Content marketing is ruling the digital marketing industry. Essentially, content marketing is related to the creation, publishing, and distribution of content. It is known to be a tried and tested method to generate leads, attract potential buyers, increase customer base, and create brand awareness among the targeted audience. Due to its effectiveness, content marketing has become one of the most powerful digital marketing tools for marketers all over the world. There is a constant struggle to find content that is unique and attractive to visitors.

Local Content Marketing is a relatively new branch which is concerned with creating and publishing content specifically for a local market. It is exceptionally useful for small and local businesses as it allows them to target local consumers to drive traffic and sales.

Marketers are increasingly using content marketing strategies to improve their website SEO and improve the ranking of their websites. However, content marketing is not just about writing blogs and publishing posts on social media. You have to be careful about your audience preference and whether your content will be able to penetrate the market or not. Our simple guide will help a small business like yours to create content that makes a difference and creates a brand that matters!

Why Local Content Marketing?

Consumers are relying more and more on Google to help them find the products/services they need. Searches such as, ‘Best Restaurant in NJ,’ ‘Doctor Atlanta,’ or ‘Carpet Cleaning Tunbridge Wells” are becoming popular by the day. Small businesses have started using this behavior to their advantage by optimizing their content to local keywords. It helps the marketer achieve the following goals:

  • Attracting more traffic to the website and social media pages
  • Increasing Brand Awareness
  • Increasing Brand Visibility on Social Media

Now that you know how beneficial local marketing is, let’s dive into the steps needed to build a strong local content marketing strategy:

1.     Define Your Target Market

Define Your Target Market
Define Your Target Market

Who will read the content you publish? Determining your target audience is the first step to a robust content strategy. Knowing your audience will tell you:

 

  • What to write about?
  • What style of wiring is preferred by the audience?
  • What type of content is most popular in this market segment?
  • What quality of content does the audience expect?

Once you have identified the audience, you get the guidelines for developing content that will be of value to them. An easy way to remain consistent in the market is by creating buyer personas, a sketch of the people who are more likely to buy your products.

2.   Focus on Quality

Another advantage that local businesses have is that they don’t need to target a wider audience. They can penetrate the local market and effectively generate leads from there. For example, if you have a small cleaning business in London, you only need to target people living in London. Unless you provide your services to other UK cities, there is no point of even reaching out to people that are based in other cities. Staying limited to certain areas and certain kinds of people have a huge marketing advantage, rather than increasing your engagement, you simply increase quantifiable and convertible leads.

3.   Find Unique Content Marketing Ideas

Find Unique Content Marketing Ideas
Find Unique Content Marketing Ideas

If you think you are the first one considering local content marketing, you are dead wrong. The market is completely saturated; finding unique and eye-catching content is becoming more and more difficult every day. In such an environment, its best to remain true to your brand voice and then think of innovative ways to build on it.

It all comes down to what your brand is selling. It might even take you a while to figure out which content marketing tool will be useful for your content marketing strategy. It is never too late to practice age-old practices like that of brainstorming ideas. Such practices are known to be highly effective and have a lasting impact.

4.   Analyze your Competition

No business functions in isolation. Even if you are a local business owner, there will be plenty of competition in your surroundings. If you have run out of content marketing ideas or simply need inspiration, there is no better place to look for ideas than at your competitors. You can take inspiration from the topics your competitors are focusing on. A useful practice is to compare your existing content with that of your competitors. A detailed analysis can help you understand which content is liked by your audience more and should be focused on in the future as well. Several data analysis tools can help provide useful insights to brands, some of the most popular ones in the market being Google Analytics and SEMrush.

5.     Utilize Broad Content Marketing Strategies

Utilize Broad Content Marketing Strategies
Utilize Broad Content Marketing Strategies

Most of the material available in the market to help and guide content strategists is focused on bigger businesses that are generating content for a larger audience. Having a small, local business does not mean that you cannot utilize the broad content marketing strategies. Applying the tried and tested methods on your local business can prove to be even more beneficial. You may have to add a local flavor to these strategies, though.

One way to do this is through writing catchy titles which will help rank your website higher on search engines such as Google. These searches include how-to guides and titles which have a higher search engine volume. Several tools can help you improve your ranking and suggest you change to the content that will make it better and help you reach a greater audience.

6.   Finding Your Inspiration

Do remember that just creating content and posting it online is not enough. Especially in today’s world, when it is all about setting your mark in the industry through new and refined ideas. However, you don’t always have to find your inspiration from competitors and online material. You can also find it through content that you have already used in the past. The only thing that you need to make sure is to see whether the content is up to date and trending. You can always tweak a few things here and there to make it look fresh and new.

Bottom line

In a nutshell – marketing in today’s world requires you to be innovative. Local content marketing is just one example. It is especially useful for small businesses to generate leads and increase traffic. Local content marketing helps small businesses compete with the bigger marketing budgets of big companies.