6 Must Know Steps of a Content Marketing Strategy!

Social media on its own isn't very effective without a second marketing tactic to back it up. If you don't have a consistent amount of relevant, unique, interesting and useful content to share on your social media profiles, you are missing the boat, and very likely to revert to a stream of sales messages, which is sure to turn off your social followers. This is where content marketing comes in.

So what is content marketing: "It is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

The following are 6 Steps to Start Building Your Small Business’ Content Marketing Strategy:

1. Research what makes you stand out: In business, your uniqueness is a major selling point, if not THE major selling point. What do you offer people that no one else does? Your stand-out factor doesn’t have to be wildly different from your competitors, either. You even can differentiate based on one little detail – the important thing is to figure out what that is. Finding your brand differentiate at the outset of your content strategy will similarly inform your own content direction and topic areas.

2. Who are you helping and Who is Your Audience: One of the best, and simplest tidbits of information is; “if your content is for everybody, it’s for nobody.” It makes sense. If you’re marketing automotive products, you don’t need to be writing content for people who are interested in buying a toothbrush, right? Ask yourself, “what problem does my product/service solve?” and “who are the people most likely to need this solution?” If you have any existing customer demographic data, pull that up and apply it as well, segmenting customer profiles if necessary. Once you have an idea of who your content is aimed at, you’ll have a better idea of how that content should be centered. Example: “[INSERT YOUR BRAND] creates content to help and inform [INSERT DEMOGRAPHIC] so they can [INSERT ACTION] better.”

3. Find Fledgling SEO Opportunities: After you pinpoint who you will be helping with your content, you can find the initial SEO opportunities that will bring in your ideal buyer: Keywords Not just any keywords, however. You need to hit a sweet spot: Keywords that aren’t difficult to rank for, that are relevant to your brand, and for which your ideal buyer is actively searching.

4. Set Goals and Draft Your Project: Once you’ve got the basics down, you’ll want to set goals for your campaign. Small businesses need to be realistic about what they can and cannot do based on the resources that they have and work within those parameters. This includes your content strategy’s overall objective, the time frame in which you’ll complete your action items, how much time, money, and resources you’re willing to invest in the strategy, and how much room you have for flexibility once the strategy gets going.

5. Understand the Worth of High-Quality Content: Setting your content standards early on in your strategy is essential for consistency. You have to uphold high-quality standards to see the following: Increased SEO rankings, Higher customer engagement with your brand (engagement = conversions = leads), Stronger online authority and Better brand awareness/visibility. It’s that simple.

6. Set Up an Editorial Calendar: The final step for starting your own small business content strategy is setting up your editorial calendar. An editorial calendar sounds official and kind of scary, but it’s a great tool that can help each piece of your content marketing come together.

After you begin your content strategy, remember to leave wiggle room for agile changes to your strategy. Rarely do things work out the first time, and the mark of a successful person isn’t measured by how often they avoid making mistakes, but rather how well they adapt to those mistakes, as well as how they can turn those mistakes into situations that can be capitalized on.

If you need help implementing your content strategy email me@rahabmbise.com