Content marketing is important for small businesses as it helps them achieve goals and grow their audience.
Content marketing creates and distributes relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined audience, to drive profitable customer action. The more content you create, the greater your chances of success.
A large percentage of marketers not only think of content marketing as generating demand/leads but see content as a core business strategy.
Here are 11 tips for creating a smart content marketing strategy for small businesses.
- Mission: Define your company’s mission to create a clear goal for your content. The mission defines the goal or purpose behind each piece of content, and not all content will produce the same results.
Some goals may overlap, but they still need to be inherently defined.
- Generate qualified leads
- Create brand awareness
- Increase retention
- Increase customer engagement
- Convert potential customers into devoted customers
- Build thought leadership
- Audience: You have to know who you are talking to to know what they want to hear. It is not only important to define the content of your mission, but also to whom the content will be directed.
You may have more than one audience you want to talk to, but these people need to know exactly who you want to attract and where you are:
- Semrush (paid) – Has a great content marketing platform that allows you to research topics based on keyword phrases. You can even enter a domain that will help you find topic ideas.
- Quora (free) – It will also give you some great insights into the questions people are asking. It will give you an idea of what people are asking and what people are answering regarding the questions.
- Crowd Content (paid): This is not a tool but a service. If you have some budget to invest but no time, Crowd Content will give you access to thousands of freelance writers. This type of professional service can help you better scale your content needs.
3. Goals: Create goals for each of your goals so you know what success looks like. For example, if one goal is to build authority, then:
- Reach out to others in your industry and get them interviewed, share that content on your site and promote it.
- I shared educational content, practical tips and more.
4. Goals: Make sure your goals are measurable and realistic. How will you measure the results and your performance?
Make sure you have the tools in place and make sure they are installed correctly so you can measure effectively. Some content marketing measures can be:
- Revenue: How many sales, subscriptions, or paid downloads (if any) your site has earned on a month-to-month (MoM) basis.
- Leads: Form submissions, newsletter signups, conversion rate, signups.
- Brand awareness: site visitors, video views, engagement on your social media accounts.
- Loyalty: Returning customers, bounce rate, subscriptions minus unsubscribes to anything subscription-based.
- Engagement: Social media growth over time, reactions, comments, shares, views, retweets.
5. Resources: Calculate how much time, money or staff you have available for content creation and promotion. Start with your budget, goals and objectives with your content strategy.
6. Content calendar: It is the main tool to keep tasks in a timely manner. It doesn’t have to be done in any project management tool if it’s not accessible. All you need is a simple spreadsheet. The form fields to include can be:
- He
- Date
- Platform (paid social media, blogs, videos, lists, white papers, social media posts, etc.)
- targeted keywords
- Inspiration (preliminary research you have done)
- Start with the idea of what format would be suitable for the topic and decide which platform would have the most impact on it.
7. Optimize the content: Keyword research is essential. Start by finding keywords with high volume and little competition.
Researching what other people are typing when doing their searches will make your content easier to find. Google autocomplete is a quick and easy way to find ideas about what people are searching for.
Also, the content needs to be visually appealing, so put some effort into the images associated with your content. Make sure your CTA (calls to action) are in the right area.
8. Repurpose content: Look at your data (Google Analytics, YouTube, social media posts that got high engagement) and see if you can recycle that content into new blogs, social media posts, infographics, or videos. This tactic can save you a lot of time, since the initial legwork has been done.
9. Update content and evergreen pages: Make a note every quarter to review old content and see what evergreen content needs to be updated. Every industry is different, but the rules, regulations and/or provisions of many industries will change. Your content needs to be up-to-date, so it doesn’t seem out of date or out of touch with industry information that’s coming out.
10. Continuous Content Promotion: Similar to content repurposing, evergreen or popular content should be promoted not just once or twice, but for as long as possible. Make sure to distribute it. You have invested time, effort and budget in the content. Make sure you get the most out of it.
11. Analyze: Once you know what you’re tracking, you can easily see what worked and what didn’t. Find ways to replicate it. Maybe it’s short-form content, maybe it’s the theme. If you constantly look for analysis, you will discover new opportunities that can help you with your goals.
