If you’ve spent any time at all researching different marketing strategies, there’s a good chance you’ve stumbled across the term ‘content marketing’. This process involves using content to market your company, business, product, or service to a broad audience. However, there’s more to content marketing than just generating content.
Content marketing benefits small businesses by publishing a lot of valuable content which builds trust with your audience. It also helps you appear in search results. This generates interest in your products and services and is a cost-effective way to increase brand identity and trustworthiness. Content marketing is a reliable way to build brand awareness, bring in new customers, and nurture your existing audience.
In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about content marketing and why a content marketing strategy is crucial for small businesses.
This Content Marketing Guide at a Glance
- Define Your Target Audience
- Set Your Content Marketing Goals
- Create a Content Calendar
- Develop Content
- Promote Content
- Measure and Analyze Results
Define Your Target Audience
The first part of constructing a content marketing strategy is to identify your ideal customer. This customer falls into the primary niche you’re hoping to target with your content and matches a predetermined set of ideals for your company. For example, if you wanted to market a cake business, you’d like to find customers that like cake, have events they’re looking to celebrate, and can purchase your cakes.
Similarly, you’d want to identify critical needs, wants, and pain points related to your ideal customer.
- Needs and Wants: These are things your customer desperately needs. The general difference between a want and a need is an essential service or product, while wants are “luxuries” that can be omitted without struggle. A bakery customer, for example, needs a birthday cake for their son’s birthday, but they want a strawberry cake. The “want” is less critical because they could take any cake, but good marketing would offer them the exact kind of cake they desire. Of course, good marketing can turn a “want” into a perceived “need” with clever content writing and selling customers on the convenience or ease of use of said product or service. Few people need the viral cleaning hacks one sees on social media, but many people want them and assume they’d be convenient enough to turn a want into a need.
- Pain Points: While this topic seems threatening, a pain point is just a customer’s problem you’ve identified. Customers who want a cake but have no bakery near them have a lack of cake as their pain point. Identifying crucial issues facing your customers allows you to market to their needs and wants quickly and lets you generate relevant marketing content aimed at their unique desires.
Once you have these three categories set, along with identifying your potential customer base, you’re well on your way toward crafting a winning content marketing strategy.
Set Your Content Marketing Goals
Now that you know who you’re marketing to and what they need, want, and specific pain points to target, you must set goals to guide your content marketing strategy. First, make sure that all your goals are SMART goals. No, we don’t mean your goals need to do well on a standardized test. Instead, SMART goals are goals that are:
- Specific: Keep your goals at a reasonable size. Do you want to increase website traffic? Don’t aim to become Wikipedia overnight; set a reasonable goal for your site. An excellent example of a specific goal is growing e-commerce transactions by 5% monthly.
- Measurable: Make sure whatever goal you choose, you can measure the results. It’s great to say you want the average person in your town to know about your small business, but there’s no easy way to measure that besides conducting a city-wide poll. If your company has the power for a census, more props to you, but in general, choosing a measurable goal that works with critical metrics gets you further toward your overarching plans.
- Achievable: Once again, keeping your goals attainable is vital. No matter how good your marketing strategy is, you can’t expect to become as popular as Mcdonald’s in a week. So set reasonable, achievable goals for your business, and be prepared for gradual growth. Even small growth intervals are worth celebrating, especially for small businesses, so set your goals reasonably and keep your dreams limitless.
- Relevant: Choose a goal relevant to your business. If you want to increase website traffic but have an outdated website, set a goal to update your website first, then focus on traffic. Take time to determine what goals are immediately relevant to your business and what can wait until later. Not only does this help you keep priorities in line, but it can also help you plan for the future.
- Time-Bound: Set a goal with a concrete deadline. This deadline can be as far as the end of the year or as immediate as next week but stick to the deadline and track results. An amorphous goal brings amorphous results, while a solid plan indicates how well your content marketing strategy worked in a set timeframe.
Create a Content Calendar
Now that you have business goals, it’s time for everyone’s favorite part: scheduling. Okay, there is a note of sarcasm in there, but planning out your content creation ahead of time is great for business. You can target routine content like blog posts, social media updates, email newsletters, and more and track how often you hope to publish new content.
Another benefit of setting up a regular posting schedule, besides the fact that your customers will know when to check back into your page, is you can target crucial holidays. Sticking with our cake maker analogy, a bakery marks down key holidays like Christmas and Easter, notable birthday months like October and November, and other sweet holidays. These are perfect times to run promotions, shout-out products, and more. Since some dates are industry-specific, plan your content calendar, and note events you want to hit next year.
Develop Content
What’s content marketing without, well, content? Crafting a style guide is one of the first things to consider when making content. Your style guide is your content creation Bible. It should have messaging templates, branding language, a tone guide, and grammatical exceptions for advertising copy. The style guide is where you ask serious questions about your business, like how you feel about the Oxford comma or if you hyphenate words like “shout-out.”
It’s also where you note design ideas for different posts, including font choice, spacing, templates, and more. If it helps a future designer or creator craft unique, recognizable content for your brand, it belongs in your style guide.
Once you have a style guide, brainstorm some topics for your content. Try and blend a good mix of topical subjects and evergreen content. If there’s a current trend, you want to prioritize that trend over other content posts. However, evergreen content like walkthroughs, DIY, and information posts will sustain your site and drive up regular traffic once the trend passes. By blending evergreen and timely content, you set your site up for constant traffic and build a reliable repertoire of articles, posts, newsletters, and more for your customers to sift through.
Promote Content
Now that you have marketable content, it’s time to put it in front of your audience. Your social media accounts are a great way to engage with customers and a place to share your various content pieces. However, there’s more to promoting your content than just sharing your posts.
Collaborating with influencers and thought leaders can be a great way to upgrade your page reach. It also gives weight to your content, establishing your business as a thought leader in its own right, and provides an air of reliability to your posts. Of course, you should exercise judgment before collaborating with other content creators, but teamwork can build your page to new heights and push your content to new audiences.
Another way to promote your content is to take advantage of email marketing. Email marketing boasts a $36 return for every $1 invested, making it a great turnaround opportunity for small businesses. Share newsletters, promote UGC (user-generated content) to subscribers, and engage with customers personally through email.
Finally, ensuring your website and content are sufficiently optimized for search engines is critical to getting traffic to your website. A few keywords and well-placed meta tags can work wonders for your site, so working with an SEO expert is crucial for your small business.
Measure and Analyze Results
Now that you have a content marketing strategy, it’s time to track the results. Programs like Google Analytics can help track website traffic and engagement and help you determine your ROI (return on investment) for your content marketing efforts.
Once you know how well your last marketing strategy paid off, you can use that information to customize your next strategy and set new goals for your business. If you saw great returns on social media influencers but have yet to see much response for email marketing, you may change tactics next time, for example.
Since marketing is about adapting to the market, tracking results and planning is a good idea. Track current trends, determine where you’re getting the most engagement, and set your next marketing strategy to target key customer pain points and needs. Once you’ve analyzed your results, it’s time to redo the content marketing strategy with your new information and update any pieces needing shifting.
Of course, working with content marketing experts can streamline this process, so you can spend less time managing content and more time working on your business or company.
Content marketing is a crucial tool for small businesses. It can bring new customers to your company and increase brand awareness, and it is a reliable form of growth for small- to mid-sized businesses. While this article may seem daunting, try crafting your content marketing strategy following these guidelines. Not only will it help you better understand content marketing, but it can help drive your business to new heights.
Suppose you’re looking for a simple, painless way to track content marketing distribution channels. Then, check out our content marketing distribution checklist. It has everything you need to improve your small business’s marketing strategy today.
If you’re overwhelmed by content marketing, our team of experts can help. At Planted Marketing, we work closely with small business owners to craft content that fits their needs. If you’re interested in learning more, or have questions, contact us through our form today.
Planted Marketing is a full-service digital marketing agency for small to mid-size business owners. Our custom packages and wide range of services allow us to grow with you at each stage of your business. If you want to learn more, send us a message!
