Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin

The book is co-authored by A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, and Roger L. Martin, a renowned business strategist. Together, they share their insights on how to develop and implement effective business strategies. At the core of “Playing to Win” is the concept of making deliberate choices about where to compete and how to win.

My thoughts – This book offers a deep dive into strategic thinking and planning, which is crucial for any business, regardless of size. The principles discussed by Lafley and Martin, although based on a large corporation like P&G, are surprisingly applicable to small businesses. I appreciate the analytical approach to choosing where and how to compete. It’s a refreshing perspective that challenges conventional small business marketing strategies.

Small Business Big Money Online

by Alex Harris

Harris focuses on leveraging online platforms to maximize profits for small businesses. This book is perfect for those who want to understand how to effectively use social media, SEO, and online advertising to boost their business.

My thoughts – Harris nails it with actionable online strategies. I appreciate the focus on maximizing ROI using social media and SEO. It’s a solid investment for any business looking to expand its digital footprint.

The 1-Page Marketing Plan

by Allan Dib

Simplifying marketing into a single page, Dib’s book is ideal for small business owners who need a clear and concise plan. This book helps you create a straightforward strategy to streamline your marketing efforts.

My thoughts – Dib simplifies marketing strategy effectively, but I’m skeptical about the one-page approach. It seems overly simplistic for complex marketing needs, although it could be a good starting point for small business owners.

Guerrilla Marketing

by Jay Conrad Levinson

A classic in the marketing world, this book introduces innovative, low-cost marketing tactics that are perfect for small businesses. Levinson’s strategies are designed to be effective and budget-friendly.

My thoughts – Levinson’s low-cost tactics are ingenious. The book is a treasure trove of creative ideas that are perfect for businesses with tight budgets. It’s a must-read for anyone looking to make a big impact with minimal investment.

Building a StoryBrand

by Donald Miller

Miller teaches business owners how to clarify their message and connect with customers through storytelling. This book is excellent for those who want to create a compelling brand narrative.

My thoughts – I listened to this as an audiobook while kayaking. I finished and immediately started it again. Miller’s approach to branding through storytelling is powerful. It aligns well with creating impactful brand messages that resonate with clients. Highly recommended for developing a strong brand narrative.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

by Robert B. Cialdini

Understanding the psychology behind why people say “yes” is crucial in marketing. Cialdini’s book is a foundational read for small business owners looking to improve their persuasion skills.

My thoughts – This is one of my favorite marketing books. Cialdini’s book is foundational, but it’s more psychology than direct marketing strategy. While it’s insightful, I prefer books that offer more straightforward marketing tactics.

Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype

 by Jay Baer

Focused on creating helpful and valuable content, Baer’s approach is particularly effective for small businesses aiming to build long-term customer relationships.

My thoughts – Baer’s concept of ‘Youtility’ aligns perfectly with providing value to clients. This book gets a big thumbs up for its focus on long-term customer relationships over short-term gains.

Contagious: How to Build Word of Mouth in the Digital Age

by Jonah Berger

This book is all about making your business or product so compelling that it becomes naturally word-of-mouth. Berger provides insightful tactics to make your small business talk-worthy.

My thoughts – Berger offers a great perspective on viral marketing. However, some tactics seem a bit hit or miss for small businesses. It’s useful, but I recommend applying these ideas judiciously.

Duct Tape Marketing

 by John Jantsch

Jantsch offers a step-by-step guide to developing and executing marketing strategies for small businesses. His approach is practical and straightforward, making it a great read for those new to marketing.

My thoughts – Jantsch’s practical approach is spot on. The step-by-step guide is exactly what small businesses need. It’s a straightforward, no-nonsense book that I highly recommend.

The Referral Engine

by John Jantsch

Focusing on the power of referrals, this book is essential for small businesses looking to leverage their existing customer base to attract new clients.

My thoughts – Jantsch’s emphasis on referrals is good, but I find some of the methods a bit outdated in the digital age. It’s a decent read but needs to be supplemented with more current digital strategies.

Each of these books offers unique perspectives and actionable strategies that can help local small businesses amplify their marketing efforts. Whether you’re new to business or looking to refine your existing marketing plan, these reads are sure to provide valuable insights and tools for success.

Remember, the key to effective marketing for small businesses lies in understanding your audience, leveraging your unique strengths, and being innovative in your approach. These books provide the foundation and inspiration to help you achieve just that.

Content marketing has become an essential tool for businesses of all sizes however for local businesses, it holds more significance as it helps them stand out in an increasingly competitive landscape.

Understanding Content Marketing for Local Businesses

Content marketing involves the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, ultimately driving profitable customer action. It enables local businesses to connect with their target audience on a deeper level, establishing a strong brand identity and fostering trust.

Ways Content Marketing Can Boost Local Business Visibility:

Improving search engine rankings and SEO – High-quality, locally relevant content helps improve search engine rankings by optimizing keywords, increasing backlinks, and enhancing user engagement. These factors contribute to a stronger online presence, making it easier for potential customers to discover your business.

Establishing authority and credibility – By providing informative and insightful content that addresses your target audience’s needs and concerns, you position your business as an industry expert. This credibility fosters trust and brand loyalty, encouraging customers to choose your business over competitors.

Building and nurturing relationships – Content marketing allows local businesses to create a loyal customer base by offering personalized, engaging content that resonates with their audience. This fosters a sense of community, making your customers more likely to recommend your business to others.

Strategies for Effective Content Marketing

To harness the power of content marketing for your local business, consider the following strategies:

Identify your target audience – Understanding your target audience is crucial for creating relevant and engaging content. Conduct market research to determine your customers’ demographics, preferences, and pain points, and tailor your content accordingly.

Focus on local relevance – Incorporate local elements into your content strategy to appeal to your target audience. Examples include sharing information about local events, highlighting customer success stories from your area, and providing helpful tips specific to your community.

Utilize multiple formats – Diversify your content by using various formats such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, and social media posts. This ensures that you reach a wider audience and cater to different content consumption preferences.

Optimize for search engines – Implement local SEO strategies to improve your content’s visibility on search engine results pages. This includes using location-based keywords, optimizing meta tags, and including local business schema markup on your website.

Encourage social sharing – Create shareable content that encourages your audience to spread the word about your business. Add social sharing buttons to your website, engage with your audience on social media, and encourage customers to leave reviews and testimonials.

Track and measure success – Regularly monitor your content marketing efforts using analytics tools to determine which strategies are most effective. Use these insights to refine your content strategy and maximize your return on investment.

Content marketing plays a vital role in boosting local business visibility by improving search engine rankings, establishing authority, and nurturing customer relationships. By implementing the strategies outlined above, local businesses can harness the power of content marketing to drive growth and long-term success.

There are a lot of myths and misinformation pushed out about Local SEO, and it can be difficult for business owners who are already preoccupied with running their businesses to know what they should worry about and what is a contrived sales pitch. Here’s a free SEO tip that you can investigate yourself. This will be particularly helpful if you are using content marketing and want to get the most out of it.

 Google Is Getting Stingy with Its Crawlers, and Your Content May Not Be Indexed

The internet grows at a rate that boggles the mind. Millions of new pages every day and with the availability of tools like ChatGPT and other Artificial Intelligence writing tools that allow users to generate written content almost instantly, that rate of expansion is only going to increase. 

Google has to take in all of that content, and the volume has become an energy and processing dilemma. To deal with it, Google will assign websites a crawl budget. This is the amount of time and data it will invest in your site at a given interval, and the reality is Google is becoming much more stingy with its crawlers. 

Unfortunately, there is no straightforward way to determine your crawl budget as it is not publicly disclosed by Google. However, monitoring your crawl stats in Search Console can give you an idea of how often Google is crawling your site and if any changes impact your crawl frequency. It is possible to use your crawl history to reverse engineer, but the reality is unless you are prepared to do the heavy lifting of optimizing your site for an improved crawl budget, the actual budget is not what you should focus on. 

If you have Search Console set up for your site, it’s easy to see the status of all your pages.

1. Log in to Search Console, and click on Pages. Scroll down to the section labeled: Why pages aren’t indexed.

You will see a number of reasons listed. Most of these have to do with technical SEO and the way your site is set up. If you have done the basic SEO on-site optimization, you will have your canonical set up as well as a full complement of pages that you intentionally do not want to be crawled. There is a full write-up of all the listed Reasons from Google here.

For our purposes the only two categories we want to check are:

• Crawled – currently not indexed
• Discovered – currently not indexed

These categories are actionable in Search Console, and I have found that they do get content crawled. Here’s how you do it.

Click on the Crawled – currently not indexed. You will see a list of URLs. Click on one of them to get the side menu to appear and then click on Inspect URL. 

Google will go out and inspect the URL to see if it’s online and its current state. Once it’s done retrieving data, the system will test the URL to see if it can be indexed. Once this is complete and the page is found to be in good order, you will have the option to Request Indexing. Click on this option, and it will run until you see the following window.

This does not immediately put you into the index however I have found that it moves things along in a few days to a week.

Just a little SEO tip that can help improve the performance of your Content Marketing. I hope it helps your business marketing.

But in the rush to jump on the Content Marketing bandwagon, many businesses have missed the mark. Content is not a series of articles to promote your business. In fact, the consumer’s ability to sniff out an ad is a highly refined talent and one that will negate your efforts at content marketing if you adopt a faulty approach.

The sad thing is you can see this failed approach everywhere.

I was doing some research the other day and came across a local plumber that has employed, what would at first glance appear to be, a robust content strategy. Lots of fresh content with titles that appeared to be in the long tail area of what his demographic might be asking questions about and leveraging Information Search Intent. But upon closer examination I found the content to be a thinly veiled (read “obvious”) bait and switch. An article titled “How can I change my garbage disposal?” was nothing more than a heavy-handed attempt to scare consumers. It warned that they may be severely injured in several ways if they attempt to do it themselves. It also featured several plugs as to why they should hire the author’s business to perform this perilous task for them.

It was nothing more than an ad.

Consumers can spot this kind of approach in seconds and content as an ad is a terrible idea because it undermines your credibility and seems duplicitous. A display ad is an understood and agreed-upon exchange of information. Consumers see it and know what it is. However, content as an ad forces me to expend the effort of reading it to determine it was an ad that not only fails to deliver what I was looking for but turns out to be a bait and switch. It’s an example of quasi Content Marketing that is destined to fail and ultimately be a complete waste of money. Sadly this is what many businesses view Content Marketing as, another way to run an ad. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Leverage Information Search Intent by providing value to consumers

Genuine content marketing is about delivering real value to consumers. If we carry the previous bad example forward, an excellent way to deliver valuable information about installing a garbage disposal would be to outline the process and highlight the typical pitfalls. For example, I have swapped out a disposal and I knew from several friends who had done the same, to be sure to remove the drain plug that is installed that will allow dishwasher drainage to flow through the disposal. Many people miss this and disaster ensues. That is the type of angle that will win you points as an authority as a business that is willing to share its knowledge. Now there is nothing wrong with wrapping it up with a plug for your business but it needs to be light and a real soft sell. At the end of the article, the consumer may decide this is not really something they want to try, and there’s an opportunity to whisper, ”We can help you with this.”  However, the important thing to remember about plugging your business into your content is that not everyone who reads it or ends up on your site is a potential customer. Great content will draw people in from all over the world and needs to be positioned in such a way that they are willing to share it and see it as a voice of an expert whose information is valuable and worthy of sharing. For this reason, it’s often best to leave the plug out of the content altogether and use your sidebar periphery content as a vehicle for sales. Since it will be adjacent to the content, someone who is in your area and sees you as a possible vendor to fill a need they have can easily be directed to relevant contact information with a strong Call to Action in a sidebar widget.

Content Marketing is important for local businesses consequently, businesses are pummeled with vendors who promise magic results with minimal costs for content. Don’t let hucksters sell you a bill of goods. Genuine Content Marketing can deliver powerful results on several fronts, but only if it provides real value to your audience. Consumers know when they are being played, so respect them and share your knowledge. They will reward you with site traffic and credibility that you can then convert into sales.

It’s not about baiting customers, it’s about solving their problems.

Understanding what your customers are looking for is the key to a successful content marketing strategy. It’s no longer about interrupting them with advertisements but is instead about attracting them with solutions to their problems. By content marketing to your customers, you can bring them onto the virtual showroom floor having established a relationship with engaging content that helped them solve a problem. But this tends to sound a little abstract so allow me to bring it into the real world.

Let’s find a good place to fish

Big-box retail has created a tremendously difficult economic environment for businesses that were once the anchors of the community. Despite this challenge, many independent local businesses have managed to carve out a niche based on a commitment to customer service and attention to detail. Old Dominion Sports Center in Winchester Va is a prime example of this type of resilient business that has flourished in the face of economic adversity. For over 50 years the independent sports center has provided hunters and fishermen with quality equipment and supplies to make the most out of each and every minute in the wild. However, the popular retailer’s website did not reflect the store’s vigor. To bring the business website up to speed Old Dominion Sports Center hired us to develop a new site.

When we built and launched their new website we wanted to start with a content stream that would draw in qualified leads and remain relevant. In our initial research, we discovered that there was no single source of information on the best public fishing spots in Frederick County. With a little research and some creative writing, we pulled together an article entitled, “Great Fishing Spots in Frederick County.” The inbound traffic from that single article was nothing short of amazing. Within a month it was responsible for 30% of the site’s organic traffic and despite the fact that the business does not engage in ongoing content marketing, it has consistently driven traffic for the past two years.

But the increase in traffic is only one aspect of the power of quality content. The truly magical thing about content like this is that it draws in qualified leads. The article on great fishing spots provides information to fishermen who use fishing equipment. They end up getting valuable free information about places they can fish from a business website that sells fishing tackle, gear, and licenses in the exact area they will be fishing.

Content Marketing doesn’t get much better than that.