Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter to attract new customers and engage those customers they already have.

Here are 5 content marketing tactics that small businesses can use in combination with SEO and Social Media to win and keep more customers.

1. Start with Content Marketing & Blog

A blog offers numerous social and SEO benefits. Blogs are very effective as the hub in a “hub and spoke” social media content model. The spokes of that model might be Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Foursquare and other social media sites your customers are participating on.

Blog posts can focus on answering Frequently Asked Questions and topics of interest to customers. Create categories for each area of focus in your business to serve as an editorial guide.

Schedule posts in advance to save time and encourage staff to comment and promote the blog on any other social sites you’re involved with.

2. Use Newsletters & Email Marketing

Email Marketing strikes back. Though more fashionable venues like social media and mobile marketing get all the attention, and some people will even try to tell you that email marketing is dead, reality doesn’t agree.

In fact, with a strong content marketing approach, email is more ... Read more...