Marketing has always been about getting your brand in front of customers and making sure they know you exist. That’s why marketing campaigns have traditionally focused on advertising – from print ads to online banner advertisements or TV commercials. But with the rise of social media platforms like Facebook & Instagram taking over as our primary means for communicating news updates across all demographics—word-of-mouth referrals becoming more powerful than ever before due largely at least partly because it bypasses intermediaries who would typically promote these products onto us first (think product placement)—marketing strategies are evolving again.
Up until recently, ads were a necessary evil. But now we’ve reached the digital age and suddenly found ourselves exposed to upwards of 5,000 advertisements per day! The primary purpose for these popups has shifted from informing us as people to annoying us with irrelevant information that only serves as fuel for our never-ending addiction.
In an attempt at solving this problem once again – something which wouldn’t annoy or irritate customers but still give them what they want without tracking their browsing habits. Enter content marketing. Content marketing is a concept that’s been around for over 100 years, but it’s making waves again.
Small businesses are finding value in this new way to compete with larger competitors – without being annoying or expensive. All SMBs need content marketing if they want their business survival rate high enough that no one can take them on.
Content marketing for small businesses is a great way to drive traffic and build your brand. According to The Manifest, at least 53% of companies use content marketing for this purpose.
Here are the 5 ways to create a strategy of content marketing that works fine for small businesses:
Establish Your Goals
When creating content for marketing purposes, it’s important to think about what your audience is searching for and how you can answer that need. A good strategy will be clear on the specific goal of their campaign so that there are no unclear expectations or disappointments once completed with results — SMART goals look like this:
Improve Your Search Engine Ranking Within Three Months
Acquire 1K subscribers in 30 Days (acquiring new subscribers should happen within a month)
Increase sales by 25% from the specified market segments. This could take over two weeks depending upon the size needed.
Identify Your Performance Indicator
When it comes to performance indicators, consider the metrics that reflect how well you’re moving toward your goals. These may include (but are not limited to):
- Unique page views
- Referral rate
- Number of downloads
- Net revenue
- Conversion rate
Select Your Audience & Content Channels
To succeed with content marketing, you need to be targeting your audience. The best way of doing this is by collecting data from Google Analytics or CoSchedule and narrowing down who will most likely purchase your product or service; then crafting a message for them.
Once you know who’s reading your current content (or not), it will become clear where the most exposure and engagement can be found. Next, focus on channels to build an online presence with those audiences in mind – this includes optimizing for search engines as well.
Craft Your Content and Distribute it to the Market
Spreading your genius insights is just as important, if not more so than attracting a loyal following. The quality of content you produce will have an effect on how many people are able to receive and understand what it takes for them to be impressed with the information being spread. So make sure that even when creating new material or re-purposing old ideas into something fresh looking; always balance creativity with good writing skills in order to create engaging copy.
Track Your Results
In just the first few hours of delivering content, you’ll begin to see how people respond. Pageviews and likes are some indicators that engagement is taking place within your audience; Conversion rates indicate whether or not they’re converting into leads for sales opportunities with their website’s marketing team – which means more potential customers on our hands.
There are many tools out there to help you track KPIs. Here are a few that might interest:
Google Analytics for measuring page views, traffic sources, and keyword performance.
Data box with its array of powerful metrics tracking almost anything from conversion rates on your site or customer satisfaction scores.
Excel also has some helpful features if this is what works with you best.
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