Here’s what’s great about online marketing for a small business owner: you don’t have to have a large budget, a lot of experience, or even any clue where to start to be successful. Because it is an ever-changing landscape, though, it’s important to create a path, a journey you want your customers to follow to get to know your brand, your products or service, and your benefits. Where do you start to make that happen? It’s all about your content strategy.
What Is Your Strategy?
A content strategy is a plan you create that lays out the type of content you plan to use to bring customers to your business. That sounds simple, but it’s a bit more in-depth. The right team and content writer can help you to build each piece of content.
Here’s how it all starts:
Identify Your Brand Identity
As a small business, it is very important to have an established brand identity. What do you want customers to recognize and know you for as soon as they see your logo or hear your name? A brand identity should incorporate what helps you to stand out from the competitors, but also what’s valuable to your organization. We all know Apple is all about technology but recognize that they are also known as a positive, uplifting company. What’s your brand identity?
Determine Which Types of Content Marketing Are Ideal for Your Audience
You know who your ideal customer is. This is the person most likely to buy your product or service. Identify them based on their demographics, your current customer base, and the marketing research you do. Then, learn where that audience is. Millennials love to use social media sites like Twitter, while Generation X is a Facebook-based user, for example.
Now, consider the wide range of content marketing types available. Which of these will help you reach your audience?
- Blog posts – A blog offers a number of key opportunities. It helps your website rank well in the search engines. It also works as the hub for your content that you’ll use for your business’s social media posts.
- Infographics – Designed to be eye-catching, infographics can take complex topics and break them down into bite-sized pieces. This can work to drive home a point quickly, helping your audience to get just enough information to respond to you.
- Videos – Video production is one of the fastest growing aspects of online marketing today. Are you using short videos to help introduce your company? You could be using video to communicate a product’s function or to show what type of work you do.
- Podcasts – If you have a topic that warrants more information, and you want the reader to really get in-depth with it, podcasts can be the route to take. You can have a content writer write the script for your video and then host a weekly podcast to share the insight and knowledge with your listeners. This is also great content to provide to your email list.
- Social media – Social is where people are, where they talk about your company and how they get information to solve their problems. Work with your content marketing writer to create informative, interesting, and eye-catching content that you use on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Now What – Building Content?
All of these tools work together to help you to bring your ideal customer to your website. Once you identify which of these pieces of content are important to your business, work with a writer to create them. Establish social media pages that work as your way to engage customers. Social media is the hub – where you will communicate with your audience, how you will get people to your website, and where you’ll share all of your content.
It’s important to know that, worldwide, there are 4.388 billion people using the internet. There are 3.484 billion people using social media as well, according to SmartInsights. This is where you need to be if you want to reach a large audience or a much smaller, local group of customers. With the right content marketing strategy, built in these areas, you can achieve that.
Where Do You Get Started?
There’s a great deal of content to write. Don’t get overwhelmed just yet. Instead, focus on finding your ideal content writer who’s ready to help you to develop each piece so you can build your success online.
Sandy B is a full-time, professional freelance writer and copywriter with more than 10 years of online experience. She is also a published author of seven, top-reviewed, in-print books on Amazon. These focus on financial topics such as retirement planning, bankruptcy, business finance, estate planning, and personal credit health as well as organic gardening and clean living. She’s ghostwritten content for hundreds of clients on topics ranging from health to finance, business services, online and offline marketing and much more.
