Content Marketing Tips to Power your Small Business Growth

You run a small business and you’re worried about how to create content that will add more value to your clients, generate leads and drive more income for your business?

Frankly, It’s normal to be worried when your content is not driving as much result as it’s supposed to, after the whole effort you put into creating content.

But besides worrying about your content, what else do you do about improving the ROI on each content you create?

Well, don’t stress it!

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you the seven content marketing tips that can boost your marketing effort and give your marketing the needed drive. Ready?

These content marketing tips are not only going to help you as you set out to get better results for your content; they are going to equip you to create a more meaningful and rewarding content for your audience and this is going to power your result.

Before we get started, what exactly is content marketing all about? I think you’ll like to know…

What exactly is Content Marketing?

Ok… Let’s chunk this down a bit?

Content is a piece of Article, Blog post, Video, Infographic, White paper etc, created with the sole purpose of creating value for others in order to drive a specific outcome.

So, collectively, Content Marketing is the process of creating and sharing valuable content, to a well defined audience, in order to create a specific outcome.

For most small business owners the primary purpose of creating content is to attract a well defined set of audience or leads or potential clients who’ll most likely be converted into paying clients.

Besides attracting leads, there are many other reasons why marketers create content, including creating brand visibility, brand leadership, driving website traffic and engagement etc.

Whatever it is for you, content marketing is a means to an end. And for you to evolve a successful content marketing campaign, you must be able to attend the result you had in mind with you content

Why is Content Marketing Important?

Let me tell you a little secret.

Content marketing is not just the future of marketing; it is at the heart of most successful digital marketing campaigns today.

Now don’t take my word for it, here’s a story line…

Some few years ago, a relatively new Los Angeles-based company, Dollar Shave Club released a $4,500 video content about their no-employee small-budget company.

Two days later, this video brought in 9.5 million views, 100,000+ new followers on social media, over 12,000 new customers and a powerful storyline for the company.

How did they do it? Great content, powerful story telling! You can read about the story here.

As a start up entrepreneur working on showcasing your expertise, Content Marketing is one of the biggest tools you can use in creating huge awareness for your brand.

Now, despite the importance of getting it right with Content Marketing, a lot of marketers still make mistakes, and right now in the following paragraphs, you’re going to learn the 7 content marketing tips that will save your small business from these mistakes.

Identify your Audience

One of the most effective content marketing tip you’ll have out there will always have to start with identifying your audience.

The reason for this is not far fetched. As a small business, your audience is at the center of everything you’re doing online. And they are really cardinal to the success of your content.

That’s why before you even get started creating content, you need to be able to identify your audience, know who they are, where they are and what matters to them.

Having this knowledge will be very important to your overall success or your ability to create the right ROI with your content.

But, how do you get to identify your audience?

Start with figuring out the product you want to promote then identify the kind of audience that will be interested in that product.

To make things easier for you, check up your competitors online, have a run on their audience and the kind of content that appeals to that audience. That’s a good place to start.

Find out what appeals to them

After identifying your audience, the next top content marketing tip you need is to find out the kind of content that appeals to this audience.

To get started with this, all you need is to run a little background research on what your audience is constantly searching for on the internet.

Tools like Google Keywords tool, Ubersuggest etc. can be very effective in giving you a rough idea about the keywords or search terms that’s popularly used by your audience when they make searches online.

As soon as you get on these apps, run a search on a particular search term that relates to whatever you’re promoting with your content, this will give you a clear idea on the volume of search you can get for that search term.

The next step to run this search which is also very accurate is to run a research on your competitors. Find out, what are the kind of content they publish and how’s it performing, in terms of views, likes, engagement etc.

Create Valuable Content

Whether you’re a new or existing business, one of the most important content marketing tip you’ll get anywhere will always bother on creating exceptional value for your audience.

This is very important. It’s what makes your content stand out in the sea of billions of content written online.

You see, content marketing does not just start and end with creating and uploading content on your website.

With over 5 million blog posts posted on the web every single day, to make your content stand out of this huge number of posts, your content has to be able to solve real life problem, in a way that’s better than how other contents are doing it.

For this to happen, you need to put in extra effort to make your content exceptional. Add extra depth to your content. Share personal experiences, make it all about your target audience and then go all the way out to promote the hell out of it.

Set Goals for your Content

As content creator, it is not only important you create valuable content, it is equally important you set measurable goals for each content you create.

Setting goals for each content you create makes your content creation process to be more purposeful and intentional. This is an important content marketing tip that’s helped a lot of small businesses.

The moment you set clear goals for a piece of content, it becomes easy to adapt your content to suit with that goal.

As soon as this is in place, you’ll be able to find accurate metrics to measure the effectiveness of your content, whether it was able to deliver on a set goal or not.

Where your content delivers on your goal, you can adapt the strategy to fit in with other content you create.

Where it doesn’t deliver on it’s goals, you can edit or create a more effective content strategy that will work for you.

Create a Content Calendar

Another top content marketing tip that’s worked for businesses is the idea about creating a content calendar.

What a content calendar does for you is that it allows you to lay out a set of content ideas for a specific period, based on the goal you want to achieve with your marketing, during that period.

This leaves you with a string of content ideas. And these are usually not just ordinary content ideas but those ideas that will actually help you to achieve your set goals.

How to Create a Content Marketing Calendar

Instead of waiting to create different kinds of content at different times of the year, focus on creating a content marketing calendar for each specific year or break it down into specific periods, over a set year.

To do this, you’ll need to set a specific and measurable (or SMART) goals for your business each year… then customize your content marketing calendar to reflect these goal.

So for instance, if my goal for the year 2021 is to reach 100 new clients at Dec. 31^st, my content will be planned to take each client through processes that will lead to conversions…

With this, I can then take the next step start producing the kind of content that will attract the kind of audience I need.

After this, the next batch of content will focus on introducing this audience to my brand… educating them and building trust with my brand, then finally I’ll create content that will influence them to buy from me.

At every point, your content calendar should reflect content ideas that revolves around each stage of your client’s journey as you work on achieving your overall content marketing goals.

If you’re updating content on a weekly basis, be sure each topic you have for the week has a specific goal that is in line with your yearly target goal for the business.

Now this will mean mapping out an all-round content strategy for your business, based on each result you want to achieve at specific periods during the year.

Promote your Content

Content promotion is at the heart of content marketing. It is also an excellent way to drive better results for your content.

With the large number of content created on a daily basis, it’s always difficult to create content that gets visibility on the search engine.

For this reason, beyond creating valuable content, you want to do everything within your power to promote your content and get it across to the right audience.

From using the right keywords, optimizing your content for the search engine to using paid promotions, I have written a complete tutorial on how to promote your content here.

Measure your ROI

Measuring your ROI at intervals is one of my top content marketing tips. As a small business owner, It is not enough you set measurable goals for your content marketing effort…

It is very important you work on measuring the performance of each content.

So, to do this, you’ll want to use relevant analytic tools to measure the result of your content, based on your set goals.

Measuring your content performance will help you understand where to improve or other areas to focus on for a better result.

Conclusion

Remember, content marketing is not just about creating and sharing content, it’s a strategic way to provide value, drive clients and expand your business…

And for this reason you should be more focused on sharing purposeful, measurable and strategic content on a consistent basis.

So, there you have the most important content marketing tips for small businesses. And here’s your turn to transform your business with these tips.

Want to drive better result with your content? You sign up for our content marketing master class here.

It’s over to you now. Which of these content marketing tips have you ever used to boost your content marketing effort?