A Content Marketing Strategy – Why Your Small Business Needs One.
With audiences becoming more and more oblivious to disruption tactics from advertisers, developing a Content marketing strategy is becoming increasingly important to businesses.
What is a Content Marketing Strategy?
More and more buyers venture online to research products and services before making the final decision to purchase. By having a solid content marketing strategy in place and creating and publishing original, high quality content, your business will be positioned to help the buyer move through the buying cycle, answering common questions, overcoming objections and providing the buyer with the social proof needed to become a business partner.
What Effect can content Marketing Strategy have on your Business?
- Raises Your Profile
By producing top quality content that stimulates your audience, you increase the chances of your content being shared across the internet. The more times the content is shared, the more links will be attributed to your content – thus raising your profile both in the eyes of the search engines and potential customers.
- Humanizes your Brand
Sharing thoughts and ideas about your business and brand for all to see changes the whole dynamic of the business relationship. The reader becomes a part of something bigger. They become a member of a community. If we work on the principle that people buy people first and that businesses and opportunities are built by people, then having a community of readers can only be good for business.
- Positioning
Not all businesses have a content marketing strategy in place. By being one of the first to really take a tactical approach to how, where and what content you publish, you can command the prime spots where your audience is likely to be and begin building a community before others have the chance to compete.
In order to position yourself as the leader in your niche and develop a winning content marketing strategy take a look at are my 6 tips below:
1. Commit to it: A content marketing campaign will require an investment of time and or money. You need to be fully committed to producing fresh and relevant content on a regular basis .
2. Set a Schedule: Create an editorial calendar for your content and stick to it. Let your community know when you will be publishing, that way you will be held accountable.
3. Promotion rules: Just creating the content is not good enough. When you produce content it needs to be shared and promoted to all the places where your audience will find it. Use Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus to help spread the message.
4. Diversify your content: How does your audience consume information? Is it through videos, eBooks, special reports, blog posts or audio forums? Content marketing gives you the opportunity to publish in multiple formats and get in front of more and more customers. So utilise each and every one.
5. Make it link worthy: I will say it again, at the heart of any good content marketing strategy is quality content. The higher the standard of the content the more chance you have of gaining backlinks and social proof raising the profile of your brand. Produce content that can provide value tomorrow and for years to come.
6. Test and Track: The success of any strategy comes down to the ability of testing, tracking and the tweaking the results. If something is not producing the results you expect then tweak it slightly and try again. There is little point distributing content that looks good to you but is not valued by your target audience.
Content marketing is here to stay – the sooner you can get your small business on board the better. Results won’t happen overnight but if you persist and produce high quality content your brand awareness will increase and you will slowly and surely build an engaged community for your business.
About
James Debono is a small business owner and Internet entrepreneur. James dedicates his time to helping other small business owners leverage the power of the Internet to drive business growth and positive change. Click here Join James Debono on Google+
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Hi James,
Great insight on a content marketing strategy – building your brand is so crucial and quality content is the only way to go.
Thanks for sharing!
Christine Brady recently posted..An Instant Audience
Hi Christine,
Content marketing is definitely going to play a pivotal role in marketing your business moving forward.
Thanks for your comment,
James