Content marketing gives small businesses a chance to become publishers of news and content, allowing them a better success rate when competing with their larger counterparts. Any business can more affordably publish and curate content. However, many businesses have a hard time developing the mindset to create a consistent flow of new, interesting information.
While spying on what your competition is doing is an effective tool, identifying your ideal customer and supplying them with content that speaks directly to them and helps to solve their challenges can make for a much more successful content marketing campaign.
By adding a real value to your content, you avoid using the hit-and-miss approach that leads to creating content that is only read by a few people and in turn, you become the go-to person for their business.
There are a few things you need to do to achieve this.
Check Out Our 7 Steps to Creating a Stellar Content Marketing Plan:
1. Identify With Your Ideal Customers
This is a key in order to create an effective roadmap for your content marketing strategy. Where do your customers hang out in real life and online? What forums and websites do they visit? What challenges do they face and what kind of content can you create that will help them overcome these challenges?
Buyers are already overwhelmed by the amount of content that businesses generate, so it is imperative to focus on quality instead of quantity.
2. What Content Already Exists?
Don’t waste your marketing budgets on recreating content that already exists. Convert existing content into quality content that is well-thought-out in order to be well-received, hence leading to more conversions. There are undoubtedly presentations, proposals, brochures and action plans that can be adapted for content marketing purposes.
3. Take a Content Inventory
When creating an inventory of content, you might find that there’s a lot of information available on a particular number of products and services, but there are large gaps when it comes to other products or services that your company offers. Identifying these gaps can help to determine what you need to write about.
4. Content Audit
Replace or remove outdated content from your website, brochures, presentations and action plans. Few businesses visit their own website on a regular basis and often fail to identify outdated information. A content audit will show you where you need to remove and replace old legacy content.
5. Quality Content
If you’re working with content that’s more than five years old, you might find that it contains good information but the tone, style and focus don’t hit the mark. Improving and tweaking existing content can stretch your marketing budget and make your content more effective.
6. Creative Use of Content
Use content in new and different ways – transform case studies into downloadable Whitepapers, turn internal company news into blog posts, repurpose PowerPoint presentations by converting them into SlideShare presentations and post photos from your conferences and functions to Pinterest.
Make your content strategy as far-reaching and effective as possible using innovative ways to take content and turn it into multimedia items, news items or any type of content that your target audience would want to consume.
7. Curate Content
Most small businesses can’t spend too much time on creating quality content. Curating content that is meaningful in an organized, valuable way can be a valuable part of any successful content marketing strategy.
Content Marketing Mix …
According to the experts, a best-in-class content marketing mix should consist of:
- 65% original content (created by your business)
- 25% curated content
- 10% syndicated content
Sharing a marketing mix of different sources of high value content can help you to leverage your resources more efficiently, while better engaging your target audience.
If you would like to talk with us about how we can help you set up a stellar content marketing plan, get in touch.
