Content Marketing Strategy For Your Small Business.

What’s Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is the use of content to engage, convince and delight your audience to either recognize, like or buy from your brand.

A content marketing strategy is the use of a well-planned task to align your content to help you reach your specific business goals eg brand awareness, increase sales or retain customers.

A good strategy is made up of a number of steps or tasks that will help you create a smooth customer journey into buying your products or services.

Customer journey or funnel is a process or stages that your target customers will follow led by your contents, into becoming paying and returning customers.

Follow the bellow stages to create your killer content strategy

DEFINE YOUR CONTENT MARKETING GOAL

What would you want to achieve after implementing this strategy?

This might be to increase your sales, build your brand penetration into the market or retain your existing customers.

Also, keep in mind the context every time you are about to create your content.

As usual, your goal must be SMART

That is;

S – Specific (What are you trying to achieve and why?)
M- Measurable (Can you measure whether the campaign was successful or not?)
A- Attainable (Can you achieve the goals with the available resources)
R- Relevant (Are the goals helpful to your business)
T- Time-bound (Does it have a start point and a deadline?)

An example of a smart goal can be;

For example, you have an online shop selling electronics. You may want to sell at least 50% of the total stock of computers you have at a given price by the end of the quarter.

A SMART marketing goal will help you reach your content marketing targets.

DO A RESEARCH ON YOUR AUDIENCE

You need to know who the content you will be producing is meant for, their challenges, and how you can help them out.

Audience research is important in your strategy. You can’t create content to serve people whom you do not know their needs.

There are several ways and free tools you can use to conduct audience research.

For a start, you can conduct online interviews of your current customers to understand them deeply, before going outside your circle.

A simple way is by use of Google forms.

Google forms is a free survey tool offered by Google. As long as you have a Google account, you can create your survey forms, then share the links with your customers.

Use the forms to collect data from your current customers and understand their needs firsthand. This gives you an opportunity to market your products or services to them, using relevant content.

You can also use your social media analytics to check out the forms of content that get the most attention and engagement.

This stage is compulsory because you cant market your product or services to people whom you don’t know their needs.

START CREATING CONTET

By now, you have an idea of the kind of content you should create for your audience.

Start by making a rough list of content ideas you think might be relevant to your audience.

You can also make use of free tools like Google trends and HubSpot content generator, to get more content ideas.

Personally, I think Google trends can be more helpful because it gives you an option to filter according to countries, dates and even gives you related content.

There are many other tools you can use like;

• Ubersuggest
• Semrush
• Buzzsumo etc

These tools are more technical mostly used by Content Marketers and Digital Marketers. Therefore, as someone just trying to market your business by yourself, I’d still recommend Google trends for you.

To help you get organized and work at ease, you can have a content calendar that you can be reviewing on a weekly basis.

The calendar will help you know what to post when and where. Also, create a content repository ie, storage or database where you will be storing your content in advance.

Download my free content calendar and repository templates that I had prepared to help you with your content marketing efforts.

NB: Create your content with context at the back of your mind.

DISTRIBUTE YOUR CONTENT

Now that you already have your content, its time to push them on the various platforms.

Keep in mind the main goal you had with your content marketing strategy.

This is the point where your content calendar comes to action. You will use it to know which platforms you need to share your content.

If your main aim is to drive traffic to your website and convert them into sales, sharing the content on social media will really come in handy.

Keep in mind that you will not share the same kind of content across all the platforms. You can have different content types across different platforms. Eg you can have Instagram reels, FB video, LinkedIn side, and Twitter video. All of them being the same content but in different formats.

Don’t forget that social reach has really declined. So, you will need to push your content through social media ads.
When using Facebook ads, select the traffic goal. This tells Facebook that you want it to show the ad to people who will likely visit your website and take an action.

If you are a B2B brand, you definitely need to be creating blog content to educate and inform your target audience.

With the same blog content, you will also need to push them on the various social media platforms and start email marketing to your subscribers.

Email marketing is where you share your content with commercial intent to your prospects (those who accepted that you can send them regular emails) with the intention of converting them into paying customers.

Something else as a b2b brand you should capitalize on is SEO.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves the activities you do on and off your website to help you be easily found on top of relevant searches on Google, Bing, or any other search engine.

For example, if you are a lawyer based in Nairobi and someone in Kenya searches for lawyers, if you did some good work on SEO, you will appear on the top of the first page of Google.

In content distribution, it’s best to start will all the main social platforms to increase your reach, engagements, and brand awareness.

After a while, when you have measured the results of each platform severally, you can then decide whether to cut off some platforms or keep all of them.

I bet you will keep all of them.😎

MEASURE YOUR CONTENT

After all that hard work, you have to see if it was worth doing or there some improvements need to be made.

This is the point where all the analytics tools come in handy.

Every social media platform comes with an analytics dashboard that you can use to see and analyze the performance of your various posts.

You can segment this into daily, weekly monthly, etc. My advice is that you do a weekly analysis to easily get a clear picture.

If you have a website, Google analytics will give you all the necessary details you may need in terms of measuring your contents

Conclusion

Content marketing is a continuous activity.
Therefore, you should always research relevant topics, create content, distribute, measure, and come up with better recommendations to help you achieve your content goals.
After reading this, do yourself a favor and take action.

Click here to get the complete Digital Marketing strategy with templates to help you grow your leads and sales