Being a small business means many things, including offering personalized service that the big box stores simply can’t match.

It can also come with a reliance on word-of-mouth marketing since your larger marketing efforts often get crushed under the weight of advertising dollars you competition has to throw around. Fortunately, online marketing is helping to get even the smallest businesses out in front of their target audience, giving them a chance to level the playing field.

Connecting with Your Customers in the Internet Age

You don’t need a big marketing contract to make contact with your customers in today’s world, but it does help to have a copywriter around to help turn your ideas into reality. These experienced writers are an important element in getting your business to ranking with Google so your customers can find you easily online.

Although you can focus your efforts in one direction, it often pays to fan out online. After all, your customers may not look for you in the places where you think it should be most obvious that you’d be. Most small businesses find success when mixing social media with blogging or the creation of an article database to enhance their website.

Diving into blogging and social media can be daunting, but rules of thumb like these can help keep you on track:

Create high quality content. This, beyond all else, is vital to the continuation of your online presence. You don’t have to write everything in formal English, with your pinkie in the air as you sip your tea, but your content must be produced fluently. Hiring painfully cheap labor means unreadable websites riddled with errors and ample Google penalties that will make it impossible for anyone to find your business online.

Produce engaging blogs and articles. It’s not enough to just throw some words onto the web, they need to be words that someone wants to read. An engaging writing style coupled with useful how-to style articles, commentary on your industry or blogs that expand on the products you carry will give people who have never heard of you before a reason to care. By producing engaging content like this, you’ll prove your expertise to the world and funnel more traffic to your site.

Interact with your fans. If you follow the first two bits of advice, you’re going to amass a number of fans, both in your social media outlets and for your blog work. These people will attempt to ask you questions, email you or interact via your blog’s discussion board. Make sure you respond to these guys and keep it interactive and up-beat. Show the world the smiling face behind your company and you can’t go wrong.

Content marketing sounds like something a small business shouldn’t be able to tackle, but it’s not as hard as it seems. Whether you hire a professional copywriter or attempt to go it on your own, the important thing is that your high quality content arrives consistently in front of your die-hard fans.