With many businesses lacking the budget, resources and time to create a successful content strategy, learning to take advantage of the recourses you have already have available to you is critical. Creating content that is eye catching and informative to your audience is vital in successfully competing alongside competition, enabling you to achieve your marketing goal.
The use of Imagery – Using Social Media
A page full of black and white writing is enough to make anybody bored and click away.
Be that different site. Create content that is both informative and eye catching with the use of imagery.
Adding in relevant pictures to an article on your website or blog is a great way to break up big chunks of text, which will attract reader’s attention and encourage them to carry on reading.
Take advantage of social media: Facebook, twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and snapchat. With Instagram having 300 million users you’re able to apply your images to an extremely powerful network and in a place which is becoming a great source for brands and businesses to grow due to the networks successful engagement rate. Not only will these sites provide you with great leads for your company, but these platforms are free to use and download onto mobiles and tablets enabling easy access at all times. By letting your audience know what you’re up to with constant and regular updates on the sites you’re grabbing their attention and showing your dedication to your latest products and services, leading to more awareness and interest of your business. You may find it beneficial to allocate an employee with experience and knowledge to manage the role to make sure you’re using the networks to their full advantage.
The use of Videos
With more than 4 billion hours’ worth of videos viewed every single month, it’s no wonder why every business isn’t already making relevant successful videos to attract their desired online audience.
For example; if you’re trying to promote your latest product, writing an article about it may not get the attention in which it deserves. Creating a video which contains sound, movement and colour enables you to attract a bigger audience as you’re able to explain and inform people in more depth about the use of the product by providing a visual example of how the product works.
With the use of social media again, you have sites such as YouTube and vine but with both twitter and Instagram recently integrating the use of video into their networks there is an even bigger platform enabling you to produce video content to share with your audience, enabling more brand exposure.
Finding your content
You have all of these platforms to apply your content to but obtaining relevant imagery is the next task.
Sites such as Canva enable you to create designs for blog graphics, presentations, Facebook covers, Instagram photos and much more. It’s an online site which is free and easy to use with an easy drag and drop tool, the site also provides you with hundreds of free fonts and images with premium images too for just 66p.
Next up there is Flickr where you will find photos taken and shared within a community of both amateur and professional photographers. The site allows you to use the photos uploaded for your own personal use as long as you credit back to the person who uploaded the image onto the site, and it’s all free and extremely easy to use.
Adobe Photoshop is a top of the range photo and video editing software which allows you to make Gifs, Animations, touch up your photos and lot’s more. With recent changes adobe have put in place a ‘pay as you go’ for their services. If you’re a small business, student or photographer it’s easier than ever to create top of the range content for your website at a fraction of the price.
Although Photoshop can be tricky and a bit daunting to use when you’re new to it, providing the relevant employees with training using courses such as xchange training which will provide them with full, relevant knowledge and training on how to get the most of the service.
However with video you need to become creative and produce your own content which is relevant to both you and your business. You will need to produce content that contains information about the service which you’re providing in order for it to be successful. You’re able to put all your video content together using Microsoft movie maker which may already be installed onto your computer, or if you’re a MAC user you may have iMovie which lets you create HD movies and share them instantly onto social networking platforms.
Combining these more budget methods enables you to market yourself among the masses no matter your business size. Get the creative juices flowing and see what you can do!
