HIGHLY PROFITABLE MARKETING STRATEGY FOR SMALL BUSINESS: 2 OF 6

Content marketing is at the center of most marketing strategies for small businesses. But what exactly is it and why do you need it?

Content marketing is the process of creating and publishing quality content that is relevant to your target audience and provides some time of value for readers or viewers. The key to developing great content marketing is knowing what your audience cares about most, including their greatest challenges, needs, and desires. Unlike some paid marketing strategies for small businesses, content marketing focuses on the long-term.

You can use quality content to improve your SEO and it’s also beneficial if you want to build trust with your audience, promote a positive brand image, and foster powerful relationships with your leads and customers. In the end, content marketing provides an attractive return on investment for any brand because you can continue to share and promote content long after the original piece is published.

Before you get started with your content marketing, you’ll need to make sure that you have clearly defined your audience and gathered information about them. Creating buyer personas is a great way to ensure that your audience is at the center of all your content marketing efforts. Buyer personas are generalized profiles of your target buyers, containing data like demographics, challenges, likes and preferences, buying behaviors, and other information that’s vital to getting to know your customer.

Once you’ve gotten to know your buyers well, it’s time to brainstorm some possible content topics. Start with your audience’s greatest challenges. What questions do customers often ask? What do consumers need to know more about before making a purchasing decision? This is a great starting point for developing topics for a wide range of content from blogs and social media posts to infographics and ebooks.

Different topics and content types work better for different parts of the funnel. For example, a video that gives an overview of the person’s greatest challenge works well during the awareness stage when the consumer is first becoming aware of the problem. 

However, a case study might work better to help those who are ready to make a purchase better understand how your brand can benefit them. Creating and publishing quality content on a consistent basis is not easy. It requires time and resources to ensure that your content is not only relevant and valuable but of the same high quality that your products and services are.

If you don’t have the resources in-house to sustain a consistent content calendar, it may be time to call in the experts. For example, hiring an agency for blogging services is a great way to ensure that you’re consistently putting out new content that attracts and engages your target buyers.