97% of marketers claim that their business experiences some form of success from content marketing. Over 6 in 10 believe that this digital marketing method brings great value. When done right, content marketing can help connect your brand with your target audience. It can help grow both your business revenues and brand.
If you want to make the most of content marketing, it is important to implement the right strategies. Here are 9 effective content marketing strategies you can leverage to grow your small business.
1. Study Your Target Audience
An effective content marketing strategy needs a very specific, targeted audience. Only such knowledge can help you create relevant content that your audience will want to read or view.
An important reason for studying your audience is to know the channels or platforms where you will be publishing your content. The knowledge will also enable you to create the right content formats.
- Analyze your current customer base
- Check the type of questions and concerns they raise
- Find out how they found your business and what their interests are
- Create a list of points that define the audience you want to target
- Gather demographic data from your social media channels
- Use Google Analytics to gain insights into your customer base’s online activity
The more you know about your target audience, the simpler and more productive the content creation process will become.
You must address the following points when doing your research:
- Gathering geographic information
- Gathering demographic information
- Gathering psychological information
- Defining your own business
- Get a granular idea of the issues or concerns you address
- Create buyer personas
2. Set Measurable Goals
If you are serious about creating a successful content marketing strategy, make sure to set a clear set of goals. This can help create a more meaningful strategy. Goals help better understand your content marketing strategy’s success. They also make it easier to find ways to improve the strategy’s performance.
Examples of content marketing goals include:
- Achieving measurable search rankings
- Growing sales by a specific amount or percentage
- Increasing email subscription by a specific number
- Increasing web traffic by a specific number
3. Create Different Types of Content
Written textual content is the starting point for any content strategy. Besides blog posts and articles, you should create other content forms as well. Remember, textual content is effective when it is well-written, useful, and follows these best practices:
- Create blog posts and articles on industry-related topics
- Create high-quality and informative content
- Target the most relevant, researched keywords
- Create a content calendar & publish regularly
- Create easy-to-read content
- Always create evergreen content
- Make sure to include visuals in your post
- Share your content on social media platforms
The best content presents your audience with new, relevant information. It helps your customers in one way or the other. The right content will also entertain your audience.
Some of the different content formats you should create include:
Infographics
Adding complex information to articles can often make things difficult to read and understand. On the other hand, infographics can help make facts and figures easier to digest. Besides, infographics have greater visual appeal and are more sharable.
- It is recommended to cite references in your infographics
- Make sure to create a searchable title containing relevant keywords
- Include your company name and website URL
Infographics provide a simple way to create branding content for small businesses. Here is an example of how infographics look like:
Current News Content
Creating content on current events is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website. Such content cannot be a part of your content calendar because you cannot plan it in advance. Anytime you come across an industry event that is in the news or trending on social media, find ways to create content around it.
Interactive content
An important purpose behind creating content is to engage your potential customers. While you strive to include CTAs in all your content, it is not the best way to get visitors to spend more time on your webpages. This is where interactive content comes into the picture.
- Create a fair amount of content that requires action
- For example, adding a project estimate calculator on your website can provide a pretty good idea of what they want and need
4. Optimize Content for Mobile
You should optimize your content for mobile across all marketing channels. This is especially more relevant for email marketing. When you have responsive website and content, you can expect to improve user experience (UX) and conversion rates.
Mobile optimization is important because there are already around 7.50 billion mobile users worldwide. Mobile optimization will continue to be a big content marketing strategy due to the growing mobile user base and the need for mobile-friendly content.
5. Personalize Content
Even in a highly competitive marketplace, creating personalized content such as emails can make your target audience feel seen and heard. It is further recommended to create planned user journeys.
Based on the user’s position in the sales funnel, you can:
- Offer discounts
- Send out reminders for abandoned carts
- Welcome back visitors returning after a long time
Customer expectations from brands have always continued to grow and evolve. Besides creating personalized content, it is important to find new ways to demonstrate your value propositions to them.
6. Build a Social Media Presence
As a small business, you should already have a presence on the right social media platforms. Analyze your customer data to find out where they are spending most of their time online. Build your social media presence on the right platforms and start promoting your content.
- Check the social media channels targeted by your competition
- Review Google Analytics to gain insights into your customers and prospects’ online behavior
- Publish your content on the selected channels
- Leverage social media to help and engage your audience with information, not just to sell your products
- Publish content including helpful tips, DIY guides, or valuable ideas to keep your target audience interested
7. Share User-Generated Content
You can also leverage relevant content generated by your customers to boost your content marketing efforts.
- Whenever customers tag your brand in their stories or posts, share the content
- Run periodic giveaways to generate new content. These giveaways can offer bonus entries for submitting specific types of content.
When you share user-generated content, they help with social proofing and trust-building. Such content shows real users utilizing and interacting with your products and brand. Additionally, you will have access to content that you didn’t have to produce.
8. Repurpose Content
When your content marketing strategy starts driving results, repurpose and publish your more popular content in other formats.
- If you find an article or blog post performing well, create videos, graphics, or another format around the topic and content
- You can take a new angle around a topic to repurpose the content
- For example, you can repurpose a popular blog post to create an infographic or transform a how-to guide into a video format
Whatever you do, the repurposed content must provide value to your audience. This ‘value’ can also mean simplifying the content or making it more fun to look at.
9. Create & Follow a Content Calendar
A successful content marketing strategy requires both high-quality content creation and consistency. You will need a clear plan to keep posting new content across different channels. A content marketing calendar can be at the center of this plan. It will guide you on the exact content to be published and when to publish it.
It is recommended to create a content calendar for an entire calendar month. It should detail the different content pieces to be posted and the different channels targeted.So, these are some of the most important content marketing strategies to help you succeed with an important aspect of your digital marketing efforts. For more guidance, it is recommended to get in touch with the Clear Imaging, Inc. team at (800) 380-6942. You can also write to us and we will get back to you at the earliest.
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