If you’re a small business owner focused on learning how to increase sales in 2019, one of the smartest moves you can make is to upgrade your content marketing strategy. Businesses with a detailed lead acquisition plan via content outreach tend to outperform companies with no solid content marketing plan-of-action. Opting for
hit-and-miss customer acquisition on social media will only lead to sporadic spikes in sales growth. For optimal sales performance throughout the year, content development is your best bet.
But how do you stack the odds of lead acquisition via content marketing in your favor? How do you determine your company’s route to sales success? If you want to understand better how to improve your small business’ content marketing strategy in 2019, following are five updates you should make.
Detail Your Distribution Workflow
Without a detailed distribution workflow for your content, your lead acquisition ROI (return on investment) will be haphazard at best. When you have a concrete plan for distributing each piece of material your small business creates, you have a better chance of optimizing your engagement opportunities. Create a specific strategy for distributing your content, including everything from when you will post your content to the social media platforms to which you’ll post them.
Analyze Your Format Structure
Far too many content marketers focus their efforts on blog posts, instead of developing a detailed plan-of-action for multiple content formats. Instead of relying on text-based articles, brand builders are better off utilizing numerous forms when creating content. From image-based visual marketing formats like infographics to video-based formats like webinars, there are many options available to today’s savvy content creators. Analyze which forms your company is currently using and what the return-on-investment is for your business for each type of content. You might be surprised to discover your brand is getting more mileage out of formats you’re not using on a frequent basis.
Detail Your Content Asset Inventory
Another crucial way to improve your content marketing strategy in 2019 is to create a detailed inventory of your brand assets. From previous blog posts you’ve published to visual marketing graphics you’ve designed for social media marketing platforms like Facebook and Twitter, analyzing existing brand assets will help you determine where you need to focus your digital marketing efforts in 2019.
Link Analysis
Gone are the days when low-quality links were all it took to rank higher on search engines like Google. If you want to improve your SEO and increase your content marketing ROI, it is imperative you understand the quality of your small business links. Perform a detailed analysis of links to and from your website to ensure your company is building a robust network of high-quality links. Update old links within your content, remove dead links, and contact sites with backlinks to your website to ensure they’re linking to a specific web page, not just your home page.
Content-Length Analysis
Short blog posts are less likely to drive attention to your small business than longer, more helpful blog posts. Conduct a study of the length of your content marketing posts to see which ones you can add more content to increase their value. Focus on creating content marketing posts that are at least 600 words in length. Make sure your content is rich in valuable information, not just filled with fluff to achieve a longer word count. The more value you pack into a blog post, the likelier it is search engines will prioritize your content.
Pay attention to these five ways to improve your small business’ content marketing strategy in 2019, and you can significantly increase your digital marketing ROI. Investing in stellar content marketing is one of the savviest moves you can make as a small business owner, but you must optimize your efforts for success. What are your thoughts? Are there specific changes you’ll be making to your digital marketing efforts in 2019?
