There’s an old saying that goes you have to spend money to make money, but conveniently that saying never covered where you should be spending said money, or how spending money will make you money in the first place. This is the art and difficulty of running a business, especially in the modern era where every business needs to not only worry about its own offering but also its digital presence. Let’s explore your digital presence and eventually find out how can content marketing can save you money.
Does Your Digital Presence Matter?
Many will argue that this only depends on your business. Of course, if you are an online retailer, your digital presence doesn’t just matter, it is the only thing you have. If you are on the flip side of that with a local business that sells physical goods only in-store, such as a coffee shop, then it can be easy to think that your digital presence doesn’t matter. It’s time to rethink that.
The Importance of a Digital Presence for Local Business
We live in the age of research. Sticking to the above example, only a few decades ago, if you wanted to find out if a local coffee shop was good, you essentially had three options: ask someone who went there, read a review in the paper, or go to the coffee shop and try it for yourself.
Newspapers are all but dead, but they have been replaced by the Internet, and the Internet, my friends, is far more accessible than finding someone who’s been there before or going there yourself to try it.
This is where Google Business Profiles, customer reviews, and even just search comes into play. If you aren’t playing the digital game for your business, whether it is a local coffee shop or an international brand, you are missing out.
Read More: 5 Digital Marketing Strategies for Business Growth
Market Differentiation—How Do You Stand Out?
Did we sell you on at least having a digital presence? That means you have a website, you’ve claimed your Google Business Profile, and you are updating both to ensure relevance and accuracy for your customers and potential customers. That’s great and all, but your competition is likely doing the exact same thing.
We know that you’ve done a lot of work and even research yourself on making sure that your business stands out and is unique in your local marketplace. You’ve done work to your business to ensure you are different but what about your digital presence? Sure you can give your site a unique design, but is it offering anything that your competitors aren’t?
This is where content marketing can come into play. By providing helpful pages and content that isn’t always about making a sale—at least not on the surface—you are making an investment in your website and you are doing so by reinforcing your brand’s voice, sparking conversations among customers, and giving you solid content to share on social media that doesn’t point away front your brand.
A lot of coffee shops offer Columbian and Ethiopian coffees but how many coffee shops have articles with custom content addressing the differences between the two on their own website? There are hundreds of topics just like that which will go a long way towards differentiating your business no matter what industry you are in.
Why Search Engine Optimization Begins With Content
Market Discovery—How Do You Get Found?
That’s all well and good, but what about getting found in the first place? Whether you are a local business or a big international brand, sometimes letting people know that you even exist is the hard part. You might need a little more than the sign on your building. Remember those articles that we were talking about before? They are perfect for solving this problem.
When you have a lot of good content in place, you can move mountains of traffic toward your website. People searching for Colombian coffee blends may end up finding that your humble coffee shop is providing the best source of information that Google can find. Showing up in the top spot for coffee shops in your hometown might be difficult, but there are other keywords that you can push them out of while you are clawing for the top spot.
Often, a successful blog will bring in more organic traffic than the homepage of the website. You may think that is great and all, but how many of these people are buying from me, and how many are just coming to see the information? This is true to some extent. People landing on your homepage are going to be more likely to buy than people landing on a blog post writing about the differences between Ethiopian and Columbian coffee. However, many of those people that just landed on your website from that blog post or any of your other blog posts, likely have never even heard of your coffee shop before.
If you are a very local business, then you may still be worrying about these traffic numbers. People are visiting your site, but maybe now they are doing so from all across the country, and you only sell coffee in Sleepy Town, USA. You have to imagine how powerful that is though. Your brand is making an impression on people nationwide, and it’s also creating that same impression at the local and at the extra-local level. By extra local, we mean people that are not in regular visiting range but may make the journey out of curiosity. Building that buzz can be a powerful thing, especially if you ever decide to dip your toe into digital sales with any aspect of your business.
Content Marketing is Playing the Long Game
The beautiful thing about content marketing is it’s truly playing the long game. Digital ads have their place in most successful digital strategies, but every dollar you spend there does its job and it immediately stops working for you. It’s a little like buying the product. You buy 500 decorative coffee cups to sell, but once they are gone the only way that they continue to make your money is by the impressions they’ve left on your customers. Unless you buy more, they aren’t going to keep doing any heavy lifting for you.
Content marketing keeps working for you forever. It’s like buying a machine that lets you make a new and interesting type of coffee. Just like with things that are new, the impact of that machine might take a while to take effect. But quietly, the content is sitting in your shop waiting for people to try it out until one day you check the numbers and find that more people are coming to you for that machine than for anything else. And that machine is already bought and paid for. Even if you stop building only our content strategy or take a pause, the work that was done will keep working for you.
Read More: How Content Marketing Can Enhance an Ad Campaign
How to Build a Successful Content Strategy For Your Business
Building a content strategy like we talked about above is hard to do alone. What you might need is professional help from a ghostwriter. Instead of a ghost, how about a Phantom? At Phantom Copy, not only can we build a custom content strategy designed to grow your business around the keywords that are important to you, but we can also optimize your website, manage your Google Business Profile, and more. Reach out to us today and find out what hiring a Phantom can do for you and your business.