Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that aims to acquire a clearly defined audience. This marketing technique is the process of developing and publishing valuable, relevant, and consistent content. When executed correctly, the return on investment for content marketing can be substantial from inspiring customer action to propelling business profits.

What are the top tips for content marketing?

Create engaging content

The overarching pillar of any successful content marketing strategy is ensuring that the content promoted is of high quality. One of the essential pieces of advice is to keep it simple. The content you publish needs to be clear and concise. Above all else, however, you must ensure that it is relevant to what your target audience requires. If your content does not correspond to their needs, the likelihood is that it won’t propel traffic onto your sites. Ultimately, remember to keep it engaging yet simple to allow for an easy, informative, and entertaining read.  

Use analytics to track your performance and to enhance your content marketing strategy

Your content marketing strategy must establish a specific direction for your content. Content does not fall under one umbrella. The marketing framework, which describes the decision-making journey of a buyer, consists of four critical stages, known as the sales funnel. Content falls within the four steps, which are: 

  • Outreach – the stage where you attract and acquire your audience
  • Conversion – the stage where your promotional material/content aims to convince your target audience to purchase your products/service
  • Closing – the stage where the sale is made
  • Retention – the stage of retaining custom as a result of brand loyalty

Understanding this process is essential to analytics to gain a higher perception of what propels buyers to advance through the funnel. Analytics enables a business to monitor, for example, traffic onto their sites and what content is of interest to potential buyers and, critically, what is not. 

Meticulously following trends of buyers’ journeys, and using the information that analytics provides, will help businesses to improve their content marketing strategy. It’s essential to ensure that companies are producing content that is more effective higher up the funnel. In addition to this, it ensures that businesses are not spending time creating content that is not relevant to their target audience’s wants. 

Schedule time for the creation and publication of your content

Overloading buyers with your content can have an adverse effect on your good intentions of promoting your business. Therefore, it is essential to manage not only when you publish your content but also when you are going to allow time for your high quality and relevant content to be created. Utilising a content calendar enables businesses to schedule time to create, edit strategically, and publish content across all of the four critical stages of the sales funnel. Ensuring that the content calendar is flexible, within reason, is a vital piece of advice to make sure that businesses deliver content that is relevant to what their target audience desires. 

Utilise social media

Establishing a presence on social media platforms is essential; now, more than ever, with behavioural shifts occurring, our society is becoming ever more digitally inclined. 67% of the UK population alone are social media users. If you do not utilise these platforms by promoting your content within them, then you are handing your competitors a significant competitive advantage. 

It’s a given that the more, for example, blog posts you create and publish, the more content you will have to promote. Promoting your content across a range of social media platforms, consistently, will increase the likelihood of your target audience being exposed to your content. 

To allow your target audience to gain access to more of your material with ease, ensure that you, or your website developer, installs the required WordPress plugins so that your audience can engage further with your content. Ultimately, it’s recommended that businesses promote valuable and relevant content across a range of social media platforms regardless of their size.

Why every business should have a content marketing strategy 

Developing a strategic road map (the content marketing strategy) will enable a business to focus on and clearly outline the process of how content will be most effectively used to attract, acquire, and engage customers. 

A successful content marketing strategy will drive the targeted audience’s traffic to increase conversions and revenue across the enterprise. The content also positively contribute toward SEO, allowing for the material to be exposed to a larger target audience. 

Jade is our content writer, ensuring copy is exciting, unique and optimised for improving SEO.