In today’s podcast, James Scherer from Strategy of Codeless and Stephen Halasnik from Financing Solutions discuss how small business owners can build a winning content strategy from scratch in order to drive traffic, inbound leads, and sales. Content marketing strategy is an integral part of business growth and development. Therefore, every small business owner should strive to create a working content strategy that generates leads and makes conversions.
Summary
Building a Winning Content Strategy From Scratch
Before the digital era, when there was no content strategy, promoting a business was often difficult, especially for small business owners. This was because small business owners had little financial flexibility to compete with the then available means effectively. Investing in traditional marketing such as print, broadcast, direct mail, phone, and more to drive brand awareness was just pretty expensive.
But today, there is a wave of optimism and hope. The evolution of the internet has introduced an exciting, inexpensive means of marketing that helps small businesses reach their target audience. In this internet age, you can carve out a place for your business in the marketing niche, with the right and winning content strategy.
What Is Content Marketing Strategy?
Content marketing strategy is a term that every small business owner in this 21st century must be conversant with.
It is essentially setting up an intentional plan to create, publish, and promote optimized content of any kind, including podcasts, videos, articles, and more that drive traffic, inbound leads, and sales. The idea behind content strategy is to develop a marketing plan that helps you achieve your business goal. In addition, an effective content strategy will resonate with your audience at every stage of the funnel and keep them engaged even after a purchase.
Having a content plan will help you organize your implementation properly. For example, you can work on a monthly or quarterly content plan. If you decide to work on a quarterly basis, you should consider taking a deep dive every month to ensure that what you have invested has worked in order to double down on it. Otherwise, you should take a more practical approach.
Why Do You Need a Marketing Content Strategy?
To succeed in the content marketing journey, you need a comprehensive and working strategy. Creating a marketing content strategy will help in your effort to attract and engage a clearly defined audience which will, in turn, promote profitable customer action.
Unfortortuanly, despite the importance of mapping out a content plan, research has shown that 40% of businesses don’t have a documented strategy. As a result, much content failed to achieve its desired outcome. However, for you to develop a robust content marketing strategy that will drive your small business, You will set specific goals, success metrics, and processes for continuous improvement. You should also consider putting in place a documented strategy.
How to Create a Winning Content Marketing Strategy
Whether you’re just starting your content marketing effort, knowing the most effective approach to develop creative and engaging content for your prospect and customers can be pretty challenging.
If you have trouble strategizing for your marketing content and need some guidelines on how to develop your plan, below are some fresh ideas you would want to consider:
Develop a content marketing mission statement
An excellent way to set off your content marketing journey is to have a content marketing mission statement. This gives you an overall view of what you intend to achieve while creating your content and keeps you track. A content marketing mission statement outlines the following:
- Your target audience
- The type of content you will use to reach them
- The platform you will use to reach them, and more
Establish your KPIs
Make your content marketing strategy specific and measurable by setting Key Performance Indicators (KPI). With your KPI in place, you will know when you have achieved your target goals by using the critical metrics for measuring your content marketing effectiveness.
What are the most important metrics to track? Revenue, sales, traffic, SEO, and more are salient factors to focus on during performance evaluation. In addition, track your expenses on various online marketing campaigns and keep an eye on the cost of acquiring leads and making conversions.
Know your Audience
For you to have a successful marketing strategy, you will need to define who your audience is so you can create content that reaches and resonates with them.
Start by collecting demographics on your visitors and email subscribers, as this will help give you the data you need on your audience. Next, collect feedback from current customers to get insights into how they feel about the content you are currently producing. And finally, create buyer personas, also known as customer avatars, which describe your ideal customers so that you can target content better.
What channel brings the best result
Knowing where your audience hangs out the most will help you build a successful online presence. It’s best to focus on the platform you will easily reach your target audience and pitch your tenth there. This will help you build a content strategy that is fruitful and result-oriented.
You can consider using Google Analytics to see the leading digital platform where your content generates more traffic so you can make smarter decisions.
Create a content calendar
Having a content calendar will help you know exactly when you want to publish your content on any platform you use. Getting all content scheduled is essential as it helps you produce your content on time.
Create content that is SEO-friendly
Before you can start ranking on the Search Engine Result Page(SERP), you need to understand the foundational variables search engines look out for when indexing content. For example, using the appropriate keywords, headings, links, and more are some of the factors that can impact your ranking on SERP.
Evaluate your content performance
Most importantly, it is proper to assess the overall success of your content marketing strategy to know where you have done and where you need to improve. In other words, you need to return to the KPIs you set at the beginning of your content strategy plan to see whether you’re hitting your target.
Bottom line: No small business owners can afford to miss out on the many opportunities in marketing content strategy. When you adequately plan your content efforts, it yields maximum results.
Learn More About Our Guest
James Scherer is the VP of Strategy of Codeless, a content marketing agency working with unicorns like monday.com to drive growth through content at a huge scale. Through his work with Codeless, he’s helped companies like monday.com, AdEspresso, ActiveCampaign, Chargify, Freshworks, and dozens of other brands dominate their page one positions through content and backlink profiles.
Learn About Financing Solutions
Financing Solutions provides an easy-to-setup unsecured business line of credit to small businesses. The small business financing product is a great cash backup plan that costs nothing to set up, nothing until used, and is inexpensive when needed. Financing Solutions is rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and 5 stars by the BBB/Google Reviews.
Unlike a traditional business bank loan, our business credit line requires no collateral or personal guarantee (except in the cases of fraud) making it an excellent alternative business financing option. Small businesses often used their line of credit for short-term expenses, working capital, to make payroll, or for a business investment especially when business cash flow is temporarily down.
Get a free, no-obligation business line of credit quote by filling out our simple 2- minute business line of credit application here.
Remember: The time to set up a credit line is when you don’t need it.
