You might have heard that “content is king”. Content is not only king, but a “king maker” as well. Why? The reason is great content can present yourself as a king or master in your field. Every small business owner wants to build their brand and reach out to their customers, and most consider content marketing is the best way to increase their business exposure.
Here are 5 content marketing ideas for small business owners that will help you build your brand as well as reach out to your customers.
#1 Understand what your customers want to know
Small business owners usually start content marketing by pitching their products or services. This is not your customers want from you. You should understand what your customers want to know from you so listen to the questions they frequently ask. Do the research and find out what are the questions your customers want to get answered. Your focus should be on giving advices or answers to your customers for their problems.
#2 Plan your work and create an editorial schedule
Many people start content marketing without a plan especially when it comes to blogging. It is important to create an editorial schedule before you start. An editorial schedule can help you stay on track with your content marketing campaign. Creating an editorial schedule is quite easy and you can even do it with the help of a spreadsheet document. In an editorial schedule, you can include the details such as the topics you want to focus, date/time you want your posts go live, keywords you want to target etc.
#3 Target the right keywords, but write content for your audience
Whether you are writing articles for your blog or guest blogs, you need to include keywords. Why? You need right keywords to bring the right visitors to your posts. However, many small business owners focus on keywords to please search engines. Don’t just focus on search engine rankings, you should write content for your audience instead. Writing content for your target audience will create awareness about your brand and search engine rankings will follow automatically.
#4 Publish your content consistently
If you have published an article on March, don’t wait until August to publish the next one. Make sense? Consistency matters in content marketing for sure. Though it is good to publish articles everyday, it may not be possible for every business. If you can’t publish articles everyday, then you can schedule your work on a weekly or monthly basis like 4 articles a week, 10 articles per month etc. Publishing articles on your blog or guest blogs in a consistent manner is way better than doing it rarely.
#5 Follow 80/20 rule for promoting your content
Hitting the publish button is definitely not the last thing of content marketing. Without promoting what you have written, you can’t reach out to your audience unless you already have a huge fan following. Typically, many small business owners spend a huge amount of time for writing content and very less time for promoting it. For better exposure to your content, you should spend 20% of time for content creation and 80% of time for content promotion. For example, if you want to spend 20 hours per week for content marketing, then you can utilize 4 hours for creating content and 16 hours for promoting it. This great 80/20 rule concept was presented by Derek Halpern of Social Triggers.
#6 Measure your success
When it comes to content marketing, it is crucial to measure your success. Most small business owners typically don’t bother about tracking their progress/results. They probably end up with wastage of time by doing the wrong things. You are required to set yourself measurable goals for a period of time, work towards those goals, and analyze how far those goals are reached. This will help you realize what works best for you and what changes you need to make.