4 really quick steps to improve your online marketing

You certainly know the power of online marketing. If you don’t have a content marketing plan in place, it can be difficult to know how to start and how to get your message out. Remember that you have to contend with everyone else’s messages!

These four steps will help to get you started with an easy to implement content marketing plan. You need to invest just a few hours each month.

1. Send an email to your list

Email marketing is definitely one of most effective ways to market your business. Send an email update to your mailing list on a regular schedule. Always include something valuable for your audience. Don’t just go for the hard sell.

Our top recommendations:

• Send the email regularly. If you’re just starting out, we recommend monthly emails to give you time to build your content.
• Don’t include all the content in the email. Link to your website to read the rest of the content, such as a blog post.
• Personalise the email by including the recipient’s name. All of the major email providers allow you to do this (MailChimp, Aweber, Drip, Get Response, Campaign Monitor).
• Experiment with different subject lines to improve your open rate.

2. Write a blog post

Content is king. Your blog is the best place to publish this content.

Articles on your blog are an asset to your business because they increase your visibility in search engines, give you a catalogue of articles you can point your customers to when they are looking for more information about a topic, and the content itself positions you as an expert within your chosen area of specialisation.

Our top recommendations:

• Publish a new blog post at least monthly.
• Use great images and photos in your blog to create engaging content.
• Focus on creating ‘evergreen content’ that will always be useful to your audience.
• If you’re just getting started, here’s how you can plan a blog post in 10 minutes so you can write better and faster.

3. Engage with social media

Social media for business isn’t about posting updates on what you’re eating or where you’re travelling. It’s about growing a following and increasing engagement.

Connect with your audience and grow a following by posting content that is useful to them. Show you care by asking questions, making connections, and contributing to conversations.

Our top recommendations:

• Post new updates at least a few times per week.
• Always include a photo with your post to increase engagement and reach because images always perform better than text and videos perform best of all.
• Use hashtags to improve your reach and target a specific audience.
• Use a social media management tool to schedule in your posts, such as the built-in Facebook post scheduler, CoSchedule, HootSuite, and Buffer.

4. Always provide value to your audience

When you are sharing content with your audience, always think of what they would want to read and what they would see as useful information.

It’s great to talk about yourself and what’s going on for you, but only for a maximum of 10–20% of your total output. The best results come from useful, engaging and visual content that your audience is genuinely interested in.

If you’re not sure what to share, we’d always suggest looking at others in your industry to see what is working for them. Check out your competitors’ posts on social networks. What are they posting? What posts are receiving high levels of engagement?

This can be a great start to kick off your inspiration.

Conclusion

Your online marketing will enjoy steady growth simply from being consistent and investing a little time each month in creating content for your target audience.

The above steps can help to get you on the right path to a simple content marketing plan that works.

What are you doing consistently to improve your online marketing? Is it working? Are you having trouble with getting started? Keep the conversation going and let us know in the comments.

Originally published at PENNInk Productions.