Small Business Marketing Content Ideas

You’ve got to have a steady stream of content for your website or blog. You know that. Consistent content production shows your target audience that you’re a pro—and it shows Google that your site is legitimate and worthy of appearing in SERPs (search engine results pages).

But sometimes the proverbial wellspring of mind blowing ideas goes dry. If you’re a small business that relies on a content marketing strategy, these dry spells can be tough on your overall efforts. Some businesses never recover from these dry spells, and it results in outdated blog posts, sporadic newsletters, and dead zones on their websites.

Don’t let yourself get there. Writer’s block, or maybe more aptly, creator’s block, is a normal part of every small-business owner’s journey. When it hits, you just need a little nudge to get your ideation sessions (that’s a fancy word for the act of coming up with good ideas) back on track.

Content creation has now turned into a competition. It’s not easy to create content that converts. You can create an amazing blog post and spend days doing research. Then a few weeks later, your competition publishes the same blog post and outranks you.

This has led many small businesses to abandon their content marketing efforts. In fact, according to a recent survey, only 35 percent of companies truly believe that content marketing works.

The truth is you don’t have to abandon your marketing strategy just because the competition is strong. You can still beat your competition by writing better content.Here are seven tips that will help you transform ho-hum blog content into stellar content that converts. We’ll use blog posts as our working example, but these tips will work for almost any kind of written content.

Write better spin-off content

If you’re not sure about what type of content you should create for your blog, it’s time you do your own research and figure out what kind of blog posts are most successful on the web.

You can use a tool like Buzzsumo to easily analyze any website, including your competition, or a keyword to find out what kind topics generate the most buzz for that specific category.

For example, “12 Unusual Productivity Hacks to Help You Write Faster” appears to be one of the top performing articles under the keyword “content marketing.” You can research this topic and find even more “hacks” that are relevant to your audience. Make sure you find enough good information to make it worth the readers time and includes a higher number than the original post for added significance.

Evoke emotions

Storytelling is now a more important part of marketing than it has ever been before. Even the advertisements we see on TV today manage to leave us in tears or cheer in joy. The brands that evoke such emotions in us leave a mark in our memory.

Take the famous Unsung Hero ad created by Thai Life Insurance, for example. The company became known around the world after the powerful message it showed from the viral video that generated over 30 million views.

Studies have found that emotional content and advertising campaigns outperform most other common types of content and make more memorable experiences for the users.

You can use storytelling in your blog posts, too, to deliver your points more effectively. It will make your blog posts more entertaining to read and also add an emotional effect on your blog posts as well.

Illustrate with images

Last, but not least, add plenty of images to make your blog posts more visual.

Reports show that blog posts with images get 94 percent more pageviews than ones without images.

So, use images whenever you can to make your content easier to digest. Use screenshots and infographics to illustrate content. Use charts and graphs to present your data. And you can even use slideshows to summarize your blog posts.

After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.