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 second part of three goes into what budget, content types, how to organize the content and what channels to target.
Resources
Part 1
Part 3
Content Marketing Strategy for Busy Business Owners – A Guide with Checklist
Examples of Strong Lead Magnets
Listen In
Watch the Podcast
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 back to the small business sweet spot. This is the second episode in a three part series.
If you haven’t listened to part one yet, you’ll want to go back and listen to that. In it, I cover what the strategy entails, how to identify your audience, The content categories and metrics. In this second part, I’ll cover budget aspects, types of content, how to organize and what channels to target.
As a single owner business, your plate might be already full with the day to day running of your company. Creating content from scratch is definitely a headache you don’t need. And outsourcing is a great option, but it means paying creatives to complete the work, which means you need a budget.
Setting a budget determines how much content you can afford to have produced each week, month, or even year.
So how much should you budget? As a general rule of thumb, The Small Business Administration suggests a marketing budget of seven to eight percent of your revenue. However, given the number of variables at play in content creation, you may need less or more than this. I’ve seen some companies go as high as 30%.
There’s no doubt that this number is all over the map.
Some of the variables I’m talking about include
design, writing, and marketing. Editing, task management automation tools, advertising spend, video and or sound editing, outsourced content, management, and even web development.
The services you’ll need will depend on the media that you’re creating. You may choose to handle some of it yourself. For example, if you’re happy to write your content, You won’t need to budget for a copywriter, but you might still want it professionally edited before publishing it live.
Creating content tailored to the different stages helps speak to the specific needs and concerns of a buyer so that they feel heard. These stages are referred to as the buyer journey. It’s the framework that assesses how likely someone is to buy your service. It’s split into four stages and they are
awareness, consideration, decision, And loyalty.
Not everyone arrives at your website or consumes your content at the same stage of that journey.
For example, the awareness stage is your chance to connect with your target audience and introduce yourself. The best content types to reach your audience in this stage could be an authority building blog or an ultimate guide. For example,
in the consideration stage, your content should be a bit more technical and in depth explaining how your service is the solution to their problem. A cost calculator or videos that show your service in action are examples that work well in this stage.
By the decision stage, your audience is close to committing to spending money with you.
Focus your content on converting your audience from a lead to a sale. Types of content that work well here include testimonials or promotional offers to help sweeten the deal.
Once your customer hits the loyalty stage, your content should make the customer feel good about the decision they made to buy from you and not the competition. Aim to create content that encourages such loyalty that they refer you to others or they buy again.
Side note here, if you’d like to know more about creating lead magnets, which is a piece of free content, a deal or an offer that encourages your ideal customer to engage with your business, And as always, I invite you to check the show notes to a blog I’ve written that shares 14 examples of, of these that you can use to attract new customers.
Now how do you organize all this content that’s being created and where it’s going?
One way is to create a central document that contains all of the information that feeds into your strategy. An editorial calendar. Is one piece of this and it guides you on what content pieces to publish when and where your document can be as simple as a multi tab Google sheet, or you could invest in an online software like ClickUp, Notion, or Trello to stay on top of it.
All
personally, I create a central content strategy document in Google sheets for me and my clients, depending on how they like to work. They can either continue using the Google sheet. Or input the information in their preferred platform. The easier and simpler, the better, because having a process that’s hard to use may keep you from using it.
You and your audience access content in many different ways through social media, listening to podcasts, watching video, reading articles, et cetera. Content strategy and creation becomes overwhelming. When trying to show up everywhere and presenting all of your content in all media formats. A solid content strategy means showing up only where it matters and investing your time and energy in a few channels rather than every channel under the sun.
The type of content you create, video, email, podcast, et cetera, must match where your audience hangs out. If they’re LinkedIn fiends, you should focus on creating content on LinkedIn. If they’re email junkies, make sure you’re rocking up in their inbox regularly.
Once you have the topic and channel choice, now it’s time to determine what content types you’ll use. And while blogging is one of the more commonly known ones, there are a bunch of formats to consider.
Here’s a few.
Case studies, checklists, assessments,
videos, photos or infographics, contests, quizzes, courses,
eBooks, testimonials, Guest blogging, podcast guesting, webinars or presentations, white papers or newsletters.
Now how do you map the buyer stage channel and content type together? Start with the buyer journey and define the questions. Create the most effective types of content for the designated channels.
Here’s an example. If you’re a coach, a question your audience might be first considering is what are the benefits of hiring a coach? In this case, the person is in the awareness stage. They aren’t yet aware of you yet. What type of content can you create for your Instagram channel that might appeal to this person?
Maybe an infographics with the benefits of hiring a coach in general, or maybe a video that is your specific approach to coaching.
Okay. That’s it for this episode. But don’t go just yet. If you’re curious about the magic that happens off mic, stay tuned for an exclusive look behind the scenes. Stay tuned next episode for the final part of this three part content marketing strategy series and for more episodes on making your business thrive on line.
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.
So a little behind the scenes, I am a digital nomad and I am in Portland for a couple months and so I’ve got the setup I’ve had to do differently in each area that I am when I’m doing my podcasting. This particular place that I’m in is very small. It’s a studio apartment downtown. Very cute by the way.
Charming. Vintage is what they call it. It is really cute but in terms of like the setup and stuff I’ve had to like move some stuff around so I could have some light and have like a decent background that I like. Because everything’s always different. So I thought I would show you a little bit of what it looks like. So this is my setup and it’s kind of cool. The light reflection looks like a moon a little bit. Anyways, this is actually the kitchen table and this goes on the other side of me behind, but I just moved it over to the window because I like being by the window and I have my light set up and then I have the laptop up a little bit and then I have a little thing.
I don’t know if you can see it right there that holds my phone so that my phone can record me while I’m doing the podcast. And that’s my setup.
