So you hear about inbound content marketing all the time and you’ve bought into how it can work for you. You start a blog on your company’s website and start hitting the keyboard. You already know that this will help boost your small business SEO and organic search traffic, but that takes time and patience. Maybe your boss doesn’t want to wait 6 weeks to be the ninth result on Google for a long tail keyword. You have high value content to promote your quality business, but still no one is seeing it right away.
Social media is the best way to get out in front of your potential customers immediately.
The best way to provide quality through your business is to find the problems that your target audience have and then solve them. It’s a waste of time and money to create a “solution” (service business or product) when there isn’t really a problem in the first place. So how do you know what problems your target audience has? How can you show them you’re the one that has the solution? You see what they’re complaining about! That’s where social media monitoring comes in.
There are many different social media monitoring tools that you can use and then set up keywords on Twitter, public Facebook posts and other channels. For local businesses, you can even set a radius to Twitter searches for people within your region. I’ve also found a lot of quality traffic driven to my sites lately through LinkedIn Groups. I’m not currently aware of a LinkedIn Group monitoring tool other than manually going to groups that you’ve joined. But it’s worth the ten minutes to go in and see what people are talking about and responding with a direct link back to your website.
Use Social Media Monitoring To Create Your Content Calendar
Now that you know what problems your prospects have, take those pain points and create a piece of content (write an article, make a video, etc.) on your blog. Once you have published this information, you can then deliver it directly to the potential customer who was complaining. If you want to reach them quickly (we all know social media is a NOW medium), put together a brief overview of 500 words to help them along the way, then they can contact you through your website for more information. In the meantime, add that topic to your editorial calendar to develop a full article or video on that topic down the road. If you’re having trouble keeping it short, or feeling like you’re not sure where to start, consider the writing like you’re answering an email to an existing client. I find that blogging can often be a mental hurdle for business owners but they can quickly and easily reply to an email from a customer asking something.
Promoting New Content Via Social Media More Directly
Now that you have your content published on your site and your ready to start welcoming customers, you need to let them know it’s there. It’s one thing to just post out the link on all of your social channels, but then if people aren’t following you, that does you no good.
Go back to your social media monitoring tool of choice (personally we use HootSuite) and shoot out a message directly to the prospects who were looking for the solution that your company has to over.