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Content Marketing Strategy – your way to success!

Home office with ring light and camera, Facebook cover size

Do you have a content marketing strategy? A lot of small businesses don’t – and if you are one of those businesses, you are missing out on planning your way to success! Staying ahead of the game is what keeps our audiences engaged and also helps our businesses remain relevant. BUT, it doesn’t mean to you have to keep up with every trend that comes along.  

A content marketing strategy includes all the things you do to attract, engage, and keep your audiences’ attention, by creating and sharing content, such as blog posts, videos, newsletters, podcasts, and social media content. In fact, anything and everything that keeps your business in your audiences’ minds when they decide they want to buy what you offer.

The strategy is about the planning of that content so that it achieves your goals and is aimed at your specific target audience.

Why is the strategy important to your business?

I’ve seen lots of people on social media saying that they want to grow their business and it’s just not happening.

Is this you?

You’re consistently posting on social media, you might have a newsletter, you show your products or services, publish your blogs, pay for ads – and are consistent – but still you’re not getting as much business as you hoped. The reason is likely to be that you don’t have a workable content strategy, or that your goals aren’t realistic.

Content marketing is a long game – it’s not something that you can implement and get results within a few months. That’s why so many big companies have a whole marketing department. They know that they need to have people working on it constantly and over a long period of time to get any return on what they do.

With the right strategy in place, you can:

  • Generate leads
  • Raise your brand awareness
  • Engage your followers and target audience
  • Retain your current customers
  • Position yourself and your business as an expert in your field

You can’t just wing it!

Unfortunately, content strategy isn’t something you can wing! You need to conduct research, know your target audience, know what keywords to use and have a clear idea of your buyer personas.

Most small businesses will know their target audiences, but quite often still post and focus on what they believe to be important or interesting, rather than what their audience and perspective customers need and want. Having a strategy addresses this matter.

It’s not a secret that creating content is time-consuming, but writing short blog posts, or putting up a social media post just because you haven’t done one today – or trying to put out three posts every day, means you’ll probably do something quickly, just to get it out – and this could end up with you losing out in the long run.      

High quality content helps you to rank better in Google, helps you to build trust with your customers and followers, brings you leads and importantly, helps you to convert those leads into customers.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for short-term content strategies, as these can produce some instant results, but a long-term strategy will allow you to build a rapport with your audience, provide real value to them and keep your business in the front of their minds long term. Long-term strategies also tend to build bigger audiences and don’t concentrate on the hard sell, which puts a lot of people off.

How do you build a content strategy?

Your content strategy is the foundation of your customers’ journey with you. It helps you have better customer satisfaction and helps you with sales. Think about:

Your audience

Who will be reading your content? Who is your target audience? Do you have more than one?

Create a buyer persona for each of your target audiences – this will help you tailor content specifically for them.

What problems do your products or services solve?

What are the benefits and features of your products/services? What are your customers’ pain points and how do you solve them?

What makes your business unique?

What do you do that is different from your competitors? What makes your products/services better than theirs? It might be that you have years of experience; you might have a distinctive way of speaking to your customers (your tone of voice).

What are your business goals?

This is very important as you need to know what goals you want to achieve, so you can tailor your content to help you achieve those goals.

What kind of content format will you use?

Bear in mind that you need your content to reach your customers, so where do they hang out? This might be social media, a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel, video content or an email newsletter to name a few. You also need to know what kind of content your audience likes. You can only find this out by trying different things over a period of time and analysing which type gets the most engagement.

Once you know what format you need to use to suit your audience and to reach them where they are, think about your budget and what you can afford to be able to use all these channels effectively – by this, I don’t mean you have to pay for ads – but things like a website or email marketing can come at a cost.

Where will you publish your content?

Linked to the previous point, where you publish your content will depend on where your audience are. This might be your website, or social media. If social media is a big part of your strategy, which sites will be best for you? Which sites do your audience use?

If you target a younger audience, you might want to opt for TikTok and Instagram.

How will you manage your content?

Once you know what channels you’re going to use, you need to think about how you will create and publish all your content. Will you be doing it all yourself?

Have a plan, and plan at least two weeks ahead, so you know what posts are happening and when. For social media, you can batch-create content and schedule it in advance. Blog posts and email can also be planned and written ready for publishing.

If you plan your content around a particular theme each week or month, it makes content creation much easier. If you write a blog, or have a podcast, you can also repurpose that content to make social media posts/videos.

Make sure that your content tells your customer how you can help them solve their problems, use your unique voice, and try and weave in your overall business message.

I try and use the 80/20 rule for my content. 80% entertaining, engaging, educating, or inspiring my audience and only 20% sales posts.

Your strategy also needs to:

  • Ensure your content points your audience to your website or online shop…or somewhere they can get more information
  • Be cost-effective
  • Include an audit of the content you’ve already published. Look at your insights on social media to find out what kind of posts work best you’re your business. And, if you blog/podcast, look at your stats to see which articles/episodes are the most popular. What works and what doesn’t?
  • Does your current content align with your goals, and will it help you achieve it? If not, you may need to look at changing what you do and how you do it.

There are loads of different types of posts you can create to keep your audience interested, and to help you achieve your goals.

Content Marketing is all about reaching your target audience with the kind of content they want to see, in a place where they hang out.

Planning and having a strategy are key and will really help you achieve your goals, reach your audience, build trust and rapport with your followers…and ultimately make those sales.

If you’d like help with your content marketing strategy, I’d love to help and get you moving towards building your audience and growing your business. Contact me via email (cindymobey@outlook.com) to book your free 30-minute consultation – I look forward to chatting to you about your business.

Reasons why content marketing is crucial for small businesses

Content marketing and its value really can’t be stressed enough – especially in this digital age where, according to zippia.com, 62%, (that’s 4.9 billion) of the global population use the internet. It is an immensely powerful marketing strategy that can help your small business become highly visible to your target audience.

By producing quality content regularly, you build trust, authority, and credibility with your audience, which helps you stand out from your competition.

The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as…

“…a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

One of the key words here is ‘valuable’ – content that will speak to your potential customers, information that they want and need; information that solves a problem or pain point.

Ways content marketing can help  

Content writing is more than just publishing posts on social media. There are many different types of content marketing and these include:

  • Blogs
  • Video
  • Social Media content
  • Email newsletters
  • Infographics
  • Case Studies
  • Checklists
  • E-books
  • Memes
  • User-generated content
  • Podcasts
  • Customer testimonials
  • Webinars
  • Success stories
  • Interactive content

What does all this content do for your business?

With 62% of the global population using the internet, you have a huge market for your products or services, especially if you trade worldwide. So, let’s look at some reasons for taking time to create all this content.

Get your business found on search engines

With all those people online, there will be potential customers out there looking for exactly what you have to offer. If you are not online, you won’t be found. You can put your business online in many ways. You can set up an online shop, through Etsy or Shopify, or one of the other online shopping host channels, but these can be expensive, especially with the fee increases we’ve seen recently.

Having your own website is a great step to take, as it is yours. You do have to pay an annual fee, but this can be done fairly cheaply, and worth it as your website can not only host your shop, but it can also tell your audience a bit about you, and you can add a blog and advertise your email newsletter all in one place.

The other thing I would definitely advocate is setting up a Google Business Profile, (which used to be called Google my business), which is fabulous for being found locally. Again, this includes a profile, you can post and share blog posts, as well as adding photos and videos.

More traffic to your website

Linking in with being found on search engines is that content marketing helps push more traffic to your website. If you blog about a problem that you solve or write an article on your website about what your business can do for your customers, when they do a search online, your article or website will appear. Once they’re on your website, it is likely they will have a look around, visit your shop and look at your details…and if they like what they see, they are likely to return in the future.

It’s important to have a CTA (call to action) on every page of your website, which tells your visitors what to do next. You can use these buttons to tell your audience to ‘buy now,’ or ‘sign up for my email newsletter,’ or point them to your courses, training or coaching and to your customer testimonials – in fact, anything that keeps them on your site.

More sales

When a potential customer finds a site they like, or feel that a site speaks to them personally, they will return again and again. And if they are returning, they are more likely to convert to customers.

Make sure that your website includes customer testimonials about the benefits that your products or services give. I always like to read about a product before I buy it, and if there are great testimonials, which show me how a product will benefit me, I’m more likely to press that ‘buy now’ button.

Testimonials are also proof, not just that you have good products, but also you have impeccable customer service, which goes a long way to getting that button pressed too.

Establishes you as an expert

Writing valuable content that speaks to your audience, also has the added bonus of setting you up as an expert in your field. If you’re sharing content that serves your customers and gives them valuable tips or information, they’ll want to know more. Setting yourself up as an expert promotes trust with your audience and engages them to want to know more about you and your products or services…and what’s in it for them!

Enhances your brand   

This might sound a bit harsh, but generally people are not really interested in your brand or in you, they are more interested in themselves – in their wants and needs. It’s not about being selfish, it’s human nature. When someone first looks at your website, shop, social media business page, they are not interested in your brand, no matter how hard you’ve worked on it. They are interested in what you can do for them, what you have that they might like, or something that makes their life easier. This is hard to hear, but it has an upside.

If you are providing something they’re interested in for whatever reason, or if your social media pages entertain or educate them, they will then become interested in your brand, as they will see it, and therefore you, as something they can relate to.

If you are consistently publishing new, unique content on your blog or website and promoting it to your social media pages – or if you are publishing new, unique content to your social media pages, consistently, more people will get to see your name or business name and will start to relate. If they like what they see, they’re more likely to share your posts, or tell their friends and family about your wonderful products or fabulous services, so your audience will start to grow, which is when your brand really shines through. This all takes time and is not something you can achieve overnight.

Helps you compete with your competitors

I’m not talking about copying or doing the same as your competitors, but there is something to be said to ensuring that you’re using the same (and more) marketing channels as your competitors. When your business and brand is not in a place where your competitor is, you’re potentially losing out on business.

It’s worth doing research on your competitors and finding out more about them, so that your business is in the right places to compete.

Improve customer relationships

Having good relationships with your customers goes without saying, we all know that. But it’s even more important in this digital age, as customers have so much choice when it comes to who they want to do business with. And it’s important to remember that customers are willing to pay more for a better experience.

Content marketing is the best way to show your customers and potential customers that you understand their problems or pain points…and that your products or services solve those problems. If you have a website, you could add a list of FAQs to help explain how your products or services solve those problems, or you can write about it in your blog or email newsletter.

This really helps improve those customer relationships, instill trust, and encourages them to spread the word about your business.

Helps your overall marketing strategy

Content marketing is just one aspect of your marketing strategy, but it is the glue that holds each activity together to help you grow your business. If you can align all your marketing activities with your content, it will help you achieve your goals and keep them coordinated with everything else you do.

For example, you decide to create an e-book alongside a downloadable checklist. You can promote this on social media, or in Facebook ads. You can also send it to your customers in your email newsletter, and you can promote it on your website. You could even write a blog post about it and how it solves a particular problem. So, just this one piece of content will help support your multi-channel marketing strategy.

Content marketing is good value for your business

Finally, if you research and write your content yourself, it is an economical option and costs you nothing but your time. You’ll learn a lot from the research you do, and you’ll find more content you can use as you go.

Not everyone wants to write their own content, and if your business is very busy, it may be worth you outsourcing some of the copywriting work. This is still excellent value for money, as you’ll be asking for expert help from someone who already knows how everything works and will know about your kind of business.

Conclusion

Content marketing is crucial for small businesses. One of the biggest challenges that you face as a small business is reaching your potential customers. To create brand awareness without access to a huge budget for marketing campaigns, content marketing is your answer. Having the right kind of content marketing strategy in place to ensure that you reach your target audience, will help your business stand out from your competitors and build trust, authority, and credibility with your customers.

If you struggle to get to grips with your content marketing strategy, or need help to write your content, contact me for a free 30-minute chat to see how I can help. Have a good week!

Hard skills vs soft skills of a marketer

As someone who does all the marketing for my business, I know there are many skills that marketers need. There are hard skills, which are more the technical and analytical side, and soft skills, the more creative, collaborative side.

Marketing Skills

Hard skills

Let’s take a look at the hard skills first.

Analytics

Analytics is about finding your way around the large sets of data, to help you interpret your audience’s behaviour, look at the performance of campaigns and measure the ROI (return on yours or your customer’s investment).

When working with content creation and product marketing, it’s imperative to be able to measure what you do and whether it’s having the desired outcome and impact on your target audience. Marketers with excellent hard skills like this are very sought after in both corporate and retail companies, as well as the smaller businesses.

There are several tools you can use to measure data, such as google analytics, and if you are a social media manager, using the insights on the pages you manage is invaluable.

Content Strategy

Content Strategy

If you are into content creation, then content marketing and a strategy is a fundamental part of your job. Here are a few statistics that illustrate the importance of content creation and content marketing.

  • 47% of B2B buyers consume three to five pieces of content before engaging with brand.  Source
  • 84% of people expect brands to produce content. Source
  • 91% of B2B marketers say that they use content marketing in their strategies. Source

So, you can see that content creation is a very valued skill. Content isn’t just about making a few pretty images, it’s about the sales pitch or the caption that is written to go along with the images you curate. Some social media channels require a short and concise caption, whilst others, such as Instagram, can be longer and more detailed.

Content creation also includes things like blog posts, articles, eBooks, emails and other written materials. Effective writing skills are very sought after and not something that can be automated. It’s a very human skill and crucial if you are a marketer.

Social Media

Most businesses use social media platforms to advertise their products or services and to put their brand out there. Over the past 10 years, social media has transformed the way that people interact with brands online and also the way that marketers communicate with target audiences.

All social media platforms have measurement tools to help you get to know the audience that follows you, likes and comments on your posts and generally engages with your business and brand. A social media content strategy will include setting goals for your business, based on social media posts and campaigns.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

There are literally billions of people interacting online at any one time during the day or night. Most of us look first to the internet if we want to buy something and even look at reviews of products or services before we even press that ‘buy now’ button. But how do they find what they’re looking for? That’s where SEO comes in.

If you’re a marketer, you need to at least have a fundamental understanding of SEO, so you can be sure that your business, or your customers’ business, is found online. This includes keywords and phrases to help Google find your business, when someone types into the Google search bar.   

SEO doesn’t just apply to websites and social media, it’s also vital to ensure that anything you post is optimised for mobile users as well as desktop, tablet or iPad users. Most website hosts do this for you, but it’s always worth checking that your content looks good on a mobile as that’s where most people do their searches.

Technology

Technology

This is kind of linked to analytics, but what I’m getting at here is actual technology, such as the tools and platforms that you might use to promote your business or help you manage your business. For example, if you send out a regular email or newsletter, the General Data Protection Regulations, (GDPR) states that you must get customers to opt-in to your emails – you can’t send them anything without their express permission. And the easiest way to do this is by setting up your opt-in on a platform, such as Convertkit, MailChimp or Mailerlite, which are the three platforms I use for my clients. When you set up your subscription opt-in on these platforms, they automatically ask the right questions so you are compliant with GDPR – they also give your customers the option to unsubscribe to your newsletter or email via a button at the bottom of each email that goes out – which keeps you compliant with the rules and regulations.     

SOFT SKILLS

Soft skills are the more creative and collaborative side of marketing, probably the bit that most marketers love – well I do!

As well as creativity etc., soft skills also include many different attributes, such as honesty, leadership, a good work ethic, time management – skills that are very difficult to quantify.

Here are some of the top soft skills.

Creativity

Creativity

This includes bringing new ideas and interpretation to common problems, and how to solve them using the written word.

Flexibility

Marketing means you have to be flexible – there are always new tasks to take on and new responsibilities constantly pop up. Very often, what you started off doing a few months ago for a client, will look very different 6 months down the line. You have to constantly be on top of new ways of doing things and you often have to hit the ground running with new platforms etc.

Resourcefulness and Adaptability

A resourceful marketer uses all the tools available to her, to find the most appropriate one for each customer or business. It’s also important to be on top of the analytics to help make that informed decision.

Marketers have to learn as much as they can about target audiences, in order to be able to make decisions about the way to market a product or service. Intuition and adaptability plays a big part here and covers things like quick decision making, keeping calm under pressure or going against the norm to achieve success for your clients.

Adaptability also means that you’re able to change plans at the drop of a hat and tackle new challenges with determination and vigour.  

Collaboration

You might work for a small business or a large corporation on their marketing. Whichever it is for you, collaboration will be a big part of everything you do. You need to build good, strong relationships with your clients and with other people who work for that client or company too. For example, you might be asked to do email marketing or write a regular blog post, and your client may already have a social media manager. You will definitely need to collaborate so that the social media marketing takes into account the emails or blog posts you write – and that subject matter is consistent with the overall marketing plan or strategy. 

Leadership

Leadership

Leadership is the last point I’m going to cover, but a crucially important one. So, what is leadership? It’s about having the ability to keep a good group dynamic, be able to lead a team with compassion, and inspire your team with your business insights, experience and innovation.

It’s also about being able to assess situations and defuse anything that could get out of hand. A leader will usually drive any collaborations, adapt to new technology and lead the marketing strategy in the best way possible.

A leader will need to know the customer or target audience inside out. What they like, don’t like, making sure that everything that’s done or suggested has the customer at the heart of everything. Are their problems being solved? What makes them happy? What makes them tick?

Marketing is something that never goes away. No matter whether your business is small (or just you!), or whether you own a multi-million organisation, marketing is the key to getting your products and services in front of your target audience. It’s not something that you can wing and hope it works – it needs to be carefully planned, organised and executed with a sound strategy.

If you’d like help to build your marketing strategy, find out who your target audience is and how to reach them, but don’t know how, drop me a mail and I can help.

cindymobey@outlook.com