What Is Local Content Marketing and Its Benefits

Content marketing, also known as brand marketing, is an effective and affordable way to drive traffic to your website — and therefore to gain online visibility.

This is all the more useful for businesses targeting a specific geographic area.
Here we will cover the basics you need to know to carry out effective content marketing, and the reasons why local content marketing matters. You can also discover some tips for applying local content marketing to your own company in the best possible way.

What Is Content Marketing?

It is a marketing strategy that involves creating and sharing content specific to your brand.
The aim is to offer your target audience content that is useful and interesting.

The Format of Your Content

Blog posts, news articles, white papers, tutorials — brand marketing can take many forms.
We have only cited a few possible written formats here.
Because content marketing does not stop there: PowerPoints, photos, infographics, podcasts, and more.
In short, the format can vary infinitely. What matters is the substance — your content must offer added value.

The Purpose of Content Marketing

The goal is also to offer something original. But not only that.
Many people use content they deem relevant on a given topic — collecting and assembling it to adapt and share with their own audience. That is exactly what is happening with these lines you are reading, which are freely translated from an English article by Marketplace Academy.
However, creating original content from scratch remains the best way to optimise traffic to your website. Indeed, Google favours sites and blogs that offer unique, original content.

Distributing Your Content

A third element is very important in content marketing: its distribution.

This is a part that is generally overlooked when discussing content marketing, yet it is just as important as creating the content itself. After all, the whole point is for your audience to discover the content.

Some marketing professionals go even further. For them, 80% of the time you devote to content marketing should be spent distributing your content. And only 20% of the time you invest in content marketing should be spent creating that content.

In short, from this perspective, it is better to create less but share more — and share more effectively.

Why Use Content Marketing?

Compared with traditional advertising, content marketing is full of advantages. Indeed, there are many weaknesses in traditional advertising:

Advertising is pushed on the public when they are not looking for it

This may not be a problem for many consumer products, where advertising generally serves a commercial and more or less permanent purpose. However, for a small business, a local shop, or a one-off service, this can be problematic.

For example, a prospect who sees an advertisement for catering services but has no immediate need for them is very likely to forget about that ad a few weeks later when the need or desire arises. Thus, the money invested in that advertisement is more or less wasted.
This is particularly true for print advertising.

Advertising rarely provides added value

Generally, advertising simply serves to make people aware that a product or service exists. In some cases, a few additional details are included (price or availability, for instance). The aim is sometimes to make people prefer one brand over a competitor — mainly for well-known companies. Apart from that, the public who sees the advertising rarely takes away anything more from it.

The value of advertising is temporary and costly

Even the most affordable methods are expensive. And once your campaign is over — once your advertising has been printed and displayed — it ultimately ceases to exist. So its impact ends the moment the advertising itself, its display, comes to a close.

3 Advantages of Content Marketing Over Traditional Advertising

Your target audience will not come across your content unless they were looking for it

The blog post you wrote will only appear to them when they perform a search on the internet about the topic you are covering.
Your tutorial video will only be revealed to your target audience when they need instructions on the subject concerned.

Content marketing produces added value

If you create the right type of content, it will always bring something to the person who discovers it — even if that person does not ultimately buy your product or service.

Imagine you sell a rice cooker. A traditional advertisement would simply show the appliance and its price in a cookery magazine. Content marketing would mean writing an article offering "10 extraordinary recipes you absolutely must try with your rice cooker". You could also create a beautiful ebook of rice-based recipes for users to download in exchange for their email address. In this way, you provide added value to potential customers while demonstrating the advantage they would gain from buying your product.

The effect of content marketing is permanent

Unlike an advertisement, a blog post or a video will exist forever after it is created.

If the quality is there and the content remains relevant over time, Google will continue to give it a prominent position, and users will be able to discover it at any time. They may even relay the content, sharing it with their friends — thereby increasing your visibility.

It should be said that content marketing is not without cost. Some formats are less costly than others.

Creating a video will inevitably cost more than writing a blog post. Generally speaking, good content requires an investment — in time if not in money (and often both).

However, unlike paid ads, here you can compensate for a lower financial investment with an investment of time.

What Is Local Content Marketing?

Let us now turn to local content marketing. This refers to content marketing focused on a very specific area.
This type of local content marketing offers a significant advantage: it is a niche marketing approach that is not saturated, unlike general content marketing.

Indeed, over recent years, content marketing has become very widespread. Everyone has come to understand its great value, leading to its use in more and more marketing strategies. As a result, online content has quickly become oversaturated.

However, while competition is fierce in that space, local content marketing is still underused — making it an excellent opportunity to seize.

How Will Local Content Marketing Be Useful to You?

Your website's content is paramount for many reasons, as we know — and all the more so in terms of local content. Indeed, if you are just starting out in the market, focusing on nearby prospects is generally a good idea. It allows you to meet your first clients in person and truly understand their needs and the conditions of the market.
Going forward, it will be all the easier to grow and expand thanks to your strong local community.

Local content marketing is thus ideal for such an approach. As we have seen, it is important that your content marketing is offered in the places where your target audience is, where they will look for such content.
If you have a thorough knowledge of the market in your area, you will know where your customers find the information they want (online and offline). You will also know what type of publications they read and what is happening in your region.

In short, you will have an understanding of the media landscape — and that is one of the key ingredients for executing a successful local content marketing strategy. Combined with quality content, it will be of considerable help to you.

(Freely translated from Marketplace Academy)