Remember running a lemonade stand as a kid? You wake up on a sunny summer day, with hours of glorious childhood nothing-to-do-ness stretching out ahead of you. Seeing clear skies and bright sun, you decide: Today’s the day I become a millionaire by selling lemonade. You talk a sibling or friend into being your business partner for the day and cajole a parent into buying disposable cups and lemonade powder. Then, out come the poster boards and Sharpies—your advertising plan. An hour later, you set up a table near the busiest neighborhood intersection you can find. There you sit (and shout and wave your sign), eager to convince neighbors that they can’t face the summer heat without a fifty-cent cup of watery, lukewarm lemonade. Just like that, you are in business. Your entrepreneurial spirit is born.
Back then, your content marketing strategy was simple: Sharpies on a posterboard and a sloppy sign waved around by kids with friendly smiles. If business slowed, you might take things to the next level, coordinating a dance routine or clever chant with your sibling-slash-business-partner to convince busy drivers to stop. Wouldn’t it be nice if content marketing for your grown-up business ventures were that simple? No planning, minimal strategy–just summer heat, an active intersection, a poster, and a sunny smile.
But marketing for your small business involves a bit more strategy and forethought. If you’re a small business looking to get your message heard above the clamor of a loud online world, you need a content marketing strategy. You need to position your marketing content in the right intersections, the places where it encounters potential customers thirsty for the very services and products you provide. You may also need a copywriting agency to help you produce consistent, excellent content that supports your goals. You need proven strategies to take your content marketing to the next level.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing helps you introduce yourself to potential customers. You must offer valuable content that meets their needs, content that builds trust and relationships. That content may be written in the form of blogs, e-books, ads, testimonials, or social media posts. It could also take the form of video content or a podcast.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of spinning our wheels, producing lackluster content solely for the sake of producing—telling ourselves that activity equals productivity. But producing fluff wastes customers’ time–and yours. Your potential customers are struggling with information overload just as much as you are, and they don’t want to consume content that doesn’t add real value to their lives.
As you brainstorm a strategy for producing content that supports your business goals, here are some questions to consider:
- What questions do my customers have that our business can help answer?
- What would my customers be excited to learn more about?
- What unique expertise or perspectives can our business share with the world?
- In what area could we establish ourselves as a trusted authority?
Answering questions like these will help you generate a plan for the kind of content you can create: content that has genuine value. Content that potential customers are willing to spend time consuming. Content that could eventually convert a curious passerby into a satisfied customer.
What’s Your Process?
You can have the best marketing ideas in the world, but until you develop a realistic process for implementing those ideas day after day, your ideas will remain just that: ideas. A successful content marketing strategy needs three essential qualities:
- A successful content marketing strategy must be consistent, conveying the same message at regular intervals.
- A successful content marketing strategy must be quantifiable, so you can evaluate how it’s going and whether it’s worth the continued investment of time and resources.
- A successful content marketing strategy must be replicable, so you don’t have to constantly reinvent the marketing wheel. You can produce on-brand content time and again to support your ongoing goals.
A successful content marketing strategy takes the lemons and sugar of your ideas and turns them into lemonade.
Where Do You Deliver Your Content?
Just as your nine-year-old self knew it was important to set up the lemonade stand near a high-traffic intersection of the neighborhood, it’s important to deliver your marketing content in places where it will be visible and effective. (Ahem. Today’s social-media-savvy nine-year-olds also know that if business gets slow, they can ask Mom to post a come-buy-lemonade-from-cute-kids pic to the neighborhood’s Facebook page.)
Before you can convert a lead into a customer, the lead needs to encounter you and your business somewhere. You need the right virtual intersection. Where do your potential customers spend their time online, and how can you meet them there? Maybe they first encounter your business through an ebook, a Facebook ad, an Instagram graphic, an informative blog post on your website, or a guest post on another site–or maybe it happens through some combination of those options.
In deciding where to deliver your content, ask yourself:
- Who is my target customer, and what does he or she need?
- Where does my customer spend their time online?
- Where does my customer go to find answers to their questions?
- Where does my customer look for entertainment?
Questions like these can help you develop a target persona: a description of your typical customer (or customers). The more you understand about the people you’re serving–what they need, what they like, where they spend time, what sources they trust–the more equipped you’ll be to speak their language and show them how you can meet their needs. Developing a target persona also helps you understand where they typically consume content so you can identify the most effective distribution channels for your material.
If your target persona is a Baby Boomer, you’re probably not going to find them on TikTok, but you may find them scrolling Facebook. If your customers are young professionals, they probably spend time on Instagram and LinkedIn. Use what you know about your audience to decide how and where to introduce yourself through your content. Find the intersections they regularly drive through and meet them there.
Who’s Going to Produce Your Content?
Think of your content marketing materials as an informal job interview, your first chance to make a good impression—not on a future boss, but on a potential customer. Just as you wouldn’t show up to an interview in sweatpants—and even your nine-year-old self knew to spend a little extra time using a hairbrush on lemonade-stand days—so you want to put your best foot forward in whatever content you share with the world. Your blog posts should be well-written and worth the time it takes to read them. Your social media graphics should be appealing and effective.
But chances are, you’re a business person, not a writer or graphic designer–and even if you have some great writers and designers working in your organization, they may not have the time to consistently produce excellent marketing content on top of their other responsibilities. If you’re a small business, you know that time is a valuable resource, and successful content marketing takes time—time you and your team may not have to spare. That’s why many small businesses outsource content creation to content marketing companies.
Trusting another company with your content marketing is no small thing, and you may prefer to handle marketing yourself. If you’re interested in learning how to start your own content marketing business, first steps will include finding your niche, defining your target audience, cultivating your brand, and developing an overall marketing plan.
Marketing requires a significant investment of time and energy, so you may want to partner with a reliable content marketing firm to help execute your marketing plan. The right company can help you expand your reach and achieve your marketing goals without getting distracted from doing what you do best: running your business.
When choosing the marketing company that’s right for you, look for a company that:
- Clearly states their core values
- Comes recommended by satisfied clients
- Takes the time to understand your business: your vision, goals, target persona, brand, and voice
- Communicates with you clearly and regularly
- Produces excellent content consistently
Content marketing is a way to introduce your business to more people who need what you provide. Taking the time to map out a content marketing strategy will ensure that your business prospers and expands. If your nine-year-old self could see you now, they’d be proud… you might even get a free glass of lemonade.
