By Anoop Nain
Are you planning to create a content marketing strategy from scratch for your business? Well, it is not quite an easy job, especially when you are completely unaware of the basics of content marketing. Even if you have a little idea about it, the entire process of creating a content marketing strategy requires a great deal of effort. Many times, small businesses do not know where they should begin from in order to chalk out a successful content marketing strategy.
Here are five proven tips to create a successful content marketing strategy framework that will help your small business grow fast.
1. Know Your Customer
The main goal of creating a content marketing plan is to sell your product or service through it. So, can you do this successfully without having an idea about who your customers are and what they exactly do? The answer is a big resounding no.
So, how can you get to know your customers?
The best way to know your customers is by creating a buyer persona. The way you represent your ideal customers after doing market research and gathering real data about your existing customers is called the buyer persona. But, do you know how to build a buyer persona? Well, this is not that difficult. Just collect information about your customers, like age, gender, income, location, language, goal etc. to have a detailed insight. This insight will help you create a proper buyer persona for your business.
2. Create Content for All Stages of the Buyer’s Journey
Once you get the detailed insight about your target audience and create a buyer persona, next thing you need to do is know their behavioral pattern. And to do this you should be aware of your buyer’s journey. A buyer’s journey is involved with a systematic pattern that includes collecting information about products, comparing different products, analyzing the products, and finally making the buying decision.
It’s usually a three-step procedure:
- Awareness – The buyers become aware of their problems and seek solutions.
- Consideration – They consider and analyze different available alternatives.
- Decision – They buy a product.
If you understand your buyer’s journey and have content for all these three stages of your buyer’s journey, you will definitely get great ROI from your content marketing.
3. Make Your Content Engaging
The way you create content directly influences how your content marketing plan will work for your business. Making content engaging ensures you success for your content marketing. Here are six secrets to make a content engaging:
- Create various types of content. For example, instead of writing only text-based blogs, vary them with elements like images, videos, infographics, quotes, etc.
- To increase readability and make the content easy-to-follow, use subheadings, bullet points etc. in your content.
- Keep a particular tone in your content that can relate to your buyer persona.
- Come up with striking titles.
- Include factual links from credible sources.
- Don’t forget to insert a call to action to tell the readers what to do after reading your content.
Remember, you cannot have truly engaging content unless your target audience engages with it. To do this, become a master of storytelling and connect with your audience through content. The rest will fall into place eventually.
4. Promote Your Content Aggressively
You cannot create a successful content marketing strategy if you only create useful content for your readers but overlook the content promotion part. Here are a few surefire ways to promote content:
- Harness the benefits of social media to promote content.
- Send content to everyone in your email list.
- Outreach to influencers and fellow bloggers in a subtle way.
- Submit your content to relevant forums, communities, and other content curation platforms.
- Run sponsored advertising.
Keep writing persuasive content pieces and keep promoting them to get the best result.
5. Analyze & Optimize Your Content to Maximize Success
Creating a completely successful content marketing strategy in one go is just next to impossible. Just like any other marketing plan, content marketing also needs tweaking in order to become successful. After creating a content marketing plan, you should track and analyze the plan from time to time. After that optimize your strategy as needed to get optimum result. Also, you need to stay updated with latest marketing trends to leverage the highest benefits from your content marketing plan.
Wrapping up, content marketing is an effective tool to take your small business to the next level if done correctly. Following the above-mentioned tips will help you create a cutting-edge content marketing strategy, engage your customers and accelerate business growth.
Photo credit: Content marketing notebook from weedezign/Shutterstock
