Content marketing can help your small business acquire and retain customers, whether they live in Flowing Wells, Rio Rico or a thousand miles away. When you provide educational or entertaining information that helps solve problems for your target market, you’ll drive customer sales.
The big question is how do you keep those ideas coming when using content marketing to grow a business?
Anita Campbell, who runs online communities and information websites reaching more than 6 million small-business owners and serves as a guest blogger for the Small Business Administration, reveals the ideas that work for her are obtained by following trending topics.
Trending topics include what people are buzzing about right now. Find your own unique angle and present it as commentary in a column or a blog post, extracting lessons or tips. The key is to stay on top of what your target market cares about at the moment.
People are also reading…
So, where you can learn more about what’s currently trending?
- Keep up with the news: local, national, business or sports.
- Google has an entire trends site that tracks hot topics: Google.com/trends. Discover what people are searching for across the United States.
- Twitter does a great job of identifying trending topics. People use hashtags to talk about a subject, and at the bottom of the search page, find the hashtags that people are using right now. Also check the left sidebar on any page of your Twitter account. Click on one of the hashtag links to see all of the mentions, links to articles and images that use that hashtag. These trends are customized to your geographic location, so if you want to see trends for another area, simply click “change” next to the trends title.
- Use sites that allow you to share links to content. StumbleUpon includes a page of the content that’s currently trending, and BizSugar shows you which content is the most popular at any given moment on the home page.
- Hootsuit tracks several social-media platforms, and you can track all mentions of an industry or keyword. If aerospace is your target market, you can set up a stream to show all mentions of the word “aerospace” and the hashtag #aerospace.
Diane Diamond is vice president of media relations for SCORE Southern Arizona, a nonprofit group that offers free small-business counseling and mentoring by appointment at several locations. For more information, go to www.southernarizona.score.org, send email to mentoring@scoresouthernaz.org, or call 505-3636.