All businesses strive to grow and expand their customer base. In order to do so, you need to have an intricate understanding of your target audience — who they are, what they want, and how you can provide them with a relevant solution.
There’s no better way to gain a deeper understanding of your target audience than through content marketing. Content marketing is a strategy in which you create and distribute high-quality content that appeals to your target audience.
What this means for you is that you’ll have access to a wealth of information, advice, blog posts, and news articles on the topic of your business. The more you know about your target audience, the better prepared you’ll be to communicate with them.
1. Create a Content Strategy
Creating a content strategy is essential for the growth of your small business. A content strategy is about determining what type of content you’ll create, and why. You should know who your ideal audience is, what their pain points are, and how you can solve them.
Creating a content strategy is an iterative process, so you’ll want to start with a strategy workshop. During a strategy workshop, you’ll meet with your team and brainstorm content ideas. You’ll break down your business into topics that are relevant to your target audience, and brainstorm blog posts, videos, and social media content.
Once you’ve fleshed out a few ideas, you’ll meet with your editorial team and determine which of your ideas make the cut.
2. Always Have an Editorial Calendar
Once you’ve come up with a few content ideas, you’ll want to create a editorial calendar. An editorial calendar is a list of your planned blog posts, videos, and social media posts. You should have this calendar for a few reasons.
Firstly, it keeps you on track with your content strategy. You’re not going to suddenly think of great new ideas for blog posts, you need to be planning out your strategy and sticking to it.
Secondly, it allows you to see the types of content you should be creating over the next few months, and what month you should be focusing on.
Finally, it keeps your team on track with their content production. There’s no point in having an editorial calendar if no one is following it.
3. Use Proven Content Marketing Strategies
In order to use content marketing effectively, you must first understand how it works. Content marketing is an approach that combines online and offline marketing strategies. Essentially, you’re creating content, then distributing it through various channels, and using a combination of online and offline strategies.
The content marketing strategies that you should be using include may include any or all of the following:
Blogging. Content marketing is all about creating, curating and sharing content. If you don’t have a blog or have been operating on the ‘wait and see’ approach, you need to get blogging. You can start a blog on your website and focus on a niche.
Alternatively, you can create a blog on a different platform, like Medium or WordPress, that focuses on your industry. Reading – Reading and analyzing your competitor’s content is a great way to come up with ideas for blog posts and push your site further up the search engine results.
Video Marketing. Video is one of the most popular forms of content, and it’s also one of the most effective. When you create video content, you create an asset that your target audience can consume whenever they want. They can curate their video content library with video from all different sources, or, put simply, they can watch your videos whenever they find them interesting.
Social Media. Social media is a dominant force in the marketing world, and for good reason. You can push out your content to your target audience, and you can also see what types of content your audience is interested in.
4. Measure the Results of Your Strategy
In order to measure the results of your content strategy, you should be tracking your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). KPIs are numbers that you can use to evaluate the success of your content strategy. Some KPIs that you’ll want to be tracking include:
Traffic to your site – The more visitors you have to your site, the more likely they are to become customers. If you’re not tracking your traffic, you don’t know where they’re coming from. The more visitors you have to your site, the more likely they are to become customers. If you’re not tracking your traffic, you don’t know where they’re coming from.
Click-through rate (CTR) – The higher your CTR, the more clicks you’re getting on your content. – The higher your CTR, the more clicks you’re getting on your content.
Conversions – You’ll want to track the number of signups from your blog posts that are converting to customers. – You’ll want to track the number of signups from your blog posts that are converting to customers.
Revenue – The amount of money you’ve generated as a result of your content marketing strategy is obviously the best way to gauge the success of your content strategy.
Time spent on your content – The more time your audience spends consuming your content, the more likely they are to become customers.
Customer satisfaction – The happier your customers are, the more likely they are to continue to be customers of your business.
5. Always Be Updating and Reaching Out
The last thing you need to remember about using content marketing to grow your small business is that you need to be updating and reaching out. Content marketing is a long-term strategy that continues to build upon itself over time.
You’re going to create new content on a consistent basis. You’re also going to reach out to your existing customers, and you’re going to be creating a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy. CRM is all about building a relationship with your customers.
You need to know who your current customers are, what they want, and what they’re interested in. You can’t keep creating content and reaching out to your existing customers unless you know who they are.
There’s no better way to grow your small business using content marketing than by really understanding how content marketing works and having a clear strategy for using it in your business.
