13 Free Content Marketing Activities That Deliver The Biggest Impact

To grow your business, you need to draw in more customers. You also need to make sure potential customers engage with your business so you can keep their attention. While there are a plethora of different marketing techniques to help you bring in more customers, many of them can be expensive to implement. The below free content marketing activities offer easy ways you can build your online presence and boost lead generation.

Blog More Frequently

Your customers want more information and want to stay in-the-know. Search engines want to see more quality blog posts from your site to determine your knowledge and authority before they’ll rank you higher. The solution: Write more blog posts.

Writing blog posts has a huge impact on the amount of traffic you can attract to your website, and can help you draw in more customers faster. Blog content is also a super easy way to fill your social media calendar and gives you something to email your database about.

Want to increase your website traffic drastically? Aim to write a blog post at least once every few days.

Not sure what to write? We offer search optimised blog post writing and a full suite of content marketing services to help you build your business online. Enquire online here.

Use Headline Analyser Tools

How do you get a customer to actually read your blog posts? With engaging, informative headlines. If the headline isn’t interesting, potential visitors are not likely to start to read the article to see if it has the information they’re looking for.

Use headline analyser tools such as this one from CoSchedule and work to optimise the headline for every blog post you publish. Try out at least 5 or 6 different headlines for every post to see which one is going to have the biggest impact and draw in the most visitors before you publish your article.

Link Your Blog Posts Together

Go through your existing blog posts to see where you can add cross links to other posts you’ve written. This encourages your customers to stay on your website longer by pointing them to more information they might be interested in, and it helps boost the optimisation of your website.

As you add more posts to your website, you can continue to link them together to further boost your ranking and draw in more visitors to your website.

Optimise Your Blog Posts

One of the easiest things you can do is take what you already have, and make it better! Review your old blog posts (and website pages) to improve the on-page search optimisation. Read this article to find out how: 10 Ways To Improve Existing Blog Posts. Improving your on-page SEO will impact how your site ranks and appears to searching customers, ultimately increasing the traffic to your website.

Want help with SEO? We can help. Get in touch here.

Auto-Schedule Posts to Social Media

When you have a free moment, go ahead and create a few different social media posts that align with your business message, offers, blog posts or opinions. Then use a in-built or external apps to schedule them to be posted at regular intervals. This process allows your business to still be connecting with customers consistently even if you’re busy working, travelling or having a day off!

Free tools include the in-built Facebook Post scheduler, or other apps such as Buffer, RecurPost, Planoly and Later (among others) offer a free plan to get you started with social media scheduling.

Create a stellar social media schedule with our Free Content Scheduling Checklist.

Add Visual Content to Posts

Driving more customers to your website is all about engaging them and grabbing their interest. Customers enjoy being able to see information and being able to see the information in a visual form can engage them more than just words on the screen. Add visual content like infographics, videos, photos, and more to seize their attention and encourage them to read your posts or visit your website — better still, encourage them to Pin your images to Pinterest to drive even more traffic to your site!

Give Out Resources for Free

Give out something free to your customers when they visit your website. Everyone loves to get things for free, so offering an e-book, checklist or other useful information can encourage customers to sign up for your email list. Studies have shown people, in general, are far more likely to give out their personal information such as their name and email address if they’re going to get something immediately in return.

Check out our range of digital marketing freebies right here.

Use Liquid Code to Personalise Emails

Sending out emails is a great way to encourage customers to visit your website again or purchase a product, but you need to make sure they’re opening your emails and reading them. Personalising your emails using liquid code ensures the email is tailored to your customer and, therefore, far more interesting to them. This can increase opening rates for the emails you send quite a bit in a very short amount of time.

What is liquid code you ask? Liquid enables you to load and display dynamic content based on the data you have about a customer to personalise your communications with them. Check out this post for 9 Tips For Using Liquid To Personalise Emails.

Send Emails During Office Hours

Don’t waste your time writing emails that don’t get opened. Send your emails at a prime time for your audience.

While you might be up early in the morning and ready to send the all important promo email, or you’re up late at night crafting the perfect email, your customers may not be in the prime state of mind to read them at that time.

Corporates or business people tend to be more willing to read and respond to promotional emails during office hours on a weekday than they are early in the morning or late at night, so sending your emails at this time can encourage them to read the emails. If you are pitching to parents or teens, perhaps nights and weekends are your best best when they are likely to be online.

Most email marketing software nowadays allows you to schedule emails so you can write them when it’s convenient for you and have them sent to customers at the right time of the day.

Create a Google Business Page

If you have a store-front or physical business location, make sure you have a Google business page. This doesn’t take a lot of time to create and can have a huge impact on the monthly visitors to your website.

Include the name of your business, photos if possible, open hours, and your website. When a customer does a search for your business name or for something you offer, it’s far more likely they’ll notice your business and visit your website if you have a Google business page. Plus you’ll show up on Google Maps giving you additional free exposure to people in your local area.

Host a Contest for Social Media

Social media is all about interacting with your customers. Though you may be posting content frequently, and your customers may respond to the content or visit your website for more information, you’re going to want to be more active in your engagement with them, especially if you are leading into a launch.

Try hosting a contest on your social media accounts to encourage more people to follow you on social media, share your business profiles or content, and watch your account carefully to see if they win the contest. Yes you usually have to give away something, BUT the free exposure you get in return is much cheaper than paid advertising.

Share Your Expertise

To get yourself a boost of social media exposure and some quality back-links to your site, find high-traffic websites related to your business, though not direct competitors, and offer to write a guest post for them. You can also seek out Podcasts of a similar nature. Ensure it is a site or podcast which attracts readers or customers that are likely to be interested in what your business has to offer to make the experience worthwhile.

Got oodles of knowledge to share? Jump on an industry forum or business directory and share with peers, get into new Facebook Groups to meet new people and educate them about what you do, or expand your reach by sharing your articles and videos on multiple online platforms.

Get On Video

We’ve all heard it MAAAANY times before, but getting on video — even if it’s just your webcam or mobile phone — is a free way to connect with your customers and followers, as well as dramatically increase your organic exposure online. You literally can’t go wrong with video. And if you stuff it up, blooper videos can do wonders for digital engagement as well ;).

So there you have it, 13 totally free ways you can step up your online presence and customer engagement using content marketing techniques. Do you have any other free content marketing tips to share? Drop them in the comments below!

Originally published at optimiseandgrowonline.com.au on June 27, 2018.