As a biz mum, it can be hard to find the time to market your business. You’re already juggling a gazillion things between your personal and professional life. Adding yet another task to your list can leave you feeling overwhelmed.
Oh, how I get it…
One way to help ease this burden is to have a solid content marketing strategy in place. Haven’t heard the term ‘content marketing’ before? Don’t worry, you’re not the only one. I myself didn’t know what it was until I’d been in business for six months. And I’d actually been doing it all along!
In this blog post I’ll walk you through not only what content marketing is, but more importantly why you need a solid strategy in place to effectively market your business and save yourself some stress.
What exactly is content marketing?
In a nutshell, content marketing is the practice of creating or curating and distributing quality, relevant, valuable content for the purpose of building and maintaining an engaged audience. And of course, to sell your thing.
Created or curated content + a mechanism for distribution to a targeted audience = content marketing!
Sadly, the good old days of Yellow Pages ads and flyers on your local noticeboard are almost gone.
People are using the internet more than anything else to find information and products or services they need. And that’s also generally how they’ll find your business too.
Over 250K Google searches are done in Australia alone, per day! [Source]
The best way to ensure you’re easy to find is to have plenty of content online to do the marketing for you.
What types of online content are there?
There are a lot of different online content formats that can be used in your overall marketing strategy such as, but not limited to:
- Written content (blog articles, email newsletters, eBooks, reports, etc);
- Pre-recorded and live video and audio (podcasts, YouTube tutorials, Facebook Lives, etc);
- Still images or graphics (photos, carousels, infographics, etc).
As with any other advertising and marketing method, the idea is to get your content out there in front of people who are interested in what you have to offer – ie. your target audience – in an informational or educational way.
The gist of it is, people go online, find your content and read it / watch it / listen to it. This allows them get to know more about your business and what you have to offer, but most importantly, helps to build trust and the type of relationship that will make them comfortable doing business with you.
Where can I share my online content?
There are an assortment of avenues available to amplify the the distribution of your content. Apart from your very own website or blog, you can also share your content to social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn or online forums like Reddit; to your own email list subscribers; social bookmarking sites like Pinterest and StumbleUpon (now Mix) and online video platforms including YouTube and TikTok.
Creating keyword-based content means your content may also be found on Google. And don’t forget, sites like Pinterest and YouTube are still two of the next biggest search engines in the world!
Why do I need a content marketing strategy?
A content marketing strategy is used for the planning, creation, distribution and management of the type of content your business needs to focus on for reaching your ideal audience.
It also ensures that all of your content is created with a purpose in mind. It helps you to be consistent with your messaging and branding, and keeps you from wasting valuable time and resources on creating content that doesn’t serve a purpose.
Having a solid content marketing strategy in place will no doubt improve your marketing efforts, but will also pay off in other aspects of your business.
1. It will help to create cohesiveness
When you develop a content marketing strategy, you work out all the content you want to create based on the products and services you offer. That does not mean every single piece of content is going to be promotional in nature, but it does mean all the content you create will work together, share the same voice, and talk to the same audience.
2. It will establish your brand identity
When you plan the content you’ll create and share in advance, it helps with branding because you can keep everything uniform. For example, you decide on the voice, fonts, images, colours and more ahead of time. It’s a lot easier to explain to someone you’re outsourcing to when you know what you want because you’ve planned it out.
3. It can increase productivity
When you create a content marketing plan you’ll know what you need to do each day to reach your goals because it’s going to be in your calendar and schedule. You will know exactly what content you’re working on today, what is being published today, and most importantly why you’re doing it. That’s going to make it a lot simpler to create the content you need for all parts of your business.
4. It can improve analytics
When you know why you’re publishing a piece of content, you’ll be able to check analytics to find out if it’s working the way you thought it would. You’ll also be able to trace what’s working and what’s not working much better than if you’re just acting on the fly. The strategy does make some assumptions and those assumptions are used as a basis for your analytics.
5. It may get a better ROI
When you do all that you can with content marketing such as use the right keywords, find the right voice, create the content directly for your audience, you’ll find out that your return on investment (ROI) will be a lot higher. You’ll skyrocket revenues as you boost brand awareness because more of the right people will know about you!
Developing a good content marketing strategy requires an understanding of your goals, your products or services, and your target audience – who they are, the problems you can solve for them, where they hang out and more. A great way to define your target audience is to create an Ideal Client Avatar (ICA).
See? It’s not as scary as you thought, is it! If you would like to put a content marketing strategy in place for your business but don’t know where to start, book in for a free 30-minute chat with me to get the ball rolling.
