If you’re a small business owner, you need not just to utilize content marketing within your business but also to understand it. Content marketing is the strongest tool you have when it comes to up-to-date marketing methods that really work. If business growth is your aim, content creation and marketing that content are key.
Content marketing essentially means creating material that will be posted online and that will bring more traffic to your website. This might be a blog, infographics, social media posts, videos, whitepapers, guest posts, and more. It’s not a direct sales tactic; you’re not focusing on the benefits of a product and persuading people to buy it. Instead, you are proving through your content that your business has the knowledge and the ability to do the work you say you can do. It’s marketing in a different form, and it’s the most popular – and successful – technique to use right now. With that in mind, here are some tips on how to create a content marketing strategy that will help grow your business.
Determine Your Content Marketing Goals
Before you can create a successful content marketing strategy, you need to know what your marketing goals are. What is it you want to achieve? Depending on your particular goal or goals, the route you take with your content marketing might be different. You’ll need not just an overall idea of your goals, but equally, when you’re creating each individual piece of content, you’ll need a specific goal for that too.
One goal you might have would be to generate more leads for your business. Or perhaps you want to give your audience information and educate them. Maybe you want to show that you’re the expert in what you do, over and above your competition. No matter what your goal might be, you need to focus on it and ensure that everything you do leads back to it.
When you know what your goals are, you also need to check that the content you’re creating and using lives up to those goals. Analytics are extremely important here; once you post a certain piece of content, look at the number of social media followers you gain, how many emails you receive, how many website visitors you get, or whatever else your goal might be. This will show you whether your idea is working or not, and if not, you can make the necessary changes.
Understand Your Customers’ Pain Points
As well as having marketing goals, you need to know who you’re marketing to. This is crucial; you can’t just create a marketing campaign without knowing who you are advertising to. After all, different people will need to be marketed to in different ways. This even includes the look of your ad and the language used within it.
You need to, therefore, work out who your target market is. Carry out market research to know who they are, and then you can create content that matches your audience and will be of interest to them.
As well as knowing who they are, you need to know what their pain points are; what problem do they have that they are looking to solve? If you can determine this and give them the answer, they are sure to come to you for more information and eventually make a purchase.
Write Actionable Content
As mentioned above, writing content that is solely about selling something is the wrong approach to take when it comes to your content marketing. Instead, you need to use content that will ensure your customers achieve the goals they are looking to accomplish.
Think about what it is your customers want, and then write content that they can take action with. It might be that you sell gardening equipment, and you specifically want to sell some compost. You could write a post about how to use compost in the right way and how beneficial it is, or you could simply mention it as a point in a list of the best tools to make your backyard look great. Armed with this information, your customers will see that compost is useful, that you sell it, and that you have the knowledge to show that it’s the right thing to buy. There are thousands of different options for you when it comes to writing actionable content, so make sure you do, as this is what makes all the difference.
Determine Your Best Traffic Channels
As well as writing the correct kind of content focused on the right target market, you need to make sure you post that content in the right places. If you don’t, you’re not going to reach your target market. Your efforts will go unnoticed because the people who are seeing what you’re saying are just not the people who will buy from you, no matter how good your campaign might be.
Therefore, when you carry out your market research, it’s also important to find out where your target market spends most of its time online. Do they use a lot of social media, for example? If so, which platforms? This is where you need to post your content, and the more of it you have, the better. This can be very time-consuming, but with the right software, it’s possible to automate your content uploads, ensuring that your target market can’t forget you and will see everything you want them to see. Visit www.jamsscheduler.com/job-scheduling/ to learn more about job scheduling software and see how this could help you create more content.
Add CTAs
CTAs – which stands for calls to action – within your content are crucial. It might seem as though it’s not necessary, but it can make a big difference. A call to action is a way of telling the reader or viewer of your content what step they should take next. It’s a simple reminder that they should get in touch with you, browse your store, follow you on social media, or even buy from you.
Without a call to action at the end of a piece of content, the reader may well just be satisfied with the information they have gained and do nothing more. With the addition of a call to action, you press that point home that they can – and should – do something, and they often will.
