Content Marketing Basics For Small Business

 What is content marketing?

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach which focusses on creating valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain an audience that’s clearly defined” Content Marketing Institute.

How does it work?

Are you a small business owner and don’t know what the content marketing fuss is all about. Here are some content marketing basics to get you started. The aim is to inform and engage your audience with the end drive to create profitable customer action.

Content marketing isn’t about selling, it’s about providing regular content to attract and retain an audience. The premise is that by giving your audience something for free, you’ll be rewarded with their loyalty and business.

Content marketing 

• Creates brand awareness
• Builds trust and rapport
• Builds brand loyalty
• Drives traffic to your website
• Encourages repeat website visits
• Provides your website with new content

A content strategy/content marketing strategy covers :

• Your goals – measurable goals that you’re trying to achieve with content marketing
• Defines your audience and buyer personas – who is your target market, their age, gender, where they’re located, interests
• Defines your audience’s needs, what problems they have and how you’ll answer them
• Maps out your buyer personas to different products and the stages of the buying cycle and matches content to these areas
• Researches the competition, what content they’re delivering and identify gaps in the market so you know what to address but also where it may be harder to reach customers
• Your brand’s story – what messages you’re trying to get across about your brand
• The platforms you’ll use for content marketing – which social media platforms, other avenues such as eNewsletters, white papers, publications, conferences
• Defines the content types you’ll use – blogs, infographics, memes, video, research papers
• Forms the basis of your editorial calendar/content
• Details your brand, their tone of voice and their interactions for both online and offline channels;
• Documents how you’ll measure your success to determine which content and platform is successful so that you can plan new content around what’s working for your brand

A content marketing strategy is necessary to ensure that you’re producing content specific to your buyer personas and so your content marketing will be successful.

There’s a lot to content marketing to sort out before you get to the process of creating content.

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