Content Marketing for Small Business

Develop a Strategy

Content strategy is the first to-do list for your businesses and for those who want to invest their time in content marketing followed by content marketing strategy. Content strategy and content marketing strategy are two different theories. So what exactly is a content marketing strategy and how do you develop a content strategy?

A content marketing strategy is actually a set of proposed rules that are prepared for your business for content development, content consistency, and content distribution i.e channels and networks for content delivery, whereas a content strategy delves more into content preparation such as what to produce, how to produce and for whom to produce which constitutes a content production planning.

Usually a content strategy may vary from one industry to another depending on what you produce and sell. You actually need to research your ideal buyer persona first before you start writing your content. Once you finish this research, you actually get to know what you should do to match your content with your buyer's persona. This usually gives you a keen sense of what type of content you should develop and for whom are you going to produce your content.

So if you are dealing in a particular type of product or service, you need to understand those people or businesses or industries who are likely to buy your products or services. You should also find their whereabouts because that is how you would know where to publish your content to get the attention that you need from your buyers and make a successful content marketing strategy.

Produce your Content

Content marketing is a blend of blogging, email, social media, images, videos, creative words, and premium content creation. Hence it is overwhelming for small and medium enterprises because creating content takes time and isn't easy. Creating content also requires a team of individual.

Therefore small businesses often neglect the benefits of content marketing. Content creation is the second most important element of content marketing because without content your content marketing strategy would fail.

Content provides a positive return on investment over time hence producing content is crucial for your business. Producing great content increases engagement hence make sure to include all the blend in your content such as copy, graphics, and videos. Once you know your goals you can easily focus on what content to produce that is going to deliver the greatest return.

So whether you are outsourcing your content or levering an inhouse team, creating content should be timeless, feel authentic, and must provide adequate value for a long time to come. Your content should also align with your business goals to transform target consumers into customers over time.

Optimize your Content

Content optimization is more like an ongoing process because you cannot optimize your content unless you measure it. Content optimization is one of the most important elements of the content strategy because the content you create should be visible to your target audience.

Imagine you have spent hours and day to build up your content but it isn't reaching your target audiences. Therefore content should be planned, created, and optimized before publishing it on social media platforms or emailing to your subscribers and your existing customers in your network. This is often known as content distribution.

Today people mostly consume content online through a Google Search so optimizing your content for Google search engines is a big deal. Hence if you want to increase your content visibility and conversions, a business needs to follow SEO best practices and optimize their content for the ground search. This will maximize their organic clicks and get the best insights with the help of analytics for optimizing their content regularly.

Therefore it is important for businesses to understand that content optimization is an incremental way of optimizing your content on a regular basis, so give some time to this process until you see any progress.

Promote your Content

Content Promotion is the initial essence of your content's visibility. Once you have your content ready you can either distribute your content or repurpose your content and repost it for targeting another group of audiences. Both are part of the content promotion strategy and may have a different angle.

Content that works today might not work well for you tomorrow, so this is where you can repurpose your old content to create another piece of fresh content. Repurposing is not just about reusing an old piece of content. It means a lot more to your content promotion strategy. For example, creating a pdf, an ebook, or infographic and aligning with another blog post or twitter cards, etc. can take a fresh start. Repurposing content brings your website’s content to your consumers to attracts a whole new group of people, your consumers and customers.

While there are a whole lot of social media channels for social media content distribution, it is important to know which content is performing better for your business. By knowing your evergreen content, you know the value of your content and your buyer's persona. Thus you can distribute these evergreen content to other platforms that might have been overlooked.

You can also connect with influencers to promote your content. Make a list of your top-performing content and share it with them. This will enhance your business in terms of content promotion and drive ROI.

Update your Content

Have you ever thought of updating your content? Content Update is necessary when your content is no longer performing. While fresh content performs better, your old content may not. This is why you often need content maintenance.

So what is a content update? Updating your content means replacing or adding new parts to your existing content. Image replacements, including fresh statistics, duplicate content removal, adding or replacing external links and internal links with the more relevant content links, etc. are some common examples of a content update. Updating your content supports your brand visibility and make your content evergreen to perform well like before.

Outdated content may affect your brand message. So if your content has not been updated for years. Prioritize your blog pages and blog posts, update them, optimize, and get aligned with your current business goals.

Search engines love fresh content so update your content regularly because outdated content is worse than having no content at all.

Analyze your Content

Content analysis is all about measuring your content efforts to align your expectation with the business goals. Therefore you need to measure your content performance over time. Setting up the relevant KPI's can be challenging at times for your business as part of your content marketing goals. KPI's help you to identify, measure and analyze your content so it has a top priority for content management.

Content Reporting can be simple to complex and most marketing software platforms are capable of delivering a wide range of reports. Therefore identify what are your business goals and work on setting your KPI's that largely means success for you and your business.

Google and Bing Webmaster and Analytics provide large capabilities for advanced reports where you can identify more meaningful KPIs and set well-defined goals. These are free tools that provide various KPI's overview on the audience, acquisition, behavior reports that identify page views, unique page views, bounce rates, and exits.

For example if you want to know what do users see when they are on your website or blog? A simple KPI report can update you with the information on your dashboard. These can include reports such as which is the most popular page or blog post, the most popular pages with title breakdown, which content group is the most popular, etc. and a lot more reporting features. Get in touch with our marketing team to get more information about our content marketing services.