A common challenge for small businesses is determining the best way to maximise the reach of a blog or video.
Your website should be your content focal point. Therefore, a content strategy should concentrate on enticing clients to your website before engaging them with your wider offering. As part of this strategy, it’s important to commit to offering timely, fresh, relevant content that can also improve your search engine optimisation (SEO) ranking.
Where you house content on your website is up to you, but there are a few issues to consider, including:
- Easy accessibility: there should be a link on your navigation menu specifically for your content
- High visibility: the best websites offer a content preview on the landing page, as a way of engaging clients. For example, a popular strategy involves previewing the latest or most popular posts.
Social media is a helpful vehicle for amplifying the reach of your content. As part of this tactic, use your personal and business accounts to share your content. When it comes to choosing the right platforms, every financial planning business will be slightly different. For what it’s worth, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter seem to work well for many small and medium-sized businesses.
On balance, social media is a sound platform for putting your content in front of a great deal of people and encouraging valuable feedback. Likewise, linking the content back to your website is sensible. A website is your digital shopfront, and a place where you’re more likely to start generating some valued business.
To ensure social media works best for your business, consider the following tips:
- Create a business showcase page: Don’t rely only on your personal profiles to disseminate content. Your business should have its own identity online, and most platforms, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, allow you to establish business showcase pages.
- Get staff involved: It’s almost guaranteed your employees will be using a social media platform. Therefore, involve them in your content marketing by sharing and commenting on your blogs and videos. It’s a valuable way to reach a wider audience rapidly and encourages your staff, particularly the sales and marketing teams, to engage your clients with your content.
Quality goes a long way
Creating content dripping in thought leadership is like driving a stake in the ground. It demonstrates what your business stands for, and what you are passionate about as its owner. Paul Clitheroe is one of the best in the thought leadership business. Through his television shows, articles for Money magazine, newspaper articles and ongoing blogs, Clitheroe has been leading the charge as a financial planning thought leader for eons; and let’s face it, it’s worked out well for all concerned.
The definition of quality content is something other parties can use and share. For example, industry publications such as Professional Planner are always searching for valuable content. So, pushing your content through other partners and websites is a strong mechanism for expanding your online audience.
It is worth considering websites outside your industry as well. This involves looking at where your clients spend time online. If you’re prepared to share your content free of charge, there are businesses that will happily repost it on their digital assets (web and social). That said, make sure there are always links to your business built into the content. For example, my bio below includes a link to my website.
This is not an exhaustive list of ways to expand your content’s reach. However, it’s a start, and once you’ve built the basic foundations, you can use your creativity to find new and interesting ways to amplify the reach of your
