Content marketing is what the majority of businesses, sites, projects, etc. cannot do without today. People all over the world consume tons of content every day and every business naturally wants a part of that attention. Not everyone can spend millions of dollars on content marketing, though. However, you don’t always have to.
Here are some tips that have proved to work quite well when you need to run content marketing with small budgets or even without it.
#1. Content marketing plan
Well, you need a content marketing plan whether you have a big budget, small budget or no budget at all. You need to spend some time in order to avoid big and silly mistakes. Planning actually is what helps you to work without unnecessary expenses and to organize logical and productive work. If you write a thorough content marketing plan, you have many more chances to succeed with it. It takes some time and researching to make a really good one, but it is definitely worth it.
#2. Blog
Make sure your presence online is on. You need to have a blog no matter what business you present. If you want to be the best in your sphere, you can not do without it. Just take a look around and see that every successful business has a blog with quality content, that people like and share. The most important thing is to make it interesting to your target audience.
#3. Use video
You have probably noticed how much more popularity goes to video content today. YouTube is thriving more than ever and Facebook proved that videos are as needed as other content. If you want to be in-trend with your content marketing, you can not but use video material, too. Think about that: people remember only 20% of the information when they read it while they can memorize 80% when they see it. Video content can be a great alternative to some texts you are planning to use. You can do the following with it:
- Review of your product/service/project;
- Guides to using your products or services;
- Promotional viral commercials that will make you visible to the crowd;
- Webinars;
- Videos from your participation in conferences, etc.
Making a video today doesn’t cost as much money as it used to. Modern technologies make the whole process more accessible; so more people can do it now, which makes it cheaper. You can even learn to make simple videos yourself if you have some time and the desire to. Or you can hire freelancers that can make it quite cheap these days.
You can present these videos on your blog or post anywhere online. Another good thing is asking specialists for an interview. With a small budget, you probably won’t get any stars for an interview, but try and ask local specialists; many people gladly agree to offer their professional opinion and get some exposure. Besides, they would probably share this interview after all and that will get additional exposure to you. Moreover, you can make a written version of this interview and post it as an article, too.
#4. Social networks
Social networks are a goldmine for free content marketing. You can use different kinds of networks for different types of content. Post your cool videos on YouTube, talk about your company news on Twitter, post pictures with your product on Instagram and publish pretty much everything on Facebook. Make sure you use the right networks and don’t overdo the whole thing.
#5. Be personal
When you create your content, you can sometimes share your company’s personal information, stories, facts and ideas. People love it when companies reveal their own stories instead of writing something abstract. Here is a good example.
#6. User Generated Content
You spend money creating some content, right? You either pay some authors or indoor writers to create articles, or hire people to make videos, or pay designers to create visual content. What if content came to you for free? It is actually possible with user generated content.
The best example here is, of course, Tweak Your Biz. They post numerous high-quality articles that bring lots of people to their site. It is not easy and not that free, though. If you want to allow people to post content on your site, you cannot go without an editorial team that would choose only the good stuff and will reject low quality and spammed content. So you need to calculate the expenses and decide which option will come cheaper to you.
User generated content is hard to organize, but it is definitely worth it. If you attract lots of people who write very good content, you can potentially increase your audience and get lots of likes and shares.
Another good example here is GoPro Company. Users of this camera generate hundreds of videos every day. The best of them are promoted by the company and everyone’s happy. The company gets content and PR. People get satisfaction and PR, too.
#7. Choose the topics people love
You can go to Buzzfeed or something similar for that as this is the site which content people share very energetically. No matter what kind of business you have, you can always create a post that will drag people’s attention. For example, if your business is about cars, you can create a post like “5 Cars in ‘The Fast and the Furious’ Movies that People Can Afford”.
#8. Quizzes
Quizzes are an incredibly viral thing that can bring tons of traffic to your site. Just take a look at these examples:
- What country in the world best fits your personality, Playbuzz – 4,7 million of shares;
- What career should you actually have? BuzzFeed – 5 million of shares;
- Can we guess your real age? Playbuzz – 5,9 million of shares.
Many seemingly simple quizzes actually go viral and get millions of likes and shares.
To make a quiz popular, you need to make it relevant to your target audience. You should use nice pictures and make it not too long so that people don’t get bored. The best way is to make it a bit funny and humorous at the end when people get the results. Whether people will share these results or not will mostly depend on how these results will be presented. So, they need to be created in a way that people would want to share it (nothing embarrassing should be here). So, imagination is definitely required here.
Creating a quiz doesn’t take too much time and definitely doesn’t require big budgets, but can potentially bring amazing results.
#9. Do occasional guest blogging
Publishing your content on cool websites will definitely help to promote your business. Many popular websites accept contributions from other people or businesses and link to their sites or blogs. You can try it, too. Remember that they always seek for only good content, so don’t offer them so-so material.
#10. “How to” guides
“How to” guides have always been very popular. People always have questions and want to know how to do things. You can create such guides for your sphere, too.
#11. Make cool infographics
This kind of content is quite popular right now. People like it because it is easier to “consume”.
Texts are probably the most inconvenient kind of content for people online now. Many get lazy to read. A big percent of people leave a page with an average article after reading 20-30% of text (I really hope it is not the case here, though, and you are still reading). Sometimes it is because of the quality of content, but the general tendency is that people would prefer to either read something short or to go to some other type of content.
This is different with infographics, though. It is visual content where designers combine nice graphic elements with numbers and texts. And the texts are usually very short, not to bore our demanding users.
For example, take a look at this infographic, Famous writers’ sleep habits. It is nicely designed and offers unusual and interesting information. Such infographics commonly attract the attention of many people.
Creating an infographic requires a brilliant idea and a good designer. If you are familiar with designer tools, you can even make it yourself. In any case, it is worth trying.
#12. Quality, quality and some more quality
No matter what content you choose to promote, you need to remember that people like and share and buy only the quality things. Posting a blog post, for example, when you have no interesting ideas, is not the very best way to present content. If you face writer’s block today, better violate your content plan and post an article in a week when you have inspiration and a nice topic. It is always better to choose quality over quantity. It concerns every type of content, too.
Images: ”Highway Signpost with Content Marketing wording/Shutterstock.com“
____________________________________________________________________________
Tweak Your Biz is a thought leader global publication and online business community. Today, it is part of the Small Biz Trends stable of websites and receives over 300,000 unique views per month. Would you like to write for us?
An outstanding title can increase tweets, Facebook Likes, and visitor traffic by 50% or more. Generate great titles for your articles and blog posts with the Tweak Your Biz Title Generator.
