The Local Content Marketing Blueprint In 2022

Content marketing has become one of the most powerful strategies for digital marketers to employ, as quality content becomes increasingly important for successful SEO campaigns.

While content marketing was previously primarily used by large brands and agencies, it is now more accessible to entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Content marketing has made it so that small businesses can compete with larger businesses more easily.

The difficulty of content marketing is increasing every year as more publishers become aware of how effective it is in reaching potential customers.

Local businesses have a big advantage over bigger brands when it comes to content marketing. They can target their audience much more specifically by location, while bigger brands have to broad-brush their targeting to reach a wide audience.

Instead of aiming for a large, diverse group of customers, local businesses can focus on providing resources, news, and information that will be useful to people in their community.

This guide provides an overview of how to approach content marketing on a local level. It covers finding ideas for locally relevant content, building relationships with publishers in your area, and measuring the success of your efforts.

Goal of Local Content Marketing

There are several reasons why you might be interested in implementing a local content marketing strategy, but there are generally four goals that can be achieved through the process:

The following goals are not Mutually exclusive and could all be part of a good campaign, but it is more effective if you Know what your main goal is to begin with. This will help determine where your campaign should start.

When looking to increase your social media following, create content that is highly shareable and has the potential to go viral.

If you want to improve your SEO, you might have more success creating a local resource or guide.

To attract qualified traffic to your website, include any content that will interest people in your geographic area.

You can generate links to your website by creating content that is useful to other webmasters. This could include resources, statistics and studies, “ultimate” guides, useful lists (tools, tactics, ideas), and infographics.

By creating helpful content, you will become a go-to resource for other bloggers and article writers, which will result in more links to your site.

Your content needs to be shareable if you want to make the most out of social media. This usually means creating shorter pieces like Top 10 lists, “best of” lists, “you won’t believe this” lists, pop culture references, videos, and interviews.

Make sure that your branding is at the front of your local content to increase brand awareness.

Finding Content Ideas

In order to come up with a good content piece, you can either come up with your own ideas or get inspiration from other marketers.

We can use data from articles that have gone viral to see what has worked and what has not.

You can find content ideas that will help you come up with ideas for your next piece by using the Content Explorer tool from ahrefs.com.

The tool allows you to search for the top-performing posts by keyword, and aggregates the results based on metrics such as social shares and inbound links.

After you have decided on your content topic, you will need to determine if you want to publish the content on your own website to attract links, or if you would rather find a local blog or website that gets a lot of traffic.

Both methods have their pros and cons:

Publish On Your Own Website

If your published content does well, you will gain new visitors and generate links back to your article, both of which are good for your SEO.

If you haven’t built up a large network of readers and social followers, it will be more difficult to get people to see your content.

Publish On Another Website

If you want to reach a new audience, a great option is to find local blogs and websites that will publish your story for free. However, oftentimes sites with high traffic will ask you to pay for a “sponsored blog.”

You shouldn’t just write sponsored blogs to insert anchor text links; you should write them to attract real traffic and potential customers to your site.

Proper Content Formats for Your Target Audience

Blog Posts and Articles 

This is because blogging allows you to target specific keywords which helps your business to rank higher on search engines. When your business ranks higher on search engines, you are more likely to generate leads.

Topics you write about should be interesting to your target audience and situated near your business.

Make sure your website’s content is original and well-written, with lots of strong keywords to help improve your search engine ranking.

Videos

It is intelligent to share your insights and generate leads by posting videos to social accounts like YouTube or TikTok. You can use hashtags and geotags to help locals find you.

As consumers are spending more time watching and engaging with video content, you should take advantage of this.

Images

The way customers find local businesses is changing, and visuals can have a big impact on engagement.

You can help your target audience understand your business in a new way by sharing infographics. Infographics can help people digest information and understand complicated topics.

If you own a local cleaning company that uses environmentally friendly products, you could share an infographic that shows the benefits of using products that are good for the earth.

Podcasts

Podcasts are a great way for local businesses to engage with their customers. Podcasts can be used to interview customers, provide explanations or even answer customer questions.

You spend valuable time and resources creating an infographic on the different types of diets. You can use the content from your infographic to create a podcast episode. You can break down the information in the infographic and talk about each type of diet in detail.

This is a great way to create new content without starting from scratch. You can save time by using other content you have created to create audio content. For example, if you have an infographic on different types of diets, you can use that content to create a podcast episode.

You can break down the information in the infographic and talk about each type of diet in detail. This is a great way to create new content without starting from scratch.

Your podcast could have people call in and ask quick questions about nutrition. You could provide helpful and educational answers to these questions.

E-books

Write an ebook to increase your leads. Start with an existing long blog post, and expand from there.

If you make your e-books available for download in exchange for an email address, you can attract new leads while also demonstrating your expertise.

An e-book can be about anything, including a workout guide, how to make restaurant-quality food at home, how to make greener choices, or even a personal meditation journey.

Create a Content Schedule

Your content schedule should note when you plan to post each week, what types of content you will share, and where you will share it. Having a schedule will help you stay on track and be accountable. You can use an online template or create a schedule in a physical calendar.

When creating your content schedule, think about how long each piece will take to create, how often you want to post overall, and when you want to post each piece.

When creating content, always keep your target audience in mind. Consider what type of content they would want to see at each stage of the content marketing funnel.

Define how you will promote content. Include social media posts, guest bloggers, and backlinks in content schedule.

It is important to be realistic when setting goals and creating a schedule. If you do not have the same resources as a large company, then you need to adjust your schedule accordingly.

Set Up a Workflow

Your workflow will include everything you need to do to set up and execute your local business content marketing strategy.

The following are typical tasks involved in a content workflow, along with the person responsible for each task and the timeline for completing them: – Outline: The person responsible for creating the outline should do so as soon as the topic is decided.

This will help ensure that the writing process is as efficient as possible. – Write: The person responsible for writing the content should start as soon as the outline is completed.

Depending on the length and complexity of the piece, this could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. – Review: Once the content is written, it should be reviewed by someone else (or multiple people) to ensure accuracy and clarity.

The timeline for this will depend on the availability of the people doing the review. – Edit: After the content has been reviewed, it should be edited to correct any errors and improve the overall quality. Again, the timeline for this will depend on the availability of the people doing the editing.

Approve: Once the content has been edited, it should be approved by the relevant authority figure (e.g., the project manager, the client, etc.). The timeline for this will depend on the availability of the person doing the

Wouldn’t it be great to have a workflow that covered everything and made your life much easier?

Get Started with Content Marketing for Your Local Business

Content Creation Tools 

• For visual content, try Canva – a graphic and document design tool that anyone can use. Trust us; it’s for newbies and seasoned designers alike. It offers beautiful and straightforward templates, photos, filters, icons, shapes, and fonts. 
• For writing content, try Copy.ai – This AI powered copywriting app can help you write blogs, social media posts, emails, and much more. It can speed up your content creation process by 10x or more!
• For relevant content, try Google Trends: Ah Google. Is there anything they can’t do? Well, Google Trends is a must-have for anyone with a local content marketing strategy. It will give you insights into today’s relevant content to help you stay on top of what your local audience wants to hear abou. With Google Trends, you can research keywords, discover new ideas for content, and monitor your brand. 

Content Promotion Tools

• Hootsuite – Hootsuite allows you to manage all of your social networks in a few clicks. Scheduling, management, and reporting tools all in one platform.
• Social media tools – Instagram, Tik Tok, Youtube, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. These heavy hitters are great tools to promote your content and reach a greater audience.
• Taboola – If you’ve got the budget to try out paid promotion, Taboola is worth a shot. Taboola takes your content and places it on publishing websites relevant to your target audience. 

Measuring Tools 

• Google Analytics – Free and easy to use, does it get much better than that? Check out how people are finding your site and specific pages and delve into visitor behavior. You can also configure it to track purchases or email sign-up goals. 
• Hotjar – As Hubspot puts it, “Google Analytics can help you uncover the ‘what’ and ‘where’ of user behavior, Hotjar’s tools can help you start to tiptoe into the ‘why.’” Giving you an accurate idea of how visitors experience your site can be super helpful to improving your local content marketing. Plus, Hotjar can help you source exciting content ideas. 

Want to create great content quickly and easily? These will help your local business:

• Website builders like Squarespace, Wix, or WordPress. These platforms make it super easy to go in and adjust and customize your website, post blog articles, and manage customer relations.
• Improve your website ranking by using a plug-in like Yoast.
• Say goodbye to writer’s block with Copy.ai. Top content marketers are already using the platform, saving companies time and money. As a local business, your resources are valuable, so make the most out of them with platforms like Copy.ai.
• Piktochart makes creating professional infographics, posters, and presentations easy.

Finding Local Websites to Publish Your Content

If you’re looking for powerful local websites to publish your content, your best bet is Google.

You can identify high authority local sites that will publish your articles by using a combination of Google search operators and a Chrome plugin.

Before you begin your search, it is recommended that you use Google Chrome and install the Moz Bar tool. The Moz Bar tool will overlay SEO statistics onto the Google SERP, making it easier for you to find the information you need.

The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) will show you which websites are strong (high Domain Authority) and which to avoid (low Domain Authority or low link counts.) The plugin is free and easy to use.

Using Google Search Operators

Google search operators are special characters and commands that help you find exactly what you’re looking for on the internet. By learning to use these operators, you can narrow down your search results to websites that match your specific query.

You can use search operators as shortcuts for an advanced search on Google. This can be quicker than using Google’s advanced search tool.

You can find a full list of search operators here, but some of the most useful ones include:

inurl:

This means that the search results will only show documents from websites that have your search term in the URL.

To find websites that are interested in publishing guest posts concerning Austin, try a search query like [austin inurl:guest post]. This will give you pages that have both “austin” and “guest post” in the URL.

If you want to find a sponsored post or guest contributor in Austin, you could try variations of the following search: [sponsored post inurl:austin] or [guest contributor inurl:austin].

intitle:

This operator will return documents that contain your search term in the title tag of the page.

To find websites that are posting infographics about Austin, try searching for “austin tx intitle:infographic” on your favorite search engine.

inanchor:

The search operator will only bring up results for pages that contain your keywords in the anchor text or links that are pointing to that page.

A search for [austin tx inanchor:infographic] will return pages in which the link’s anchor text contains the word “infographic” and the page contains the words “austin” and “tx”.