Are you looking to build a strong digital marketing strategy for your small business?
No matter your industry, content marketing is an essential online marketing strategy. Over 300 million people just in the U.S. alone have access to content to inform their purchase decisions.
To stand out, businesses must create and share relevant content with their target audience. The content should educate consumers about their brand, expertise, products, and services.
This post highlights five immediate content marketing steps for your small business. Whether you run a local or online business, these content marketing steps will strengthen your overall digital marketing strategy.
1. For Content Marketing You Must Understand Your Audience
Do not waste time creating content unless you understand your target audience. Are you targeting residential, commercial, or industrial customers?
Conduct proper research on your audience to determine their pain points and interests while understanding their buying habits. The findings should indicate why and when your audience buys, how they buy, and what they like.
Use the audience research findings to create engaging and helpful content that resonates with them.
Social listening tools, online surveys, and analytics tools are a few of the valuable resources for conducting audience research.
2. Topic and Keyword Research
While Google releases new algorithm updates more often than expected, keyword research has remained key to inbound marketing.
Keyword research focuses on finding and analyzing search terms that your target audience enters into search engines. The objective is to discover the topics and search terms to target. You need to find out the popularity of these search queries and their ranking difficulty.
When conducting keyword research, pay attention to:
- Relevance: Your content only ranks if it meets the searcher’s needs.
- Authority: The content only ranks if it is exceptional.
- Search volume: Number of times the keyword is searched per month across all audiences.
Learn how to use and analyze keyword research tools to find the best keywords.
3. Figure Out Your Best Content Channels and Allocate Resources
As you conduct audience research and keyword research, you get a sense of where your audience is hanging out and on which channels you already have a successful online presence. Remember, it is best to focus on what works rather than place limited resources on everything. It helps if you use analytics tools and content analysis algorithms to determine where your traffic is coming from and what content types bring a larger traffic share.
Figuring out which channels work best for your business helps you focus your resources on growing the content in that channel. For instance, your YouTube channel could bring more traffic than your Facebook page. Or maybe the blog is responsible for 95% of your total sales.
Therefore, knowing which channel works best for your business saves your money and time.
4. Create a Content Calendar
A content calendar is a written schedule of when and where you plan to publish upcoming content. The content calendar includes the forthcoming pieces, status updates, planned partnerships, and updates to the existing content.
By creating a content calendar, you spend less time wondering what content to work on and instead focus on creating the content.
To create a content calendar, start by defining your goals. Then create a template for the calendar and define which content goes to each channel on which you are active.
A content calendar also ensures you keep evergreen content at hand, so you get clicks and visits after publishing the content. You do not have to keep posting new content to your channels. You can repurpose old content, turning it into videos, podcasts, or even infographics.
5. Distribute and Market the Content
You will not get the results you hope for unless you distribute and market the content correctly. Content distribution is the process of sharing, publishing, and promoting your content. It is how you present the content to the target audience through various channels and media formats.
For content distribution and marketing, consider:
- Setting a schedule for sharing the content with subscribers
- Using email marketing to distribute content to subscribers
- Notifying influencers mentioned in your content to spread the word
You may use targeting tools to deliver the lead magnet and to direct new visitors to important pages.
Conclusion
Content marketing answers your audience’s questions and helps them build trust and relationships. In today’s age, your target customers expect high-quality and consistent content. Thus, you must develop content marketing steps for your small business.
Are you ready to create a content marketing strategy? Talk to a digital marketing expert to help craft a winning content strategy.
At SwingPoint, we are focused on helping local businesses improve their digital marketing strategies. Contact us today for more details on our approach.
SwingPointMedia for Content Marketing
SwingPointMedia is a marketing company focused on using content marketing, such as written articles, videos and podcasts, to attract their customers’ ideal audiences. This approach has proven to attract higher-quality customers while simultaneously reducing the sales cycle by as much as 70%.
SwingPointMedia serves local businesses in Southern California and can be reached by calling 760-422-5176.