Further Content Opportunities

An established tree becomes an ecosystem that hosts the life cycles of many organisms. Its light and shade provide the right environment for understory plants. Its trunk and branches support vines, mosses, lichens, and many other life forms. Its fallen leaves nourish and create soil. Its fruit and flowers feed insects, birds, animals, and people. All year round, the cycle of photosynthesis absorbs carbon and produces the very air we breathe.

Like great trees, your local business and the initiatives you run have the opportunity to become the hub of a community, supporting thriving local life. You can also use this cyclical system in the way you produce and develop your marketing strategy. In this final chapter, you’ll learn the cyclical practices and fruitful opportunities that go toward transforming a business into a community household name.

In this chapter:

• Continuous remarketing of assets
• Ongoing asset refreshes
• Continuous growth of internal link architecture
• Publishing for all phases of the customer journey
• Publishing for B2B relationship development
• Publishing for good

Your valuable, creative, unique content takes time and resources to produce and deserves remarketing beyond the initial launch. It often takes just a little bit more work to return more results from your content marketing assets.

Let’s imagine you own and run a local plant nursery. To share your knowledge and showcase your expertise, you have researched, written, and published an excellent guide to native plants that’s fun, helpful, interesting, unique, and popular. And it performed well! In the first three months, your asset has been driving traffic, gaining citations, social mentions, and links. But then it dried up as your marketing efforts dwindled. Now your asset is gathering dust because the content marketing campaign is wrongly viewed as “over.”

Remarketing inertia is a painfully common problem. Its biggest risk is having your amazing content assets undervalued and lost over time when they could be working hard for you.

Don’t let this happen to you. Any asset that you’ve worked hard on needs to be remarketed at regular intervals. There are two key hurdles you’ll need to overcome to ensure you’re getting maximum value out of the content you’ve invested so much in publishing.

The practical hurdle to overcoming remarketing inertia

The first hurdle is a practical one. Unless you keep excellent track of all the pieces you’ve produced, you may simply forget about them as time goes by. Maintaining a database of your content is an excellent way to stay organized, and track your success. We’ve put together a free, downloadable template you can use alongside this guide.

You'll find 4 tabs in this template: Instructions, Content Assets, PR Outreach, and Local Partners. In the Content Assets tab, you’ll track your best content. As you can see, we recommend including the title, URL, author, publishing date, summary, target keywords, and platforms where you’ve promoted the content. We’ll cover the additional columns and tabs in this chapter, as well. It takes work to be organized about this, but you’ll be grateful for meticulous record-keeping later on.

The psychological hurdle to overcoming remarketing inertia

The second hurdle is a psychological one. Local business owners may feel that they are being repetitive and boring the public if they promote an asset more than once. You can totally rid yourself of this kind of thinking by realizing that:

• Social media is crowded, and people don’t see everything in their feeds – people may miss your messaging the first time around, the second time around, the third time around, etc.

• New people sign up for social platforms every day. If they join X, Instagram, or Facebook in July, they will have totally missed your June promotions unless you re-market them.

• Customers are constantly at different phases in their journeys. For example, last December, they weren’t giving any thought to their gardens, but as soon as spring arrives, their thoughts and needs change, and they may be ready to research and buy new plants. Meanwhile, people move, become new neighbors, encounter new challenges, and discover new interests every day. Your assets take on fresh relevance to new community members as their lives change, but only if you are remarketing your assets so that they are visible.

• The old “rule of seven” has existed for nearly 100 years, and it proposes that people need to be exposed to a brand at least seven times before they’ll remember it. Your content assets all introduce your brand to people, and repetition can help local neighbors remember your name when the need arises.

• Studies have shown that repetition can increase the success of outreach. For example, you may write to a blogger or journalist once about your new asset and receive no reply. This doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t interested. They may have been on vacation when you wrote, or too busy working on a different story, or just not in the mood to receive your message. In your downloadable worksheet, you’ll find a tab labeled PR Outreach. This is where you’ll document their details and your outreach efforts, and plan to reach out again to anyone who didn’t give you a firm “no” the first time.

Taking all this into consideration, you should have no fear of wearying your audience with repeated messaging. If you’re still worried about being perceived as dull, re-tool your second, third, and fourth rounds of promotion with some new angles and images.

Perhaps the first time you promoted your guide to native plants, you focused on the top ten flowers that grow in your area. Next time, focus on the expertise of the guide’s author. The time after that, focus on which plants are toxic to pets. The time after that, focus on planting for year-round color in the garden. Highlight different photos, videos, or statistics from your guide. Many social stories can be told from just one strong piece of content, and over time, the practice of re-marketing should grow the traffic, links, citations, and shares of your asset.

Refreshing content is the recycling plant of the marketing world. Like the ecologically diverse mulchy undergrowth of a rainforest, the dead leaves can be put back into the mix to nourish a new seedling.

Particularly in industries where ongoing research and trends in consumer behavior result in significant change, older content can quickly become outdated. Too often, this results in pieces being shelved and forgotten when they could, instead, be refreshed to remain relevant.

When to refresh content

Refreshing content doesn’t happen on a set schedule. It’s a cycle you need to determine and maintain. You can proactively refresh content by adapting the value into different formats, taking your PDF of the native flower guide, and producing spin-off blog posts. Or, you can refresh content reactively: it might be caused by your content becoming outdated or something happening in your industry that makes your guide highly topical. Or perhaps it no longer performs. On that note: do you know how well your content is performing? By benchmarking the performance of your content, you’ll not only learn a lot about how your audience responds to certain types of content, but you’ll also get signals when an asset begins to go stale. Poor performance doesn’t always mean content should be retired. Refreshing and repromoting content is often a lighter lift than creating new content from scratch and can be informed by past performance.

Let’s return to the idea of your native plant guide. You successfully remarketed it for several years, and the photos, historical information, and some of the stories in it are still every bit as appealing. However, too many things have changed since the publication date for the guide to represent your business as current and appealing.

For example, since publication, scientists have published new data about habitat loss in your community, which underscores the new urgency of gardening with native plants, and your old guide doesn’t reflect this. Perhaps new surveys have been published linking gardening to the relief of symptoms of depression, but there is no information about this in your resource. Maybe your state or city has just launched a social marketing campaign to promote restoring native habitats, and funding has been made available for community projects, but your asset was written before this was put in place. Perhaps technology, terminology, consumer trends, or local news have brought people to a different mindset in recent years.

There are some instances in which older content is, in fact, not salvageable, and your best option may be to retire it and redirect its URL to a new replacement asset. For example, if products you wrote about are permanently discontinued, customers encountering that content can no longer act on CTAs to buy them. Or, it may be that so much has changed in your industry since you published an article that its presence is making your brand look outdated. But in many cases, you can update resources so that they become like new again. You can promote that these pieces have been updated for the new year by updating their titles to reflect this, and your remarketing can highlight fresh information, statistics, data, and trends. Whether the changes you make are small or large, refreshed content is like fresh content for your website and your marketing campaigns, capable of earning new rounds of links, citations, and shares, as well as bringing in new traffic and sales.

Make it a practice to audit it — at least once a year— to determine the relevance status of each item. As you can see in the Content Asset tab of your downloadable worksheet, we’ve created a column labeled “​​Relevance (Last Date Checked).” This column will track whether a piece is still current and relevant or whether it is ripe for a useful refresh.

Attracting backlinks from other websites can feel like a mysterious process and is often very hard work. However, planning out and developing internal links is totally within your control. You just need to be organized. By linking from your existing content to your debut publications, you will help them to get indexed by search engines faster, send them some strength to help them rank more highly, and ensure that customers are encountering these assets all along their journeys.

The practice of linking from one page of your site to another can pass along ranking power and create paths for customers to follow. In the Content Asset tab of your downloadable worksheet, you’ll see a column labeled “Internal Link Opportunities.” Here, you can track your internal linking to help you understand your site’s architecture and customer journey.

Every time you create a new piece of content, browse through your Content Asset tab and identify pages or assets that can link to the new publication.

For example, the above page on Calscape.org is their section on monarch butterflies, and this topic has an important relationship to the plants gardeners can add to their gardens to attract this species. Because of this relationship, it makes sense for this site to link internally from their monarch guide to their page on the plant called milkweed, which these butterflies depend on. So, the butterfly page links to this page:

Whenever you create a new asset on your website, take the time to consider whether it would help site visitors and your business if that asset linked to related information elsewhere on your site. If so, your links can take the form of simple text links or can include image-based links and call to action (CTA) buttons to draw attention to the fact that you’ve got additional helpful information to offer the visitor.

Customer journeys towards finding and choosing your business can be messy. In the past, content marketers spent a great deal of time attempting to tie specific keyword searches (like someone looking up “best tacos” on Google) to different phases of the consumer journey. An online consumer journey consists of the path a particular person takes through the web leading up to a sale and beyond. The overriding point of any visualization of these journeys is that local businesses should aspire to publish content that assists customers at all stages.

You may have seen customer journeys neatly envisioned as a funnel – a 19th-century concept that begins at the top with an awareness stage, moves down through consideration, ends with conversion, and sometimes has loyalty and advocacy percolating at the bottom.

Or you may have seen the customer journey envisioned as a series of arrows or charted on a timeline, featuring tabs like “discovery,” “research,” and “comparison,” also leading to a sale and sometimes beyond, to “use,” and “retention.”

And if you’re really studious, you may have heard of the concept of micro-moments, in which different searches are categorized into the four buckets of “I want to know,” “I want to do,” “I want to go,” and “I want to buy.”

While all of these concepts can be useful in helping you understand the intent behind different sets of phrases, the truth of how people use the internet, unfortunately, is never as tidy as content marketing formulae represent it.

In 2020, Google attempted to reflect the seeming randomness of customer buying journeys by illustrating the concept of the messy middle of the purchase journey. In 2022, Moz’s search scientist, Dr. Peter J. Meyers, spoke at MozCon on the subject of the “messy middle” of search, using this illustration of how customers loop back and forth between exploration and evaluation before making a purchase.

If your local business remodels kitchens and you’re trying to understand the intent of search phrases that appeared in your keyword research, this messy middle model can help you determine to some extent, that a customer searching for “kitchen inspiration” is looking for content on your site that sparks ideas. For example, you might publish a gallery-style blog post of the ten most beautiful kitchens you’ve remodeled in Houston.

Meanwhile, searchers looking up “Houston kitchen remodeling” are almost certainly comparing your organization to other local competitors. At this phase in their journey, they might want to see content that convinces them that your business is the best in town because it is the oldest and most experienced, has better prices, offers stronger satisfaction guarantees, or has other benefits like sustainable sourcing that peers lack.

The central point for content creators and marketers of all these funnels, arrows, and loops is to help your business ensure that you are publishing something for every phase of the customer’s journey, regardless of how they travel through the web. Local business owners may find it easiest to simply audit existing content using the following checklist of questions.

1. Can you be discovered?

• Are you listed across the major local business listing platforms?
• Are you implementing SEO best practices to be sure you are ranking well in both the local and organic results?
• Are you sure that you’ve localized your content so that customers can quickly see they have found a nearby resource rather than a remote one?
• Are you posting images and videos across multiple platforms?
• Are you present and discoverable on the major social media platforms your customers prefer?
• Are you practicing good internal linking so that new content is being indexed by search engines and can be found by customers?

2. Can you be compared?

• Is your USP absolutely clear and present across all your content assets, and does it answer the key customer question, “What can you do for me?”
• Is all the necessary information about your business, goods, services, mission, ethics, attributes, and other features published on your website, listings, and social profiles so that it can be easily compared to what other local competitors offer?
• Have you published a comparison chart, if appropriate, for your industry and community?
• Have you optimized all content so that it matches the phrases you found in your keyword, customer, and market research phases?
• Have you optimized your customer service policies, staff training practices, and responsiveness to reviews so that your brand comes out looking the best when evaluated alongside local competitors?

3. Are you ready to transact?

• Is your entire fulfillment ecosystem highly publicized on your site, listings, and social profiles, including online shopping, in-person shopping, curbside service, delivery, bookings, telemeetings, etc?
• Is your shopping cart offering the best possible user experience?
• Is all of your contact information for your physical locations accurate across the local search ecosystem, including hours of operation and holiday hours, so that customers are assisted instead of inconvenienced?
• Are your accepted payment methods clear and visible?

4. Are you facilitating loyalty and advocacy?

• Are you making it easy for customers to review you?
• Do you have a review acquisition plan in place that includes asking for them (when appropriate) and sending links to your profiles?
• Are you responding to all reviews in a timely and effective manner and remarketing the best sentiment you’ve received from customers?
• Are you actively engaging in conversation with customers on social channels?
• Have you implemented a loyalty program to gather email and text information from customers while rewarding them for repeat business or referrals?
• Are you making it easy for customers to share your content socially on their favorite platforms by publishing guideline-compliant content on each site?
• Are you building the kind of reputation for outstanding customer service that leads to real-world word-of-mouth marketing?

If any of these questions earned a “no” from you, you may have discovered a missing piece in your content strategy that is causing you to be absent at a particular stage of customers’ journeys. By filling in this gap, you’ll better your chances of being present at more phases, however, messy journeys have become.

Many local business models are business-to-business (B2B) and qualify for all the practices covered in this guide with the understanding that their customers are other businesses instead of the general public, or business-to-customer (B2C.) For example, a local farmer sells directly to local restaurants and grocery stores that cook and sell their produce. A local pottery manufacturer supplies home goods shops that sell them to local customers. Local businesses could also service B2B and B2C clients, for example, a local yoga instructor could welcome local companies that contract with them to deliver health perks to their staff as well as individuals.

Even if your local business model is B2C, your content marketing strategy can grow to encompass B2B principles that are designed to facilitate mutual thriving for multiple businesses on the local business scene. For example, a local print shop in Arlington, Virginia, has teamed up with peers to offer a great t-shirt. You can team up with just one other business or with many to benefit one another.

To identify opportunities for businesses in your area to band together, start with this process:

1. Assess shareable assets

Determine which of the following powers and benefits you’d be willing to offer to one or more other local businesses in your town, including:

• Links
• Unstructured citations
• Social mentions
• Online referrals
• Offline word-of-mouth mentions and/or referrals
• Write-ups about them, like an article you publish on your site that references your peers
• Cross-selling with them
• Cross-promoting with them
• Text, podcast, or vlog interviews
• Featuring or even selling their goods/services on your website
• Co-hosting or co-sponsoring events

2. Discover your natural allies

While any local business can form a partnership, the magic happens when there is a logical relationship between one brand and another. Whether it be a mutual promotion, common marketing trends, or a similar customer base.

This doesn’t mean you should overlook any possible relationships; for example, there isn’t an immediate connection between bookstores and bakeries, but that doesn’t mean the owners couldn’t come up with a plan in which the bookstore will feature treats from the bakery down the street during local author talks, or that the bakery will stock a shelf of the bookstore’s best volumes on baking. These things happen in real life, and customers can really enjoy them. But, the structure can be a bit clearer in the case of, for example, a local landscaping company that creates some content about what they like best about some local nurseries they use for planting materials, while the local nurseries may also create pages about landscapers to whom they refer customers looking for professional help in the garden.

Life events can also be the basis of networks of relationships. For example, think of all the goods and services involved in a wedding. Places of worship, clothing shops, alterations specialists, caterers, event venues, DJs, florists, bakeries, consultants, and more may all play a role in a shared event. Formal and personal arrangements amongst this set of businesses can create a domino effect of benefits for all. Look for connections tied to seasons, holidays, local events, and common daily needs.

In your downloadable worksheet, you’ll find a Local Partners tab. In this tab, you’ll track your natural local business allies across your community, with names and addresses, any contact information you can find for the owners of these establishments, and your best ideas about how you could forge a mutual content marketing strategy.

3. Outreach to your potential partners

If you and some of your prospective partners belong to a local business organization such as a chamber of commerce, making connections could be quite easy, but if not, your best bet is to send an email or pick up the phone to request a time to chat. If your invitation is accepted, make a short, friendly presentation of how you think you can both send new business to one another with a mutual investment in content marketing. Explain the powers and benefits you’re prepared to offer them from the list in step 1.

Always leave room for your peers to share their ideas; they may have valuable insight and inspiration that hasn't occurred to you. Also, find out how they’d like to be featured. Some owners might not be comfortable getting in front of a camera but would love a text-based interview. Some might already be in an exclusive referral relationship for a particular good or service but still be able to link to you or cite you for something else. Take notes in the Local Partners tab, and be prepared for a follow-up meeting if a peer needs more time to organize their ideas.

4. Publish and promote

Apply the 80/20 rule to your B2B content once you’ve created and published it. All partners in the new relationship should use the full powers of their collective marketing channels to publicize the agreed-upon content and offers. When an effort proves a success for all partners, take note and reassess the promotion at an agreed-upon date to see if it can be updated and refined over time to reflect seasonality, new trends, and new developments at the participating businesses.

Just remember, keep your potential customers top of mind in all that you publish and promote, as you do in all your marketing. If a cross-promotion makes sense and appeals to the public, it will be good business for everyone involved.

Many local businesses begin with the simple goal of becoming profitable so that the owner can pay themselves and their staff a living wage. In today’s economy, with its bias toward big business and monopoly, this has become a noble aim in and of itself – one that may even be newsworthy enough to form part of your content strategy. Other local businesses start from the ground up with a broader mission of contributing to positive social change, and their owners only feel they have achieved success when actions on the part of their brand have resulted in some gain for their community. This approach is also ripe for impactful storytelling.

Whether you start out with more personal or more societal goals for the local business you’re writing about, at some point in your business development and content marketing journey, you may want to consider one or more of the following paths to brand differentiation and community contribution.

1. Advocacy for economic localism

Economic localism involves acting with the intention to reduce suffering by building a community that actually functions well for everybody who lives in it. By supporting and engaging in local SEO and local content marketing, you’re making it easier for local shoppers to choose localism.

“Localism is about building communities that are more healthy and sustainable – backed by local economies that are stronger and more resilient. It means we use regional resources to meet our needs – reconnecting eaters with farmers, investors with entrepreneurs, and business owners with the communities and natural places on which they depend. Economic success is measured less by production than by providing a decent standard of living for the most people while living in harmony with natural systems.” – Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BAILLE)

Local business owners typically live in the communities where they work and have a personal stake in the quality of local life. You can educate customers, one by one, on the multi-faceted benefits of shopping locally when you develop content around features like those established by the American Independent Business Alliance, which include the following.

• Better selection and service
• Access to expert advice
• High-quality social interactions to support mental health
• Local jobs with higher wages and lower rates of income inequality
• Local owners and employees contributing to local charities and causes
• Local recirculation of wealth (instead of remote extraction) for community needs
• More tax revenue for local public services (fire departments, schools, road maintenance, etc.)
• Greener shopping with reduced environmental impacts

Some, or all of these benefits will appeal to most communities, and messaging can either be baked into your basic pages or form the basis of blog posts, articles, social posting, and interviews you give to the media. For example, AMIBA has created a section called "Let’s Make Ripples" on their site that is designed to educate their audience about the benefits of choosing to shop locally, and many local businesses could do the same:

For further inspiration, read What is Economic Localism and How Does it Relate to Local SEO and publications put out by organizations like AMIBA and ILSR. These can offer an ongoing source of inspiration for content that helps customers understand why local businesses like yours are the best choice in so many ways. If what you publish is noteworthy, it could earn you excellent local press, new citations, and links.

2. Advocacy for environmentally sustainable business practices

A significant transformation is occurring right now in the world of business and marketing in response to climate change. The goal of sustainable marketers is for hundreds of millions of people to live more sustainably than they are now. The people involved are the rising generations of creatives (like content creators and marketers) and employees (like local business staff) who are participating in climate-oriented activities between working and shopping, and whose voices and support need to be earned by sustainable brands.

If green practices are a key part of your business’ unique selling point (USP), or you would like them to become so, consider these four phases of transition explored by the Can Marketing Save the Planet? podcast:

a. The Shift — Marketers talked the public into overconsumption and pollution. Marketers can talk the public out of it. Re-storing, recycling, and remarketing second-hand products, or featuring made-to-last inventory are ways to help people shop less, cutting carbon. Large brands are already taking this approach. For example, Eileen Fisher is reselling its gently used fashions, and Patagonia resells used outdoor gear. And in 2018, the world’s first secondhand shopping mall opened. Local businesses can find secondary income streams and a lot to write about when they shift towards a least-consumption approach.

b. 3 Cs and 3 Ps — Customers are Choosing to shop their values and Communicate them online, putting them in Control of brand narratives. As covered earlier in this guide, the overwhelming majority of consumers trust what customers say about brands more than what brands say about themselves. Meanwhile, content marketing is central to a brand’s efforts to earn ethical Profits because of its power to promote how the business is centered on People and the Planet.

c. Carbon literacy —- Marketers of all kinds are already taking pledges like the Clean Creatives pledge not to lend their talents to polluters like the fossil fuel industry. If your local business is large enough to need to hire outside content marketing professionals, it’s important to know that many people are now insisting on a carbon-literate career path. They simply won’t work with companies that don’t have high green standards. And even if your business is quite small and you are handling all content creation and marketing in-house, you and your employees will benefit from carbon literacy training. It will impact everything from your business operations to how you write about what your company is doing.

d. Winning — Visionary content marketing changes the climate narrative from one of loss and deprivation (scary) to one of meaningful gains in authentic happiness from climate stability (joyful). Polluters are investing endless funds into delaying the necessary transition to green energy and least consumption by using tried-and-true scare tactics that paint images of a bleak future, but as Carbon Literacy Project founder, Phil Korbel, explains:

“It's quite the opposite. It's about having more. It's about having more connection with people, less obsession with useless stuff we can't afford, and actually looking at things of tangible value – that sense of personal connection to the people, communities, and things around us that actually make us happy."

Business owners may initially feel concerned at the idea of least consumption and wonder why they should work for a future in which people buy less. It’s vital to understand that people will still be shopping as we transition. It’s just that what they buy will be sustainably sourced, and hopefully as locally sourced as possible. Meanwhile, governments are already outlawing planned obsolescence – the practice of manufacturing goods that are designed to break. As these climate-harming tactics are made illegal in more nations, local business owners should enjoy a return to selling inventory that is made to last, as was the norm in former eras.

Local businesses have a vital role to play in telling the story of sustainability via content publication and marketing. Your local business can make a very meaningful contribution to your community by writing a compelling narrative around your green foundations or transition to sustainability. For further inspiration, read What I’m Learning About Local Sustainability from Renowned Marketing Experts from the Moz Blog.

3. Advocacy for DEI

In the local business setting, DEI refers to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Diversity – The presence of both staff and customers bringing valued differences to the business, including (but not limited to) differences of identity, race, ethnicity, nationality, language, gender, sexual orientation, ability, health, spirituality, political affiliation, socioeconomic status, and home life.

Equity – Understanding the root causes of disparities within societal and commercial settings so that issues may be promoted and addressed with equal fairness, impartiality, and justice for everyone involved.

Inclusion – Ensuring that diverse people are fully welcomed by the business, both as employees and as customers, and are equally able to participate in all aspects of what the business does and offers.

Local businesses have tremendous power to create nearby social norms. Your hiring practices can close diversity gaps, your on-site facilities can send a message of welcome for all, and your allyship with large causes can provide the support needed for societal change. When the local grocery store in a community decks its shop front with Black Lives Matter or Pride flags, when it offers gender-neutral restrooms, and when it employs equally, it sets the tone of what neighbors and visitors see as part of the everyday life of the town.

Large local businesses can develop employee resource groups (ERGs) to foster DEI across the whole organization. Small local businesses can give space to citizen advocacy groups to meet, collect signatures, or speak on important issues. As covered in our earlier section on social marketing, businesses of all sizes can take public stands to influence public opinions but must do so in the spirit of allyship, while avoiding co-opting the messaging of grassroots movements for commercial uses.

In many cases, your company’s efforts to be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive can be an inspiring part of your narrative, showing care and respect for everyone in your community. One path that should be considered by all businesses at this time is the continued support and accommodation of their most vulnerable customers. You can do so by continuing to provide safer fulfillment options as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact elders, young children, and people with various health conditions. While many people have transitioned back to full pre-COVID lifestyles, others in your community will still greatly appreciate and make full use of any offers of home delivery, masked shopping hours, masked service appointments, and other caring options. All such efforts should be highly publicized in the content of your website, listings, and social profiles.

4. Support of local causes and groups

Local residents know best what is most needed in their community. As a local business owner, you may already have nearby issues you care about, and you can broaden your perspective by surveying your customers or local social followers to get a sense of what matters most to your neighbors.

A challenge some owners face is that they are reluctant to publicize the good they are doing. Highlighting your altruism can even be seen as bad manners in some settings. But when you consider how eager many people are for good news these days, it makes it easier to create and market content around your community involvement. Give hope and lift spirits by publicizing activities like:

• Charitable giving
• Donation of a % of your profits
• Donation of merchandise or services
• Allowing organizations to put donation jars or collection barrels on your premises
• Becoming a recycling station
• Sponsoring events, teams, and projects
• Creating a scholarship
• Volunteering at events or on projects
• Encouraging employees to spend a % of their work hours volunteering
• Hosting free trainings, workshops, and other community events
• Attending city or community council meetings with your colleagues and staff to represent important issues
• Founding or joining a “Buy Local” organization
• Offering discounts to first responders, teachers, frontline workers, or other essential community members

Psychological studies have found that generosity is contagious; people are more likely to give when they see others doing so. Your business can be an example of this ethic, and as demonstrated in Kindness as Currency: How Good Deeds Can Benefit Your Local Business, your efforts may be rewarded with press, links, citations, and social media praise.

Some business owners may live in communities where there are valid concerns over speaking up about issues, needs, and causes. They may justly fear backlash from the community. Do a risk/benefit analysis of publicizing your support for different causes, and talk to trusted business peers about their experiences. If it’s not right for your business to promote your community contributions, you could instead choose to do a lot of good without publicity, which still has intrinsic value.

Wonderful job – you’ve not only learned in Chapter Four how to publish for all phases of the customer journey and build a values-based brand that is a force for good in your community, but by reading this whole guide, you now know how to:

• Do customer, keyword, and market research
• Create and publish core content assets
• Market those assets and earn links, citations, and press
• Track the outcomes of your strategy
• Ensure ongoing management and improvement of your assets
• Seek new opportunities to differentiate your brand through positive action in your community

While local businesses always exist in times of change, customer-centricity, and community-centricity are time-tested foci for building a brand that is strong enough to attain longevity and become a local household name. When faced with new challenges and opportunities, revisit this guide and lean back into the reasons customers consistently choose to shop local. By making customers’ stories your own, your community can move together in a positive direction toward a bright future.

Written by Miriam Ellis and the Moz staff.