Content Marketing: 3 Ways to Make Your Marketing Dollars Work Harder
0Is your marketing investment paying off?
If not, there’s nothing wrong with maximizing your marketing efforts and making your budget work harder. In fact, stretching dollars has been, and always will be, in the best interests of small business owners. Therefore, here are three ways you can make your marketing dollars work harder by developing smart content.
1. Make content easily shareable.
If your company has an online presence — which it should — content creation can play an important role in your online marketing efforts. This can include videos, infographics, whitepapers, webinars, studies and so on.
If you want to empower your social media fans to share your messages and content (possibly make it go viral) it’s important that your creations are easily shareable.
Enable your fans to become brand ambassadors by ensuring that the proper social media sharing buttons are available for all pieces of content on your website. The basic social media buttons include Twitter, the Facebook Like button, Pinterest, Tumblr, and perhaps StumbleUpon (Digg, unfortunately, is not what it once was).
One other sharing tool I recommend is an embed code. Embed codes allow other websites to easily feature your content, while ensuring that you retain credit and links back to your site. This creates a simple way for people to share your content.
2. Create content worth sharing.
The heart of sharing isn’t in an abundance of social media buttons. Instead it’s in fans, followers and customers wanting to actually click them.
For example, don’t create an infographic about your brand. Try creating a piece of content that is valuable to readers on a larger scale … something people will want to share with others. In contrast, if you spend all of your time on the “hard sell” touting your brand, your content becomes nothing more than a display advertisement — something that can be easily tuned out.
