As part of my role here at Blueclaw, I work across large and small accounts, but at the end of the day, both types are trying to achieve the same goals; more traffic, more leads, more revenue and better content marketing.

The SEO stage has changed over the last few years to make way for traditional marketing techniques that reward businesses with better relationships and a fruitful marketing channel. Here are three of my favourite content plans that get real results and help build the brand.

“The Campaign”

“The Campaign” is a marketing technique we use to support a smaller charity, to help build awareness around something that doesn’t normally get much exposure and to get people involved in a good cause.

Easy to set-up, “The Campaign” starts with a blog post, a few images and a strong niche idea. The blog post should outline your cause and how the business is supporting it; be it through a donation to a charity or by informing your customers of the cause.

We did this with one of our clients, McCarthy’s, to help support a niche cancer charity in the form of Myeloma UK. By getting in touch with the charity, we explained that we wanted to build a small campaign to raise some funds for them, with the support of a few local Yorkshire businesses.

We created the “Win a Box a’Yorkshire” and sought out support from like-minded local companies who wanted to help by providing free products and produce to donate towards the raffle style competition.

The campaign raised £178 for the charity, helped us build local connections with a few great businesses and got support from a number of local Yorkshire bloggers as well as the local chamber of commerce. What’s more, it was inexpensive to set-up, provided a few long-lasting relationships and the few links we got along the way helped our local SEO too.

“The Repeat”

This one is a slow burner and requires a monthly investment, a bit of a social following and some willing bloggers.

The idea of the campaign is simple; create a monthly competition that is open specifically to bloggers.

The bloggers should:

• Be active on their websites with regular updates
• Be equally active on social media platforms
• Tend to share posts and ideas a lot with others in their niche

The prize should be good enough every month so that it builds up a good incentive for the bloggers to want to get involved. Something that is worth a couple of hundred pounds in retail value tends to work well, and although your own products might be a good incentive, consider using something that the niche can use in their everyday lives. Food vouchers, spa passes, new technology and experience days tend to work well.

Be empathetic towards the time of year and the fact that your niche bloggers are likely to make a living from their online platforms, so although we don’t condone paying bloggers for links, the prize should be good enough for them to want to take part without the advertising costs.

The “hook” on this campaign is to produce your own monthly content, which will engage with the audience and ask them to take part on their own sites by referencing your competition. So if the blogger is doing something crafty that month and writing about it, they might as well include your competition as part of the post and be in with a good shot of winning.

These campaigns tend to build over time and will develop a loyal following of a small number of bloggers who will enjoy taking part and have a good chance in winning the competition. As a small business you will benefit from the promotion to their readers and hopefully develop some fruitful relationships with an internet niche; helping you build your business.

“The Holiday”

Appropriately named for this once-a-year campaign, “The Holiday” helps you get creative around the big holiday days of the year.

The strategy takes its name from the massive buzz created around certain days in the year, with Christmas being the most traditional. However this campaign is often most effective in slightly quieter months of the year.

Easter, New Year, Bank Holidays, Black Friday, Valentine’s day, Christmas Jumper Day, Movember etc. All of these are great for a bit of self-promotion and allows you to get creative with your brand.

Ideally, to make this work well you want to focus on a serious point around the holidays, something like safety. A couple of years ago, we decided to use the idea of safety around Bonfire Night and created: http://www.bonfire-night-safety.co.uk/. This campaign wasn’t the cheapest to implement, but it got great take up and is something that we can use every year.

As a small business you might want to consider sharing a story or experience around the holiday, something like your “Bonfire Night Routine” and then ask your customers to enter the competition by sharing their Bonfire Night stories.

The key with this is to gain as much interaction from people who are already talking about the holidays and getting excited over social media. Plan ahead a couple of months and think about it before the holiday is upon you. The best campaigns work with planning, rather than a blog post published on a whim.

The theme is to create the story and encourage people to be part of it.

So there you have it, three ideas, all low in cost, but take a bit of planning to execute. Hopefully this will give you a few ideas on generating a bit of online marketing for your small business.

If you want to discuss any of the above, feel free to contact us and we can have a chat about implementing some ideas for your business.