A whopping 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Making sure your business ranks well is imperative to being found online. 

Keyword research is the first critical step in developing your SEO strategy. But the way that you undertake keyword research for your homepage will be different from how you settle on the right search terms for your content like blog posts and podcasts. Plus, keyword research and content creation should have a symbiotic relationship. 

As you research your keywords and begin to understand how prospects are searching, you can plan and create content that speaks directly to searchers’ intent and needs. 

Here’s a quick, 6-step guide to help you get your content research off the ground and drive the right kind of traffic — traffic that is more likely to convert.

We’ll start by talking about what keyword research is.

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing popular search terms that people enter into search engines like Google, and include them strategically in your content so that your content appears higher on a search engine results page. 

Keyword research can help you find ideas for your next blog post, learn more about the needs of your audience, and keep up to date with the lingo of the ever-changing search landscape. Researching what people type into search engines and using this data to create targeted content will ultimately help you drive the right traffic to your site.

Here are 6 quick, easy steps to help you get started. 

Step 1: Start with Your Own List of Keywords

Start by brainstorming on your own. You know your business and what you offer to your customers, so you probably have a solid sense of the terms they’re searching for to find you.

It’s important to note that in recent years there’s been a shift in the way that Google handles search queries. Google is now more invested in ranking results based on intent. The person who searches for “home remodeling ideas” is probably looking for something different than the person who searches for “best home remodeler in Kansas City,” right? The latter searcher is probably ready to start knocking down walls and ripping out tile, whereas the former might be daydreaming about redoing their kitchen someday in the next couple of years. Therefore, the results are going to vary.

Google acknowledges that the intent behind those searches is radically different, and so they’re now displaying results differently for those search queries. Because of this trend towards semantic search, it’s now important for businesses to consider long-tail keywords.

While your homepage might have keywords that are broader and more likely to cast a wider net, snatching up searchers at various stages of the customer journey, you want the keywords associated with your individual product pages and informative content to be more targeted.

If a home remodeler has various pages for the types of services they offer—kitchen, bathroom, home additions, basement finishing, and so on—they should have long-tail keywords for each of those pages that speak to that subset of the broader audience.

Step 2: Turn to Auto-Suggest

Another great starting point for your content keyword research is to start searching in Google yourself. Autocomplete is a great to use early and often when developing content calendars and general organic search strategies. You can uncover quality long-tail phrases that are commonly searched across the web by your audience.

Take some of the broader keywords you’ve identified for your business and see what comes up in auto-suggest.

Let’s return to the home remodeling example. When you type in home remodel, you get some auto-suggestions that indicate a few trends. One is about technology; the fifth and sixth suggestion have to do with apps and software. The other is about financing; people often search about loans or government incentives associated with remodeling.

This tells you something important about what prospects are thinking about when considering remodeling for themselves. They’re worried about the financial aspect (we all know renovations aren’t cheap!), and they like the idea of being able to have a hand in the design process, accessing technology that can help them plan out and visualize their dream kitchen or bathroom.

If you don’t already have content on your website that speaks to those major areas of interest or concern, maybe it’s time to consider adding some! It’s also helpful to go through and click on those auto-suggestions to see what content does appear when you Google “home remodel incentive,” for example. Who is already ranking in those results? Are they direct competitors? Is there a gap in the type of information you can find in that search—one that you could fill with original content on your site?

Step 3: Check out the Competition and See How They’re Ranking For Your Keywords

While it’s important to think about your own strategy, it’s also a smart idea to consider what your competitors are up to. There are plenty of tools out there that can help you do some opposition research into the keywords your competitors are using.

A site like SEMrush can help you see your known competitor’s keywords, identify other potential competitors that you hadn’t previously considered, and monitor shifts in where your domain is ranking (you can access a free 14-day trial of SEMrush Pro using this link).

You can also spend some time on your competitors’ website. Take a look at how they organize their content. Is there a way for you to differentiate your site and content from theirs—a unique approach that you can take to sharing what you do?

Step 4: Ask Your Customers

By this point, you’ve done a lot of digging into keyword research on your own. Now it’s time to ask your customers what they think. Sometimes the people who know and love your business will have a unique take on what’s so special about you, and it will help you to hit on a vein of content to mine that you wouldn’t have found on your own.

Don’t think of this as a daunting task. Asking for feedback can be as simple as sending a quick survey or simply asking people as part of your conversation with them while you’re on the phone.

There are a few helpful questions to ask, like:

“What search terms did you use when you were researching how to fix your problem?”
“What search terms ultimately led you to our business?”

Plus, it’s helpful to ask what it is that they think sets you apart from the competition; writing about what makes you different is a way to help your content stand out.

Step 5: Look at Google’s Keyword Planner (and Google Trends)

Once you’ve gathered up this bundle of keyword suggestions, it’s time to head to Google’s Keyword Planner tool. While it’s designed to work with paid search, it can also help direct your organic search efforts. Keyword Planner can help you get an idea of the right keywords you want to target by considering monthly search frequency, competition, and even cost-per-click (CPC) pricing.

 You do need a Google Ads account to access it, but once you’re in, you can begin to get information about the size of the audience you’ll be able to reach with each keyword, and more. 

Google Trends can help you determine which terms are trending upward, and are thus worth more of your focus. (This can be accessed without an ads account.)

For local businesses, it’s best to hone in on keywords that are not overly competitive and have a manageable reach. If you go for broad keywords that are highly competitive and can reach millions of people, it doesn’t do you much good. You’ll then find yourself coming up against giant brands, and you’ll never be able to rank well in that arena. Plus, you don’t need to reach tens of millions of people; you’re serving your specific community, so those are the people you want to see your name in SERPs.

Step 6: Create Hub Pages

Once you’ve settled on the keywords for your content, it’s important to mold the content itself to speak to the intent behind these keywords. You understand now what your audience wants, it’s time to create content that gives them just that.

I’ve talked a lot about building hub pages recently, and that’s because they’re an incredibly powerful tool when it comes to establishing trust and authority plus dominating in search results. Hub pages allow you to build what’s essentially a mini-Wikipedia for your area of expertise. You put all of your content related to a given topic on a hub page and tie it together in a way that addresses the questions a prospect might have.

Let’s return to the home remodeler example. One of their hub pages could be “The Ultimate Guide to Kitchen Remodeling.” On that page, they’ll link out to content (blog posts, video, podcasts) that cover all the ins and outs of a kitchen remodel, from initial research to picking finishes to project management once the renovation is underway.

Through keyword research, you learned that financing the project and using tech in the design stages were important issues for a lot of homeowners, so you want to include content that addresses those issues.

With this hub page, you become the comprehensive source of information on the entire kitchen renovation process. Not only does this allow you to become an authority early on in prospects’ research (making them all the more likely to turn to you when they’re ready to hire someone!), it also does great things for your SEO. Prospects stay on this hub page for a while—there’s a lot of information to soak in! They click on a couple of articles, navigating back to the hub page in between. They may even share an article with their spouse about the renovation process, or send a video to their friend who’s helping them pick new appliances.

When visitors spend a lot of time on one page, search engines get the message that it’s a well of great content. They want to provide their searchers with the best results, so they bump your hub page up in SERPs to ensure that it gets found by a broader audience.

Great keyword research for content is about using that research to guide your content creation process. You can learn a lot about search intent and what prospects are looking for by undertaking effective keyword research. Armed with that knowledge, you can then create content that speaks to those prospects’ wants and needs, ensuring that you stand out from the competition.

What was once a complimentary, nice-to-have component of content marketing now plays an imperative role. Video has emerged front-and-center and is arguably one of the most effective types of content to connect with your audience.

Video consumption shows no signs of slowing down in the next few years. By 2021, the average person will spend 100 minutes every day watching online videos (a 19% increase from 2019).

If you still haven’t yet embraced video, now is the time to start.

Oftentimes when people think of video marketing, they think of social media content. While there’s certainly a great case to be made for using video on social platforms (and lots of ways to do it!), incorporating video across other marketing channels is just as essential.

Here are eight types of video content that can be added to any business’s marketing system. This will allow you to tell your brand story in a dynamic, engaging way, and influence people to take action. 

1. Brand Story

Every brand has a story. Lots of entrepreneurs have fascinating tales of how they got the idea to start their business and the journey that they went on to get that business off the ground. But when we talk about the core story, it’s not about where the brand has been, it’s really more about the customer’s story.

Every brand has a problem that they solve for their customers. It’s their own unique approach to solving the issue. This is what attracts customers to the business in the first place and keeps them coming back time and again.

Creating a video that tells your core story is a great way to establish trust immediately with prospects. A strong core story outlines a prospect’s problem, paints a picture of a world where the problem has been solved, and then offers up your business as the solution to the issue.

Putting a video like this front-and-center on your website sets you up for success with prospects. Not only do prospects feel seen and heard by what they’re seeing in the video—this is a brand that really gets my problem!—they also have a sense of connection with the people behind the brand.

When the business owner gets on camera and talks directly to their prospects about how they address their big concern, this wins their trust and builds a human-to-human connection from the get-go.

2. Service or Product Videos

You have gotten the attention of a prospect with your core story. Next, your prospect might want to learn more about the specifics of how your business can solve their problems. That’s where product or service videos come in.

It doesn’t matter what kind of business you run. A video showcasing your offerings can help to dynamically demonstrate all the pros of purchasing your product or service.

For more complicated products, like a new software system or a tool or machinery that requires some set-up, product videos can help eliminate some of the fear that a prospect might feel about purchasing a complex product. When they see how easy it is to set up and use in the video, they’ll feel more confident in their ability to do it on their own.

The same is true of videos that feature services. Let’s say you are a car mechanic. People are often distrustful of car mechanics, thinking they’re able to rip people off because most of us don’t understand how a car actually works. A service video, where the mechanic walks viewers through the standard inspection process and points out potential red flags along the way can help to eliminate prospects’ fears that they’re a scam-artist mechanic.

Even for simple products, video can help to bring the item to life. A product video for a children’s construction toy that shows the features of the completed model might sell a parent on the purchase. Or a video on a clothing e-commerce site, showing a model walking back and forth in items of clothing can give viewers a sense of how the shirt or pants look and move on a real person.

Product Video Examples:

Service Video Example:

3. Client Testimonials

Testimonials, reviews, and case studies all play a similar role in the lead nurturing process. They offer social proof that your business is as good as you say it is. Of course, you have a vested interest in selling your business as the best business out there in your field. That is your job when you have your marketing hat on, after all! 

The most persuasive messages don’t come from email campaigns or sales reps, they come straight from the mouths of satisfied customers. Testimonial videos create a deeper and more emotional appeal from your brand. Social proof is a powerful decision-making factor. Video testimonials give regular customers the opportunity to be a brand advocate. 

By showing prospects an existing happy customer, you give them a taste of what their life could be like if they hired you. If you’re looking for tips on how to get the most out of your interview with one of your happy customers, check out these steps for putting together an effective case study.

Testimonial Video Example:

4. Frequently Asked Questions

Let’s face it, scrolling through dozens of questions in a standard FAQ page is boring. Why not create the most engaging FAQ page possible by incorporating video answers onto the page?

This is also a great opportunity to get a number of people from the company involved in the video creation process. Have someone from each department get in front of the camera. They can each record a handful of answers to the FAQs that are most relevant to their role at the company.

First, this is a fun activity for the team members who participate. Additionally, it provides you with the opportunity to introduce prospects to even more of the faces behind the business. And the greater the sense of familiarity and personal connection you can establish early on, the more you will stand out in terms of trust and likability.

5. Educational and ‘How To’ Videos

People love having their questions answered and learning new things – especially when they’re looking for more information about a specific topic.

Educational videos offer real value to your audience they can apply and use in their everyday lives. When people find the content you produce to be valuable and genuinely helpful, you begin to earn their trust.

When they trust you, they’re more likely to return to you for more help in the future thus building a stronger relationship with them. This encourages leads down the funnel.

Educational Video Example:

6. Event Videos

Planning and hosting an event takes a massive amount of work. Capturing your event on video is an easy way to extend its length and reach. Videos make events scalable. You’re able to spread brand awareness, engagement, and authority far beyond the event itself.

Events are about making new connections and networking with other people. Your event video should capture that. 

Event Video Example:

7. Explainer Videos

Explainer videos are often used to learn more about a product or service. They help you deliver important information in a short amount of time and leave a memorable impression. It’s a short informative video that explains something in a colorful, fun, and engaging way.

Adding an explainer video to your homepage is a great way to quickly explain your product or service to someone visiting your site. It effectively walks customers through a scenario where their problem would be solved by using your product. This way a user won’t have to click through and read multiple pages to understand what it is that your company does or what your offer is.

Explainer Video Example:

8. Personalized Sales Videos

Once you have won prospects over with great video content on your website, it’s time to take things to the next level. Encouraging your sales team to use one-to-one video in the sales process allows them to embrace personalization.

Using a tool like Loom makes it easy for even the least tech-savvy sales team in the room to record and send videos. Creating a personalized video, where they address the prospect by name and speak to their specific concerns and questions, makes that prospect feel special. They think, “If this business went through the trouble to record a video just for me, can you imagine the lengths they’ll go-to for me if I become a customer?”

Video content can play a role throughout all stages of the customer journey. Video can be critical to establishing trust, building a personal connection, and moving prospects down the hourglass towards their first purchase.

Your business doesn’t serve a homogenous customer base. Unless you’re an incredibly niche service, it’s likely that you have at least a handful of types of people who benefit from your products or services.

Because these types of customers are different from each other, they won’t all be won by the same kind of messaging. That’s why it’s helpful to create unique user experiences on your website that speak to each segment of your overall customer population.

Here’s what you must do to create a more personalized, segmented user experience for your website.

Create Target Market Personas

First thing’s first: You need to figure out what the segments of your larger customer population are. There are a number of ways to break an audience down into distinct buyer personas, and it starts with data. This might be data from your CRM, email service provider, website, or social media analytics.

Start looking for demographic and behavioral trends. Are there certain age groups, genders, or people from specific locations that do business with you? If you’re a B2B company, are there industries you work with often, or are your point-people in a particular department, or do they hold a specific job title?

Behavioral trends can help, too. Are there certain pages on your website that nearly everyone visits before they become a customer? Is there a particular email campaign that drives a lot of prospects to set up a sales call and eventually convert?

Finally, take a look at how these demographic and behavioral data points overlap. Is there a specific age group that responds well to a certain section of your website? Does your social media page generate a lot of interest from people in a particular geographic area?

If possible, it’s also a good idea to conduct some interviews with your existing customers. Hearing straight from the source about what problems your client solves and why they chose your client over their competitor can help you hone in on some of the other elements of the customer personas.

Once you’ve gathered all of your information, you can create your composite sketch of each type of their ideal customers: Who they are, what they need, and what they expect from you.

Allow for Self-Identification

Now that you understand who these different segments of your audience are, you can begin to create different messaging and experiences for them on your website.

The easiest way to ensure that each customer ends up on the path that’s intended for their persona is to allow them to self-select into the appropriate segment on your website. Websites do this all the time to great effect. Let’s say you own an architecture firm, and you handle both residential and commercial projects. On the homepage for the website, build a splash page with two separate buttons—one for those interested in each type of project.

Each button will take the visitor to a separate homepage for that specific audience, with a navigation bar that speaks to their needs (i.e. those who click on residential will see the portfolio for homes the architect has designed, and informational content about the process of undertaking home renovations).

Design Unique Landing Pages

I’ve already covered one instance in which unique landing pages can work on your website to speak to different audiences. This is also an effective tactic when you’re driving traffic from ads to your website.

Take, for example, a paid search campaign. Let’s stick with the architectural firm example and say that within your commercial work, you have two distinct personas: You work regularly with private schools and non-profit organizations. You design a Google Ads campaign targeted at private school leaders and board members. When they click the ad, rather than taking them to the generic landing page for commercial projects, why not create a landing page specifically about your work with other schools?

This customized landing page is effective in immediately addressing the pain points of your distinct persona. That board member of the private school might be somewhat interested in your work for other types of commercial properties, but when they see right off the bat that your architect has designed beautiful spaces that address the specific needs of a client in private education, that prospect feels an immediate connection to your work. They feel seen and understood, and you begin to immediately build trust.

Select Channels Based on Audience

Once you’ve captured the attention of each segment with an effective strategy to get them onto your website, continue to dazzle them with content that speaks specifically to their needs.

Of course, you want the meat of the content to be relevant to the audience. That means topics that matter, filled with advice and helpful information, rather than sales pitch after sales pitch.

But in addition to considering what you’re going to cover in your content, you want to think about how you’re sharing it. Typically when people think of content, they think blog posts, but there’s so much more to it than that: Podcasts, explainer videos, webinars, infographics, and ebooks—there’s a wide variety of ways to reach your audience.

For example, did you know that video, while a popular medium with all consumers, is even more effective with Baby Boomers? It might surprise you to learn that they watch 10 percent more videos on YouTube than Millennials. Meanwhile, Millennials and Gen Zers outpace Boomers and older generations when it comes to podcast listening.

So while you want to be providing a variety of content to each of the segments of your audience—because no one wants to be greeted with the same content format over and over again—think about ways you can lean into certain types of content for specific personas.

Invest in Hub Pages

Hub pages do a lot of good in organizing content on your websites. In addition to giving you great SEO juice and breathing new life into old content, it can also establish thought leadership in specific areas that are important to your different personas.

Let’s return to the architect example. If you know that your commercial clients are mainly in the private education and non-profit worlds, it makes sense to build hub pages around those two areas. One hub page can be specifically for that private school audience and include content that speaks to topics like fundraising and budgeting for major capital improvements, planning your construction around the school year, and designing a modern education building that speaks to what today’s parents are looking for.

Different segments of your audiences will have different needs and expectations when it comes to what they’re hoping to get from your business. By identifying these different buyer personas and creating specific customer journeys for various groups, you get a better chance at directly addressing pain points, building trust quickly and efficiently, and moving new prospects towards the sale even faster.

This post was brought to you by Ivory Research

Both SEO and content creation strategies cannot be implemented successfully without keyword research. Creating content that is ranking and speaks to the intent and needs of your ideal audience requires an understanding of which keywords matter to the relevant searches.

Keyword research is a critical first step to establishing a successful marketing maturity model. While it’s worth investing some time and effort in the process, it need not be arduous or difficult. In fact, I have some tips to help you conduct simple, effective keyword research.

1. Ideation

Who will know your business better than you? Hopefully no one. That’s why a great first step in keyword research is to sit down and brainstorm terms and questions your business answers for clients.

You should have a solid idea of what your business does and what people ask for. Are there certain questions their sales team gets all the time? Is there a consistent piece of feedback you get in reviews about what you did differently from your competition?

Do your best to focus on what customers ask for and stay away from any industry jargon. You are looking for the words and phrases that customers would use to describe your goods and services.

Part of the brainstorming process should also include understanding the types of customers you’re hoping to attract. What do you want to be known for, and what related terms should you focus on?

2. Turn to Google Keyword Suggest

Google Ads does have a keyword research tool, but I find it easier to just go to the search engine itself and run some test searches. Their autosuggest tool is a powerful way to generate keyword ideas that reflect what people are actually searching for.

Let’s say you own a home remodeling business. If you go to Google and type in “home remodel” check out the suggestions you get.

While some people are looking for specific companies, it seems most turn to Google when they’re in the early design stages. They’re on the hunt for ideas. Others still are looking for an app or software to help them begin the planning process; and that makes sense—it’s easier to commit to an expensive remodeling process if you’ve been able to run some scenarios in advance and are certain it’s worth it. And of course, because the home remodel process is expensive, you see questions about loans coming up close to the top as well.

From this one simple search, you now have a goldmine of information and lots of SEO and content ideas. Maybe write a post outlining how to budget for and finance renovations. Perhaps you can create a video showcasing your favorite free design tools where prospects can test out remodeling ideas.

You can also check out the “People also ask” box featured in the middle of the SERPs and the “Searches related to…” links at the bottom of the page for more ideas.

3. Keywords Everywhere Extension

While you’re on Google, why not check out what the Keywords Everywhere extension can tell you? Designed to work on Chrome and Firefox browsers, this extension will tell you even more about the search terms you enter.

Once you type in your search term, the extension will display related keywords on the Google page. It will also pull in Google advertising data, showing you the search volume, cost per click, and Ads competition.

4. YouTube Suggests

While YouTube is owned by Google, it’s still worthwhile to pop on over to their homepage to check out their autosuggests on your relevant keywords.

While the search term might be the same, the results you’ll get are often radically different. That’s because people use Google and YouTube in very different ways. Folks often turn to YouTube for tutorials and other types of content, which means you’ll get to see a whole other side of keyword possibilities by checking out autosuggestions on both Google and YouTube.

5. Wikipedia

Another angle to explore is everyone’s favorite online research tool: Wikipedia. Type in your keyword there, and you’ll find a table of contents at the top of the page. This gives you a whole new list of ways to explore your client’s area of expertise. Take again the home remodel example.

The table of contents on home improvement dives into the reasons one may undertake a home renovation project. Perhaps there’s a way for you to build out content around each of these areas. Create a podcast episode around energy-saving renovations, with information about replacing windows, updating insulation, and walking listeners through alternative energy sources, like solar and geothermal. Write a blog post about how to incorporate safety and emergency preparedness measures into a home improvement project, from fire and burglary alarm systems to back up generators that supply power during an outage.

6. Answer the Public

When you’re looking for popular questions related to your search term, I suggest you check out Answer the Public. Simply type in your search term on the homepage, and the tool will create a visual representation of related questions and phrases, and will even provide you with an alphabetical list of related terms.

7. Analyze All Existing Content and Create Your Hub Pages

Once you’ve done your keyword research, it’s time to take a look at the content you already have. How does that content align with the relevant keywords you found along the way? Are there ways to tweak the content to speak more directly to searchers’ intent? Are there gaps in the content you can fill with new content that will better address those most relevant search terms?

From here, you can begin to build out hub pages. These pages serve as the go-to guides on a given topic, and it’s easy to hone in on the best topics for hub pages once you’ve done your keyword research and understand what people are really searching for when they research your industry or field. Hub pages have major benefits from both an SEO and content perspective, so creating a handful of effective hub pages should be the ultimate goal of your keyword research.

Keyword research is never done in a vacuum. Great keyword research is at the heart of strong SEO and content creation strategies. It will drive your editorial calendar creation and help you get ranking in SERPs. By following the steps above, you’ll be sure to cover all of your bases and give yourself the greatest shot at happening upon unique keywords that can help you get noticed in a crowded marketplace.

Getting backlinks can seem like a daunting task. How do you get other businesses to link to your site online?

If you don’t have any backlinks yet you can get up and running pretty quickly by tapping your existing partners and resources within your community. Things like the local chamber of commerce online listings, alumni directories for the founders’ schools, and church and community directories are great places to start. This is the low-hanging fruit, and getting these backlinks set up is a great way to ease into the next steps in a backlink strategy.

Once you’ve established those links, it’s time to move onto more advanced tactics. Gathering more backlinks should be an ongoing effort, and if you’re looking for legitimate ways to get backlinks, these are the best way to do it.

Research Competitors Backlinks

Start by investigating your competitors. Where are they getting backlinks? Are they in industry databases or local publications that list providers in their city? Once you’ve discovered these additional places where you can be listed, it’s sometimes as easy as filling out a simple form to get your business listed.

A comprehensive SEO tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs can help you research your existing backlinks as well as the links your competitors have acquired.

Update Existing Content

Hopefully, you already have some content on your site. Sometimes, there’s an opportunity to restructure or refresh the content you already have in order to generate backlinks.

Do you have any blog posts that list providers or tools that are helpful for your readers? Take a look through the list and add some new businesses onto these lists. Then, reach out to these businesses to let them know their service or tool has been featured; they’ll want to let their customers know that they got a shout-out on an outside site, and so you’ll likely get a backlink from them.

Submit Guest Posts

Guest blogging has long been a popular, more advanced way to get backlinks. Reaching out to relevant sites and writing a guest post on their blog is a great way to get links. However, over the years the trend of guest posting has waned a bit, so it’s now more difficult to get a guest blogging gig.

It’s worth the try, though! Put together a targeted list of blogs and publications that would be a solid fit for a strategic partner for your business. Write a compelling, error-free pitch email, outlining the topics you could write about and why it would bring real value to their audience. Tailor your pitch to each blog’s specific audience, and take the time to research who you’re emailing so that you can send a personalized message. Finally, feel free to follow up with your contact in a respectful way if you don’t hear back initially.

Join a Podcast

While guest blogging seems to be falling out of favor, guest podcasting is my new favorite way to get backlinks. Just like with guest blogging, guest podcasting is great because it allows you to tap into the existing audience of the brand of the podcast you’re appearing on.

And there’s an additional benefit that guest blogging doesn’t have: It’s very little additional work. While writing a blog post requires research, writing, editing, and selecting photos and relevant emails, when you are a guest on a podcast, you simply show up and talk about what you do every day. You’re an expert in your field, and you can speak comfortably on your topic with little preparation. And with most podcasts, you can call in from wherever you are to speak with the host, so within the 30 minutes or so that it takes to do the interview, you have generated great backlinks.

A service such as Podcast Bookers can get you set up a pitched to podcasts very quickly.

Write up a Report

While it’s sometimes challenging to convince others to let you guest blog, if you have exclusive research to share, you can capture everyone’s attention. Offering up research is a great way to get media links and to even open guest blogging doors.

Yes, exclusive research takes time. However, if you are able to partner with one of your existing business relationships, you can both reap the benefits and halve the work. You and your strategic partner can tap into your networks to find people to interview for the research. Then divide and conquer when it comes to assembly the data and creating visually-appealing ways to share it.

Connect in New Content

How can you get attention and backlinks for new content you create? Mentioning relevant influencers, community members, or others in your posts is a great way to get re-shares on new content.

Of course, you shouldn’t just stuff names into posts for the sake of name dropping. Make sure that the people you’re mentioning are relevant to what you’re writing about. For example, let’s say you are a home remodeling business. Consider pulling together a series of posts featuring families you’ve done work for. If there’s anyone that’s a pillar of the community who they’ve worked with, ask if they’d be willing to be featured. Let’s say you helped the former mayor remodel her kitchen—ask her if she’d be willing to talk about the process and share how her new and improved kitchen has bettered her life.

Once the post goes live, let the person know and ask them to re-share with their network and followers.

Publish a Press Releases

With all of these new digital marketing tactics, it’s possible to forget about those tried-and-true methods. But press releases are still a great way to get attention and backlinks! Are you launching a new product or opening a new location? Did you make a big, announcement-worthy hire? Are you participating in a local community event? There are plenty of reasons you might write a press release.

If you need a refresher on how to write an effective press release, check out this guest post on our Duct Tape Marketing blog.

Link Out

This is a long-game approach to getting backlinks, but it’s worth the effort. When you’re creating content, link out to tools and resources you genuinely like and think are helpful. If you’re featuring a specific tool or mentioning an individual person, you can email the business or person to let them know. But it’s good practice to include external links in every post, and many of those external links don’t warrant an email to the source.

However, it’s likely that the source is doing exactly what you’re doing: monitoring your online presence. They’ll see an alert that they’ve been linked out to, and that simple thing such as a link can get your brand on their radar screen. While they might not shout out that piece of content or link back to them right away, there may come a time in the future where they’re looking for a link to share that’s relevant to your client’s business, and it’s your site that they’ll turn to.

It’s important for you to build up a repository of backlinks. It matters for SEO ranking and your online reputation, and the more mentions you can get across the web, the more likely you are to win the attention of a new audience. But just as important as quantity is quality. A great marketing strategy can help you gather backlinks that are relevant to your business.

It’s an age-old question: what should I post on social media for my business? When it comes to social media, engagement is the ultimate name of the game. You want to start dialogues online with your followers. Many times that engagement can be a first or second step in getting a customer with a need to know, like and trust you. 

Social media can be an incredible tool to open up potential lines of communication with customers or clients. But in order to begin a conversation, someone has to say hi! By posting regularly on social media, through both organic and paid channels, you are saying hello and giving followers a starting place for additional engagement. 

You want to share content that’s meaningful and is likely to get a response from fans. Social media feeds contain lots of junk; you need to create something that captures attention in a sea of reTweets, tiger kings and memes.

Here are the three types of posts you should be creating for engagement on your business’s social media profiles. Each serves its own unique purpose, and when combined, they create a consistent, thoughtful online presence.

Brand Personality  

Introduce yourself to your followers and their friends. This is organic content that can only be shared by someone within your organization. Let your followers start to understand the type of culture that is within your company. 

People go to social media for the community, to take a break, for advice, all of which are very personal. This is not where you should be selling. Sales messages would be a distraction from their original goal when they turned to their social channels. Or worse an annoyance. 

These posts can be hard to plan because they’re about things that happen organically. Maybe you decided to bring your dog in for the day. Who wouldn’t love to see your office from your dog’s point of view? Or take this real-life example from Duct Tape Marketing. I shared a photo with a touch of humor and a touch of a positive message with the help of my coffee mug and I got some great engagement and feedback. 

Posts like this get a lot of engagement because they tell the story of the person behind them. You aren’t selling to anyone, instead, you are letting them in, showing them day-to-day stuff as you run a business. It’s this kind of content that’s most likely to generate comments and likes, while simultaneously creating a sense that prospects really know the people behind the brand.

Editorial Posts 

The majority of your posts should be culture posts. These aren’t as easy to plan as the majority of them happen in the moment. To fill in the moments between you can schedule more operational posts. 

These are posts around shared content, they help to demonstrate you as an authority in your field. It’s proof that you are an expert at what you do and is a critical trust-building element with leads.

Let’s say you own a home cleaning service. Maybe you’ve been a guest on a podcast or local TV news show about finding the right cleaning service to fit your needs and budget. Or perhaps you write a great blog post about how to clean up messes left by a pet.   

Whatever the case may be, share this content on social media. While it won’t get the same level of engagement as your brand personality posts, it’s more likely to capture a prospect’s attention because the prospect has already been drawn in by something else. 

If they do click on the link, they’ll find it contains meaningful information. That’s how they’ll develop a deeper level of trust in your expertise.

Customer Journey Progression Posts 

Once you’ve won your audience over with culture posts and earned their trust with editorial posts, you can move into paid posts, which are designed to achieve business objectives.

These paid posts should have calls to action that speak to a specific conversion goal. You can create a number of paid social campaigns that are designed to speak to prospects and customers at various stages of the customer journey. For those in the try phase, create a CTA that invites them to download an ebook or sign up for a free trial. Returning customers should see advertising that’s tailored to their needs based on previous purchases.

While we all know that paid ads are not anyone’s favorite thing to encounter on their social feeds, if you’ve already laid the groundwork with meaningful organic content that your followers genuinely appreciate, prospects will be that much more receptive to seeing an ad from you.

A smart mix of organic and paid social posts can help you to build awareness and trust. This is what drives engagement on your social profiles. Posts with a lot of heart pave the way for those that are more focused on achieving business objectives. When you strike the right balance, you create an opportunity to have your social efforts feed directly into your other marketing channels to guide people farther down a customer journey.

Marketing is an ongoing process. Once you’ve established your systems and processes, it’s important to continually check in and reevaluate. And that’s because, in the course of running a business, things change. Your brand expands or shifts focus. Your customers’ needs and expectations fluctuate. It’s important that your marketing efforts remain fluid so you can keep pace with the natural evolution of your business.

Conducting a brand audit is part of this process. This is a smart place for marketing consultants to begin when they start work with a new client. It’s helpful for small business owners to have an outside set of eyes evaluating their brand and providing feedback. And if you’re a consultant yourself, it’s important to audit your own brand once in a while!

These are the essential elements that anyone should consider as they conduct a small business brand audit.

Brand Name

Start with the most visible part of the brand: the name. Does the name of your business communicate what you do? Oftentimes, businesses will shift focus as time goes on. While they may start out doing one thing for a particular type of client, as they head out into the world and begin interacting with real people, they may discover that customer needs are different than they anticipated or that there are complementary offerings their business should provide to give more comprehensive service.

It’s smart for a business to pivot in order to meet demand, but it’s also important that you consider a change in brand name if your original name no longer describes what you do and who you serve.

If you decide that a change in name is appropriate, there are a number of elements to consider. Is the new name you’d like to use under trademark elsewhere? Is there an appropriate domain name available online to reflect your new brand name? Do you have a web designer on hand to help facilitate the switch from your old website to your new online home? And do you have a plan in place to inform your existing customers about the change and to ensure they still feel welcomed and well-served by your business under its new name?

Logo and Icons

After the name itself comes your logo. Your logo will be stamped on almost everything you create and do, so you want to make sure it represents you well. Does your current logo reflect the look and feel you’d like to convey for your organization?

There are a number of design elements that go into setting the tone on your logo and branded visuals.

Color Palette

Can you identify three to four complementary colors that will help tell your story? It’s important to keep things to a narrow set of colors. When you introduce the whole rainbow into your design elements, you muddy the waters and make it difficult for your audience to find a through line in the story you’re trying to tell with your logo and color palette.

It’s also important to settle on colors that work well together. You likely remember the concept of complementary colors from elementary school art class, but are you familiar with the other types of colors that play nicely together?

This overview from Canva on the color wheel and color theory provide insight into how to match colors on the color wheel. Whether you opt for complementary colors (which are opposite each other on the color wheel), analogous colors (neighbors on the color wheel), or one of the other combinations that make sense from a color-theory perspective, it’s important to settle on a narrow range of colors that tell your story while looking great together.

Fonts

Along with color palette, you must be mindful of the fonts you select for your brand. The types of fonts you use can speak volumes about the type of business you are.

Again, it’s not advisable to embrace a wide range of fonts. Instead, it’s best to limit yourself to two to three fonts that you use consistently across all of your marketing assets. As with brand colors, the more fonts you introduce, the less clear your intent and brand story become.

Things like the font style, size, weight, and spacing all convey information to your viewers. A bold, serif font that takes up ample space on the page may convey authority and strength, while a thin, delicate script font might signal a homey, warm quality.

The font you select for your logo is important, but it’s also critical that you select complementary fonts for the rest of your assets, such as your website, printed materials, and social media content. This guide from Canva on how to pair fonts shares a lot of useful tips to help you get started.

Pairing a serif with a sans serif is an easy way to create a clear contrast between two font styles in a design. Playing with font size and weight can help direct the eye. Larger fonts often grab attention, as do bolded and all-caps messages. Avoid using fonts that are either too similar or too different. Clashing fonts can distract audiences from the messaging contained within the words on the page.

Images and Graphics

Beyond your logo itself, you want to pay attention to the other visual, image-based elements associated with your brand.

Are the images you’re using professional? If you’re creating your own images, invest time in getting them right. Use a high-quality camera for any photos you take, and ensure that there’s a consistency in look and feel. You should try to tie your brand colors into your visual elements, too. Can you incorporate your brand colors into your company headshots by having yourself and your team wear a piece of clothing with your brand’s colors?

If you’re creating icons or digital images, crafting them in a professional editing tool can help you manage things like spacing, alignment, and adherence to your brand colors and font styles. Canva is a great drag-and-drop tool for ensuring consistency across your various marketing assets. And if you’re well-versed in Adobe products like Photoshop or InDesign, you have even greater control over the images you create.

For brands that are putting out lots of content, it can be helpful to rely at least partially on stock images. But when you do, take care in the images you select. Your audience has a keen nose for stock images, and the wrong ones can feel very inauthentic (we’ve all seen the cheesy stock photos of the smiling team gathered around the white board in the office). Again, if you’re using stock images try to find ones that align with your brand’s identity and color palette.

Don’t Forget About the Layout

Many brands believe that once they have their logo, color, and fonts in hand they’re good to go. But the reality is that they’re not quite finished yet. How all of those elements flow together and relate to each other is equally important. Whether or not you present them in a unified manner can truly make or break your brand recognition.

Establishing a brand style guide that dictates how all of the various elements of your brand interact with each other in any of your branded content is key to guaranteeing consistency across all of your marketing materials. Whether it’s your marketing team creating a new social media campaign, your sales team pulling together a pitch deck, or your newest team member ordering up business cards, you want to be sure that all of the elements of your brand’s style look the same across the board.

Conducting a small business brand audit is key to ensuring that your business is represented appropriately on- and offline. You want the various elements of your brand’s style to sync with what you do and who you serve. And because that sometimes shifts, it’s important that you make adjustments to your image, too. Reassessing these crucial design elements help you ensure your messaging and mission are always aligned.

When you’re starting your business, you spend a lot of time considering your brand. You want to find a name that fits just right and design a logo that represents the essence of who you are and what you do.

Once it’s out in the world, though, it’s tougher to protect that beautiful brand you’ve created. You want people to talk about your business, but what happens when they mispronounce your name? Or perhaps they post about your product on their blog, but change up your logo to match the color scheme on their website. Or maybe you sponsor an event, only to arrive on the day and find that your logo has been truncated on the signage the hosts created. These are the kinds of branding no-nos that make every marketer cringe.

So what can you do to ensure that your brand continues to be represented properly as your name spreads far and wide? That’s where a brand style guide comes in.

Brand style guides provide parameters for how anyone reproduces your brand’s name or image elsewhere. Here’s how to create a solid brand style guide that keeps your business looking professional and consistent out there in the big world.

Present How to Use Your Name

Some businesses have pretty straightforward names (Whole Foods, for example, is a tough one to mess up). But other brands have names that are a little less clear-cut. Some brands have created words for their name, while others have stylized ways they’d like their name represented.

When it comes to making sure your name is used correctly, it’s helpful to simply let people know how you’d like it used. Sometimes the easiest way to do this is to start with the story behind the name. What seems like a hard-to-remember brand name might become easier to get a handle on if your audience knows the why behind it.

Even if you don’t have the time or space to give your full story, there’s still an opportunity to educate the public on how to use your name. For example, Greek yogurt brand Fage includes the note “It’s pronounced FA-YEH” on all of their cartons of yogurt. While there’s not enough room on a little tin of yogurt to tell the whole story, they’re at least getting the basics of proper pronunciation out there.

It can also be helpful to address common misuses. This might be pronunciation-related, or it might be the way your name is stylized. For example, it’s Walmart, not WalMart or WalMART. This is a particular struggle for brands who have created their own name or use a combination of words as their name. It’s also relevant if your name incorporates a common phrase that itself is often misused (We’ve had some intrepid searchers over the years looking for Duck Tape Marketing online).

Simply by taking some time on your website and other online assets to give the backstory to your name and demonstrating consistently how you’d like it to be stylized, you can eliminate much of this confusion.

Explain How Your Logo Should Be Used

There’s a lot that goes into designing a logo. Selecting the right imagery, type face, color palette and more takes a lot of time. It’s also common for brands to create several approved versions of their logos. There’s the full logo that you use at the top of your website and in the banners on your social media profiles, but then you might have a smaller, modified logo that you use as the little round profile picture on your Twitter or Instagram profile.

But just because you have a few approved versions of your logo doesn’t mean that people are now free to get creative with your branding and do whatever they’d like. You need to outline how you’d like your logo to represent your brand. That way, your marketing team and anyone else who might use your logo to promote your brand knows what’s allowed and what’s not.

Define the Approved Colors

No matter how many versions of your logo you choose to create, it’s up to you to set the colors you’d like to be used.

Consider a brand like Target. Their bullseye logo is instantly recognizable in their signature red. But if it was yellow or blue, you’d be left scratching your head. They’ve set clear brand guidelines that their logo is to be produced with red logo on white background or white logo on red background, and not any other variation.

Other brands are more flexible with the color palette they use for their logo. The Nike swoosh, for instance, is one that we’ve seen in a variety of colors. They sometimes show it as a black swoosh on white background, sometimes vice versa. And other times it’s another color, like red. A brand like Nike can afford to be a little more flexible with their color palette, because their logo itself is so well-known. It doesn’t matter what color the swoosh is; consumers instantly know it’s Nike.

At Duct Tape Marketing, we settled on a palette with a variety of shades of blue, plus a complementary pop of orange. The black and white elements of our logo and accompanying design elements are not pure white or black—instead we opted for a grey-white called slate and a dark grey charcoal.

No matter what colors you choose for your brand, it is up to you to set approved colors. Make it clear that it’s only your logo if it appears in one of the colors you’ve outlined in your brand style guide.

Clarify Fonts

Fonts are another area where sometimes others try to get creative with your logo. However, as with your color palette, you selected your font for a reason. It conveys the proper attitude for your brand, and if someone’s going to reproduce your logo, they need to use the font you’ve set forth.

It’s not just about the font itself, it’s also important you dictate the size of the font, particularly as it relates to other design elements on the page or within the logo itself. Guaranteeing consistency in font size, placement, and style will make your logo more easily recognizable by consumers.

This is the font guide we’ve created for Duct Tape Marketing. As you can see, there are three different fonts that we use in a variety of styles, depending on the occasion. In our style guide, we clearly outline how to use each font, and how the elements should relate to each other on the page.

You Set the Mood

When you’re talking about the individual design elements that go into your logo, what you’re really dictating is the mood of your logo—its look and feel. Much has been written about the psychological influence of using certain colors. While there’s not a lot of scientific evidence about how colors influence our buying behaviors, it’s undeniable that we associate certain colors with particular emotions.

For example, someone starting a children’s toy company likely wouldn’t opt for a grey-scale logo. They’d want to pick “fun” colors. Something in bright orange or yellow would be more appropriate to connote the excitement children will feel when they engage with those products. The font might be something light and whimsical that bounces across the page.

On the flip side, a neon-bright logo would not be the first choice for a law firm. Lawyers want to convey their knowledge, expertise, and gravitas with their logo, so they might opt for something in a darker color palette and with a heavy, imposing serif font.

Establish Your Brand Voice

Once you’ve gotten clear on how you’d like your logo and name to be presented, you can broaden it out to talk more about your brand voice. This brand style guidance is most applicable for people who will be writing representing your brand. Whether that’s someone on your marketing or sales team, or an outside writer that you tap to help with your content, giving guidelines for your brand voice can help to maintain consistency across all of your messaging.

This is a great place to establish your brand’s personality traits. Do you want to be approachable and down-to-earth? Is the aim to appear authoritative and commanding? Of course, your brand’s personality will vary based on industry and area of focus.

It also pays to provide concrete examples for how you’d like this personality to be expressed. For example, is it okay for writers to use contractions in their communications, or would you prefer to keep things more formal? Are there specific words you’d like writers to either avoid or embrace? These granular guidelines can help keep everyone on the same page.

If there are words or phrases that are particular to your brand, it’s also a good idea to define how you’d like them referred to. For example, McDonald’s is clear on the name of their signature burger, the Big Mac. You don’t see them calling it the Big Mac on store signage and then referring to it as the Big McDonald’s on social media! Make sure that all of your branded words and phrases, not just your logo and business name, are set in stone and consistent across all marketing materials.

Include Supporting Visuals

When it comes to representing your brand, it’s not just about your logo. It’s about the kinds of visuals you use across your brand’s platforms and how they represent you as a business.

Set clear guidelines for those who might be creating images to accompany content for your brand. For example, if your brand relies heavily on cartoon images on your website, perhaps you’d like that same aesthetic mirrored across your social media channels. Maybe the images on your website all have a sepia-tone to them, and bright, hyper-edited photos would feel out of place in other representations of your brand online.

Whatever the case may be, clearly spell out what you expect to see when it comes to other visuals associated with your brand. It’s even nice to provide a gallery of approved images, so that people can either pull from that gallery directly or use it to inform their work as they select their own images.

Pulling together your brand style guide is a necessary part of ensuring that your business’s image remains consistent out there in the world.  You spent a lot of time thinking about how best to represent your identity, mission, and customers, and you want to be sure others adhere to the guidelines you’ve established.

If you’re looking for a helpful tool, Canva makes it easy for brands to create a kit with their established logos, colors, and fonts so that it’s easy to share with designers, writers, partners, and others who might be creating content for your brand.