How to Build your Business Content Marketing Strategy
Whether trying to get new customers or just looking to boost traffic, business content marketing can be a powerful way to get your message out there.
So you're trying to start building your business content marketing strategy, but you feel like you're in the dark. You may have an idea about what you want to publish but don't know how to put that idea into words. Or perhaps you have ideas about what you want to publish but not how to implement them. In either case, the good news is that you're not alone.
Everyone's in the same place when starting a content marketing strategy, so I'm excited to show you a step-by-step approach to creating your own.
In this guide, I'll walk you through the first steps you'll need to take before starting your content marketing strategy.
The right business content marketing strategy will drive you to a more efficient, more effective and happier life. Let's get started.
Content should be at the core of your marketing
Content is the foundation of everything we do. It's the glue that holds us together as a business, a brand, and a community. As such, content drives social media traffic and engagement. It drives online conversion. It's how you attract and retain customers. It's what people remember about you. And it's the primary reason that Google loves and trusts your site.
When you think about it, content has so many benefits. It's easy to produce. You can control it. You can manage it. You can use it to build your authority, influence, credibility and expertise. And it's a critical element of most business content marketing programs. But it doesn't have to be. Content can also be a tool that gets in the way of your success.
The key is to consider the quality of content you produce and why it's valuable to your business. Your content strategy should focus on creating valuable, authentic, engaging, educational, helpful, entertaining, and inspirational content. Only then will you be able to engage your audience and convert them into loyal customers successfully.
Leading brands use content marketing
The world had changed a great deal since the days when advertising was the only means of promoting brands. The digital age has seen the creation of content that we can share online, and even social media platforms have been developed to generate word-of-mouth buzz.
This is especially true with the rise of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Brands can now create content that can be uploaded and distributed across the web. Business content marketing allows brands to reach their target audience differently.
A recent article in Forbes by Gary Vaynerchuk talks about the success of Netflix. The company offers its customers a wide range of original films, TV series, and old movies. Its brand strategy allows people to watch these films at home, online or via tablets and smartphones. This is an excellent example of how content marketing can work.
With the growth in the number of people who access the internet and smartphones, more people are exposed to the kind of content brands produce. The internet and smartphones allow companies to share information quickly and efficiently with their target audience.
According to Marketing Week, the value of UK content marketing is expected to grow by £2 billion this year. This will be due to the increasing use of technology in our everyday lives. The internet allows us to research products and services before buying them and social media enables us to discuss the latest trends with friends. Content marketing is becoming necessary in this new digital landscape, and brands must produce content that will attract customers.
Content is the present (and future) of marketing
Content is the biggest challenge facing marketers today. More than ever, brands need to engage consumers and build meaningful relationships to create and maintain loyal audiences.
We asked some of our top thinkers and practitioners to share their thoughts on how content will impact business and marketing over the coming years.
1 – The future of content
The digital landscape is changing at an unprecedented pace, and content is no exception. We've never been in a more dynamic, creative and connected world – but it's not without its challenges.
As the volume of content produced continues to rise, the value of a single piece of content will decline. But the ability to deliver, distribute and access the content at scale is multiplying – meaning we'll all be able to consume more content than ever before.
2 – Social media and the rise of social commerce
The internet is awash with content, but it's not just about sharing – social media platforms are changing how we consume content on the web and mobile devices. The increasing ubiquity of smartphones means we expect the same level of experience whether we're browsing, watching videos or shopping.
3 – The rise of data
As we rely more on digital channels to find, interact and consume information, the amount of data we generate and collect will grow exponentially. This will have a profound effect on the way marketers think and behave. Data will become increasingly important to drive decision-making and will impact all parts of our day.
4 – The growth of influencer marketing
Marketers are beginning to recognise the value of connecting with authentic voices that resonate with the audience. Influencer marketing has proven to be an effective way to connect with consumers.
Brands are starting to understand the importance of bringing the right influencers on board to increase awareness and engagement with their brand.
5 – Video will remain, king
Consumers are increasingly turning to video to share their experiences, express their opinions and express themselves. Brands must continue adapting and evolving to remain relevant and attractive to consumers. For marketers, this means producing more videos and making it easy for consumers to access and share the video.
Marketing is impossible without great content
Marketing has changed in recent years. The traditional advertising model of creating and paying for ads was replaced with digital platforms. Content became a crucial part of marketing strategy.
The most successful companies have created the best content to attract customers. They used social media to share valuable information about products and services and use online videos to create a more human experience for their customers. They understood that content is the core of their brand, a way to communicate effectively, engage with their customers and attract new clients.
We can create a great content plan only by taking time to think about the problems you face, understanding the needs of your audience and then creating content based on your knowledge and research. Content is a critical component of a company's branding strategy.
Many tools are available to help companies create and manage content, including social media, video, mobile, eCommerce, email marketing, blogs, and more.
What we need is a content plan!
If you have a content plan, you know what is coming shortly, what you want to promote, how to make it happen, where to put it and how to market it.
To create a content plan, you must answer a few questions:
- Why should my target audience read/see this content?
- What message does it communicate?
- How will I make sure they share it with others?
- Where will I place it on the web?
- How will I ensure it is attractive, valuable and easy to read/view?
With a content plan, you can create engaging content, drive traffic to your website and promote your business to increase your chances of success.
Tips for Successful Small Business Content Marketing
Understand Your Audience
Today's most significant problem most business owners face is deciding who their ideal customers are. This has been the case for years. It wasn't until the last decade that marketers finally started figuring out that they were marketing to people, not at them.
In reality, this decision is an important one. The wrong audience will give you the wrong results. And yet, there are several ways that we as business owners can get a good sense of whom we need to market to.
One way to do this is by understanding your customer's wants and needs. When it comes to content marketing, this means understanding your audience.
But first, let's look at how your customers see your brand. To understand this, think about the people that visit your site. What would you consider if you were an investor reading about your favourite business? Would you care if the business was profitable? Or would you care if it had a solid product? Or maybe you'd be interested in the financials?
Each of these topics is important. But it's only one part of the equation. And it's only one part of your audience.
So, what else should you consider? Well, what is your company's culture? What's it like inside? Who is running it? What do they like? What don't they like?
And what is their perception of your company? Do they perceive your company as friendly? Do they perceive your company as being helpful? Do they perceive your company as being trustworthy?
Now, I know you're thinking that you should make sure to ask these questions before making a big decision. However, the point isn't to ensure you know everything about your audience. The point is to understand that you need to think about your audience.
If your customers want to stay loyal, you need to understand their wants and needs. This includes their perceptions of your company.
And if you want to build trust, you need to understand why your customers trust you. And this involves understanding your company's culture. So, what does all of this mean? Well, it means that you need to start thinking about your audience as a whole. And this means you need to start thinking about the different parts of your audience.
When you're building content, you need to ask yourself questions such as these:
- What are my customer's wants and needs?
- What's my company's culture?
- How does my company fit into my customer's world?
- And most importantly, what is my company's purpose?
Business owners need to think about their customers. They need to think about how they feel about your company. And they need to think about what your company stands for.
Tell Stories
How to tell stories with business content marketing? It's a great question that can be hard to answer for new marketers. People often say they “don't know how to tell stories”. This section aims to provide some quick tips to get you thinking about the elements you should look for to tell your brand's story through content marketing effectively.
Businesses today are faced with the challenge of telling their stories to potential customers. The internet has allowed businesses to connect directly with potential customers. Customers can now research and find information on almost anything and everything.
This has created a sea change in consumer behaviour. As a result, creating the impact that was once achievable with a traditional advertising campaign has become much more challenging.
As a result, many brands are now turning to business content marketing to connect with their target audience. In this post, I'll walk through a few basic things to think about when it comes to telling your brand's story through content marketing.
Content Creation
One of the easiest ways to tell your brand's story through business content marketing is by writing articles and blog posts. Blog posts are great for telling stories because they are often written in the first person, which allows you to connect with the reader and make them feel like you're speaking directly to them. When it comes to creating articles and blog posts for your brand, here are a few tips to keep in mind:
First, you'll want to keep it simple. As mentioned above, consumers are looking for information and don't have time to read long-drawn-out pieces. Think about what would interest your target audience, and write around that topic. Be sure to include helpful information in these pieces, but make sure to avoid too much fluff.
The second thing you'll want to consider is quality. Make sure that you're publishing high-quality content. I'm not saying you need to publish an entire book, but make sure that your blog posts are well-written, engaging, and include lots of helpful information.
Social Media
Another great way to tell your brand's story through content marketing is by using social media. In the past, businesses were limited to one or two main channels. Now, however, there are many different channels to choose from.
Facebook has become a crucial part of most companies' social media strategies. It's free to use and easy to connect with your target audience. Facebook also offers a wide range of business tools, including advertisements, polls, and event management. These are great for making your brand's story come to life.
Twitter is another platform that has become extremely important for companies looking to connect with their target audience. Twitter is similar to Facebook because it's free to use and an excellent way to stay connected with customers.
The critical difference is that Twitter doesn't offer as many tools for businesses to use. Twitter is an excellent channel for businesses to communicate with their customers, and it's an effective way to build your brand's reputation.
LinkedIn is also an effective channel for businesses looking to connect with their target audience. LinkedIn has become the go-to platform for many job seekers, and it's also a good place for businesses to promote their products. It's a great way to connect with current and potential customers and is free to use.
Creating a consistent story across your marketing channels is a great way to establish yourself as a thought leader and build brand awareness. Keep the stories simple, consistent, and shareable to ensure your brand gets the exposure it deserves.
Make the Most of SEO
SEO is an excellent tool for improving the visibility of your business and increasing sales.
We know the main thing is to have relevant and exciting content for the visitors. And that's why we always focus on creating great content for the visitors, whether it's about SEO or anything else.
If you want to make the most out of your SEO strategy, then you should consider using the following methods:
1 – Create Great Content
The first step is to create high-quality content. You can use content creators or freelancers if you don't have time to do it yourself. They will help you create content quickly and efficiently.
When you create a new piece of content, make sure to write everything down. This way, you'll be able to ensure that you're not missing anything important.
Make sure that the text is long enough for people to read, and make it easy for them to read. You should try to include as many details as possible.
Also, try to add your keywords to the titles and descriptions. It would be best if you placed the keywords at the beginning of the title and description.
2 – Build Good Links
It's also important to add links to your site.
The best way to do this is to look at the backlinks of other websites.
You can use the Majestic SEO tool to find sites that are similar to yours and see which ones they have. After that, you can add links to those pages so search engines can find them.
3 – Make Use of Social Media
SEO is not only about creating content for your site. It's also about building relationships with people. You can use social media to get more traffic and improve your SEO.
There are several tools available that can help you do this. For example, you can use Hootsuite to manage your social media accounts.
4 – Engage Your Audience
Engaging your audience can help you build trust and get more sales. It's essential to get feedback from people who visit your site.
You can ask them for suggestions, use surveys to understand their needs and problems, or even give them discounts.
You can also use your blog to answer questions and solve problems. The problem is that many people use blogs for their business rather than their personal lives.
To get the most out of your business content marketing, you should try to create engaging posts and make it easy for people to find what they're looking for.
5 – Monitor the Performance of Your Site
Monitoring the performance of your website can help you find problems.
If there's something wrong with your site, you can fix it. It's also essential to make sure that your site loads fast.
Google gives more weight to sites that load fast. Also, if a visitor has a bad experience with your website, you can lose many sales.
6 – Get More Traffic from Search Engines
To get more traffic to your site, you should optimise it. First, you should ensure that you have the right keywords in the title and description. Next, you should use tags, categories, and schema markup.
Finally, you should make sure that your website is accessible, mobile-friendly, and has a responsive design.
You should also pay attention to the speed of your site. If it's too slow, your users might leave.
7 – Grow your Email List
One of the best ways to grow your email list is to promote your email newsletter. You can also use the content you've created to send emails to your subscribers.
8 – Set Up Social Media Pages
Another great way to grow your email list is to set up social media pages. You can share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and other platforms. You can also post on other pages that are related to your niche.
Connect with Influencers
The influencer marketing strategy is the newest trend in digital marketing. Influencers create content that is helpful for the audience. The audience shares the post and creates an impact. In return, the influencer gets rewarded. Influencer marketing is more than just a buzzword.
In a way, influencer marketing is a type of content marketing. But it is different from other types of content. In influencer marketing, people with a large following (influencers) share content about products, services and businesses.
The content shared by the influencer may be promotional or educational. The influencer receives money in return for sharing this content. This is also known as paid or sponsored content.
Here are some examples of influencer marketing:
- Influencers recommend a product on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. They also share their experiences with the product and other brands.
- A brand shares a video with an influencer. The influencer promotes the brand and shares it on their social media platforms.
- An influencer helps to advertise a business. They do this by writing a blog post, creating a video, and posting it on social media platforms.
In this section, we're going to discuss how you can use influencers to promote your business. We'll also discuss why you should use influencers for your business.
Why Use Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a great tool to reach out to the target audience. This strategy helps you reach out to people not interested in your services. When you use influencer marketing, you'll reach out to people who are already engaged with your brand or service. This increases your sales and conversions.
Another reason you should use influencer marketing is that it helps build relationships. When you get to know the influencers, you get to know their followers. You can reach out to these influencers for a special offer or event. You can make them aware of the event and promote it.
In addition to this, influencer marketing helps you to build credibility. When you get to know the influencers, you get to know their followers. This allows you to create trust. As a result, your audience trusts you more.
Let's look at the benefits of using influencer marketing:
- Your business can reach out to the target audience.
- Your business can attract new customers.
- Your business can gain visibility and authority.
- You can establish trust.
- Your business can build relationships.
- You can create brand awareness.
- Your business can engage your customers.
- Your business can generate leads.
- Your business can grow.
Measure and Monitor Your Results
Business content marketing is the new era in modern-day digital marketing. In this part, we will discuss different ways to measure and monitor your results of business content marketing.
Measurement and Monitoring:
Every business owner is trying to reach the top position in their respective field, and content marketing is one way to achieve the same. The only difference is that they use different tools for measuring the results. However, there are few tools that all marketers widely use for the same purpose.
Let's have a look at these tools:
Google Analytics
Gone are the days when you had to wait for weeks to get the Google analytics report. Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you to track your visitors and their behaviours. This helps you to understand how people are using your site. It is an ideal tool for measuring and monitoring your content marketing results.
With Google Analytics, you can see which pages are getting the most traffic. You can also see the referral sources from which people are coming to your website. You can even identify your target audience based on your visitors' behaviour. All this information can help you to improve your business. You can also know which pages are performing well and which ones need improvement.
Social Media Metrics
Social media is a great way to promote your business. You can reach out to many people by sharing posts and updates. You can also use social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to promote your business. Once you start promoting your business, you will have many followers interested in what you are saying.
Now, how do you know if your business content is working? How do you measure the success of your business content marketing? There is a metric known as engagement rate, which is used to measure the success of your business content marketing.
Engagement Rate:
Engagement rate is nothing but the ratio between the number of shares and likes of your posts as compared to the number of views of your posts.
For example, if you have a Facebook page with 100 likes and 1000 views, then the engagement rate of your business content is 1%.
Now, if you have a Facebook page with 100 likes and 10,000 views, your engagement rate is 1%.
This means that if you have 10,000 views of your posts, then your engagement rate will be 1%. So, you can see that it is possible to have a higher engagement rate than a lower one.
Content Sharing Sites
Content sharing sites such as Quora, Reddit and Steemit are gaining popularity among marketers. Content sharing sites are platforms where users share their ideas, thoughts and opinions on various topics. It is like a bulletin board for businesses to share their content.
This is a great way to promote your business, especially if you have something valuable to share. You can use these content-sharing sites to share your business content and promote your business. You can find several content-sharing sites to choose one according to your requirements.
Content Marketing ROI
Content marketing ROI is a metric that helps you measure your business content marketing success. This metric gives you a detailed overview of the money you have spent on your content marketing activities.
This metric allows you to compare your expenses with the revenue you make. You can calculate your content marketing ROI in two different ways.
Total Cost:
In this method, you will divide the total expense of your content marketing activities by the total number of impressions, shares, likes, comments and responses.
Net Profit:
This method will calculate your net profit and divide it by the total number of impressions, shares, likes, comments and responses.
Let's have a look at some examples:
For instance, let's say you have spent $500 on your content marketing. You have shared 1000 articles and received 500 comments, 1000 shares and 1000 likes.
Then, the Total Cost for your content marketing is $500.
The Net Profit is $500 divided by $1000, which equals 50%.
This means you have made a net profit of 50% from your content marketing activity. So, this is how you can measure and monitor the results of your business content marketing.
Any business owner needs to know the value of their business content marketing. With the help of the tools mentioned above, you can measure and monitor the results of your business content marketing.
Conclusion
The best content marketers know that content marketing isn't a one-size-fits-all strategy. Instead, content marketing is about creating the right content at the right time and place. With the right message for each audience. Content marketing works best when it's created to target specific audiences and build trust, credibility, and relevance. Follow these steps to ensure you're building your business content marketing strategy correctly.
Let's chat about your website and how you can get more people through the door. Schedule a call with one of our team members about your business content marketing.
