This is a three-part series aimed at breaking down the simple steps to develop a content marketing strategy to attract more organic website traffic and engage potential clients. The series covers everything from identifying your target audience (listen for a quick hack on this part!), content categories, and metrics to budgeting, content types, channel targeting, and finally, the creation and distribution of content. This first part of three dives into what a content marketing strategy entails, how to identify your target audience, and the significance of setting goals and measuring success with appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs).
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Content Marketing Strategy for Busy Business Owners – A Guide with Checklist
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Raw Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the small business sweet spot. I’m your host Barb Davids, and this show is dedicated to helping small business owners like you get more organic website traffic and also to help create and distribute content and analyzing the numbers so that we can make better informed marketing decisions. It is action oriented, direct, and conversational. And if you’ve been looking for SEO or content marketing help, please stick around to the very end where I share about the group coaching program, small business sweet spot. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s go.
Welcome to the first in a three part series on content marketing for busy business owners. With blogs needed one week and emails the next and a peppering of social media in between, overwhelm is never far away. I’ve been there and wrestled with the uncertainty of what to post, when to post and in what format,
but publishing content that attracts the right potential clients and gives them a reason to stick around and trickle down the sales process. Is possible when you have a tight content marketing strategy.
How do you get a content marketing strategy for your business? By following some things I am going to share in this series, I will walk you through the process so you understand what goes into a good strategy and how to bring it to life.
In this first part, we’ll cover a brief description of what a content marketing strategy entails and how to identify your audience, meaning Who is at the receiving end of all of this great content you are creating. We’ll also cover content categories and metrics.
Part two of the series, I’ll cover budget aspects, types of content, how to organize and what channels to target. And the third and final part will cover ideation, creation, and spreading all of your great content out into the world.
So does your business need a content marketing strategy? Let’s start here. Content marketing is just a part of your entire digital marketing strategy. It is creating and sharing information in different online formats, be that blogs, emails, downloads, social posts, paid ad creatives, just to name a few.
With the main aim being to attract and keep your ideal audience.
Rather than pitching your service or product directly, content marketing addresses your audience’s needs by answering their concerns and questions while familiarizing them with your offering.
And by having a content marketing strategy, it provides clear direction for business resources needed and establishes your priorities.
When writing your content marketing strategy, the things you want to keep in mind are research, Measuring, creating, publishing, and distribution. Each of these considerations are covered in this series. If at any time you’re listening and thinking, Oh, I need help with that exact thing. Go to the show notes and click on the sweet spot to find the help you need.
Now let’s move into identifying your audience. Hopefully, you already know who your target audience is, since you already have a business. But if you’re not sure, your first step is to figure that out.
Here’s a quick start list of questions to ask, and it is by no means all you should do to get to know your audience. But if you’re completely new to this. Now let’s move into identifying your audience. Hopefully you already know who your target audience is since you already have a business. But if you’re not sure, your first step is figuring that out.
Here’s a quick start list of questions to ask, and it is by no means all you should do to get to know your audience. But if you’re completely new to this, answering the following questions as a starting point.
One, who is your demographic? What job do they hold or industry do they work in? Three, What are their hobbies? Four, how do they consume content and what channels do they use? Five, what channels do they face that your business helps with?
Five, what challenges do they face that your business helps with? And six, how do they make their purchasing decisions?
Do you want to know a hack about who you’re targeting? It’s you. You are your target audience. A lot of the time, business owners way overthink this part and thus end up never answering these questions. Instead of agonizing over it just write for you, it’s likely you started your business because of something you needed or something you are passionate about.
So it only makes sense to create for you. Ditch the niche and write for you.
The overall goal of content is to drive brand awareness that results in an action being taken, which generates revenue. This is a very broad goal. Secondary goals that allow us to categorize each piece of content makes the mammoth task of turning content into a sales tool, more manageable.
A piece of content’s secondary goal may be to educate. nurture, serve existing customers, either cross sell or upsell, build authority, engagement, or establish expertise.
Understanding the content’s goal brings clarity to its purpose, offering clues about where you should publish it and to which segment of your audience It’s relevant to more to come on this bit in the next episode.
Okay. Now, once the goal is set, decide how you’ll measure its progress and what parameters need to be met to judge its success. You may hear the, excuse me.
You may hear these called key performance indicators or KPIs for short. The most relevant measurement depends on the type of media you’re producing, such as video,
The most relevant measurement depends on the type of media you’re producing, such as video, email, pay per click ad, and so on. Here are some examples.
Blog post performance is typically measured by how many people visit the page or engage with a page for a certain amount of time, or if they sign up for something on your website. And email newsletter performance
is typically measured by open rate, but that only measures how well your subject line is. Because once they open your email, you will likely want them to take action on something. So that is the measurement you’ll want to track
social media. There’s lots of talk about vanity metrics. What’s the most important to track is going to depend on your goal. If your goal is to increase brand awareness, then visits to the website, isn’t as important as how many likes they get.
If you post on social to share your main offer, then tracking that back to Google Analytics to see if the offer is downloaded or purchases is your main metric.
I have a table in the show notes that shows more example KPIs by content type.
Keep an eye on your metrics by tracking them in a simple spreadsheet. Add your first date and the metrics at the time. Check again a month later and record the change.
And that’s it for this episode.
Stay tuned to the next episode for part two of this three part content marketing strategy series. And for more episodes on making your business thrive online. See you in the next sweet spot. Cheers.
Thank you for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you’re looking for SEO and content marketing help, consider joining the small business sweet spot. It’s a group coaching program where you can get answers to your questions about your business directly and clarity around the marketing strategies that you would like to implement in your business.
You can find all kinds of information at compassdigitalstrategies. com. And if you liked the episode, please tell a friend. Cheers.
