Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses Using WordPress

Regardless of the size of your business or operation engaging in content marketing is a must. However, if you’re running a small business or are out there on your own, it’s probably fair to say you have fewer resources to invest in promoting your services and products than a large scale enterprise. Even so, that doesn’t mean that without the right strategy you can’t get great results so we’ve put together our list of content marketing tips.

In simple terms, content marketing involves producing high-quality content which is then promoted in order to bring more targeted traffic to your website. By improving your content marketing efforts your site will receive more visitors, you’ll increase lead generation. This can ultimately your business to make more sales.

There are many different ways to implement or improve your content marketing strategy. Luckily, if you have a WordPress website then there are some powerful WordPress plugins that you can use to help. Whatever your experience with content marketing and however much time you have to give, the content marketing tips below will start you off in the right direction or boost your current efforts.

1. Create Great Content

You might not want to hear this, but the most important aspect of content marketing is the content itself. Many people tie themselves up in knots over how to produce amazing content, or even just deciding what subjects to write about.

The best advice for small businesses is to keep it simple. Think about what information your customers want to know. What questions have they recently been asking? What have you found yourself explaining over and over again? If someone has a problem that they have discussed with you then more than likely plenty of other people have the same problem and they are at home Google-ing it.

Write down the queries and concerns of your target audience and existing customers and turn this into content. The best way to add interesting and engaging content to your site is through a blog so take your customer’s questions and turn each one into a blog post. Try and make these posts informative and fun but most importantly relevant to your target audience, so they are enticed into reading.

Now, whenever a prospective customer or client takes to Google to search for an answer to their query, there’s a chance they will find your blog. After receiving an answer to their question, within just a few clicks, they can be at your checkout or contact page – ready to take the next step in your sales funnel.

2. Use a Quality WordPress Theme

There are many WordPress themes to choose from, and when you’re fist getting your business or blog started online it can be very overwhelming. For content marketing you want a theme that loads fast, looks professional, is easy to use and doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg. We can’t recommend the Total WordPress theme enough. This theme has been optimized for speed, has hundreds of Theme Customizer options, and easy drag & drop page builder and costs less than a new printer. For any business or blog, Total is a great theme to build a content marketing website with.

3. Organize your Content Creation

For a small scale business, you want to be posting at least one, ideally two, blog posts a week. People often start out well creating and adding content to their site. When it’s new, you’re motivated! But then as the weeks go on they tend to fall behind. It is really important to regularly add content and the best way to do this is to use a tracker or calendar. You would use a calendar for meetings or other important aspects of your business, so why not your posts and promotions?

Editorial Calendar is a free plugin for WordPress that enables you to see all your scheduled posts for the day, week, or month. It allows you to organize when the articles are scheduled to be published, what ideas you have for future content and much more. This information is all presented in a clear calendar format. This free plugin offers a quick and easy way to stay on top of your content creation duties.

4. Don’t Forget About Email

A list of content marketing tips wouldn’t be complete without touching on email. It’s vital that you attempt to collect the email addresses of the visitors to your website, as well as maintain a list of customer and client emails. By setting up an email newsletter or subscriber list, you can now reach out to these contact each time you post a new article on your blog. These email notifications help your audience become aware of the new articles and encourages them to visit your site to find out more.

MailChimp is a powerful email marketing solution. By installing the free MailChimp for WordPress plugin and signing up with MailChimp, you can begin building a mailing list. Through MailChimp, you can then automatically email your new content to all, or a group of, your mailing list.This is an important way of interacting with your customers and summoning an audience for your blog and the rest of your website.

5. Manage your Social Media

Social Media is another important way of sharing your content and promoting your site. Whatever type of business you have you need to have a presence on social media. The more articles you produce the more you will have to share on the different social media channels, the more people will be exposed to your content.

The easiest way to make your content shareable and to encourage people to follow you on social media is to add share buttons to your site. Social Warfare is a freemium WordPress plugin that specializes in social shares and driving traffic to your site.

As well as providing social share buttons it also helps with other aspects of social media marketing, including providing options for Pinterest specific images and creating Twitter-friendly quotes. This plugin will equip your website with the tools you need to begin sharing your content and building a strong social media community that will also share your content for you.

6. Save Time with CoSchedule

One of the main problems with content marketing and social media in general is that it can be time-consuming. The constant creation of new content and the continual sharing of it on the different social media platforms can be a full-time job within itself. CoSchedule can help with this and save you much time and energy.

CoSchedule is a premium WordPress plugin (with a 14 day free trial) which works a bit like Editorial Calendar. However, CoSchedule not only helps schedule your blog articles but all the social media posts that go with it. It also enables you to easily share old posts again so you don’t have to be constantly creating new content. All this is done from the WordPress dashboard, saving time jumping from one site to the next and getting your head round each channel’s requirements.

7. Use Analytics to Help Improve your Content Marketing Strategy

Analytics is a crucial part of content marketing. It enables you to see how many people have been looking at your site, how they found you, what content they are interested in, and what pages they aren’t, as well as a lot more.

Google Analyticator is a great free WordPress plugin that enables you to see real-time statistics from inside your WordPress dashboard. The information it provides will help you to improve your content marketing strategy. Armed with this info you can them make your content more relevant to your customers interests.

Sprout Social is a service that helps you monitor how your content performs across the different social networks. This is a premium solution that offers many features, but its social media metrics is particularly impressive.

The tools included with Sprout Social enable you to really look in depth at how your social media platforms are helping you, where your target audience is hanging out, and what content they are interested in and sharing. This type of information is essential to help you market your site in the right way, with the right people at the right time, in the right place!

Wrapping up Our Content Marketing Tips

All of the strategies above are important aspects of content marketing. If you want your business to thrive it is worth taking the time to implement each one. Then to use them consistently.

If you are just starting out or haven’t got to grips with a content marketing strategy yet, choose a couple of areas to focus on to start. Then go up from there. Or simply start with the content marketing tips we’ve shared above. Good Luck!

Have you got any good content marketing tips? What have you tried that has been successful? What do you still need to improve? Please share your experiences with us in the comments below.