Your business provides a one-of-a-kind service that the world never knew it needed, but absolutely cannot live without.
If you don’t have a good content marketing strategy, the world will never know about it.
Content marketing is one of the most important factors in the success, or failure, of a small business. With small business content marketing, you identify who needs your product or service, what you need for them to do, and then you develop a strategy to make that happen.
A good content marketing strategy can help you create a brand identity that consumers can instantly identify. You can also outperform competitors and establish yourself as a leader in the industry. Check out these five reasons why you need an airtight content strategy. All of these factors and more will help create more website visitors and lead to conversions. Follow these four simple steps to create an effective marketing strategy today!
Know Your Audience
Now that you understand what content marketing is, you need to know more about the people you’re marketing to. After all, you want to make sure that your content is relevant to your consumers so that they not only purchase your products or services, but also come back and bring new potential customers with them. It is important to research your audience so that you have a better understanding of their needs, interests, and habits.
But, how?
There are many ways to gain insight into your customers. For instance, you can be direct; ask customers what you can do to make your business better and more relevant to them. This also allows you to gather more information about your customers, such as demographics. Questionnaires should be short—studies show that the average attention span is less than 10 seconds. Offer an incentive to keep their attention and get the feedback you need!
If customers aren’t as receptive to the direct approach, social media may be a better avenue. Most of the world is on at least one social media platform, so these outlets are great tools for your small business.
Lastly, you can check out your competitors. Examine a competitor’s newsletters and social media pages to see what’s working. It’s also important to look at those who are struggling and compare. While it’s true that what works for one company may not work for another, you can study trends in social media and develop your own effective social media strategy. Check out these five social media strategies to get more ideas on developing your own!
Create Good Content and Update Often
You know why small businesses need content marketing and who you are trying to reach, but what you’re saying is important too. Your website needs frequent updates and its content should be fresh and interesting. As the internet evolves and A.I. algorithms grow more sophisticated, search engines automatically look for rich, original content that’s relevant to consumers. Short, medium, and long-tail keywords can make or break content, so small businesses should use them wisely.
In order to stay relevant, it’s important to meet that demand for content. And, it needs to be more than just the written word. Content comes in all shapes and sizes, including everything from blog posts to infographics to podcasts. Diversity is the key, and with it, you can unlock higher search placements and reach more consumers.
Regardless of what kind of content you’re creating, be consistent with it. The role of content marketing is to do just that, market your business. Develop a schedule that is realistic and reasonable for your business and make sure your content writing is diverse. Aside from weekly newsletters from your company, social media is also a good way to tell your audience about the new content you’re producing.
Promote Your Content Using Social Media
While it’s great for your audience to share your content for you, the key to a successful content marketing strategy for small business is that you share your content at the right time, in the right way, and in the right place.
Studies indicate that users share reactive content—content that creates strong emotions, whether it’s excitement, anger, or something else. To make shareable content that’ll boost your business with little effort, make sure that your headlines grab attention and the content is something that users will want their friends and family to see. DIY guides and how-to articles pertaining to your products or services are a great way to draw in more of your target audience.
You should also consider where you share content. Images and infographics do best on outlets like Instagram and Pinterest, which are primarily visual. Facebook and Twitter are both good choices for visual content and blog posts alike.
It’s also important that your content is shareable with a simple button. Make sure the content you produce is something your consumers will share on their own social media outlets. One way of doing that is to show users how many other people have shared your content on their social media. Nothing inspires shares more than seeing that something is popular.
Keep An Eye on your Audience
Now that you’re producing quality content and distributing it to your audience, it’s time to sit back and watch. Analytics, such as Google Analytics, evaluate what is working and what you could improve on. But, it can also be laborious and time consuming to look at so much raw data; creating a plan and getting regular reports can help turn overwhelming data into helpful information.
Not sure what you should prioritize? Read more about marketing analytics for small businesses like yours!