Smart company owners know that you need to market for the year that you’re in and with content marketing being the most relevant form of marketing in our world today, we must embrace it and implement it into our overall marketing strategy.
Content marketing is important because it answers your audience’s questions and helps you build trust, develop relationships, improve conversions, and generate leads.The good news is, there is a path to simplifying and effectively executing your content marketing strategy, even on your own, and this helpful blog is here to help you do just that.
1. Know Your Ideal Customer
Sure, you know your customers. But you need to really know your ideal (cream-of-the-crop) customers. And here’s a little secret, there are only one or two ideal customer personas, and you need to know them extremely well.
In order to create content that will ultimately bring that ideal client to you, the content you publish needs to be engaging and catered to what they want and need. This is where you show your expertise, build trust, establish rapport, and become the one that your ideal customer chooses to hire.
Crucial Questions
Here are a few questions to ask yourself while you’re working to understand your ideal customer avatar:
- What does my ideal customer want/need from me?
- What challenges is my ideal customer facing?
- What are my ideal customer’s pain points?
- What solutions do I have to offer in these areas?
2. Choose the Most Effective Avenues to Reach Your Customer
The next step here is to determine how your ideal client consumes their information. Is your ideal customer doing research on major search engines like Google and potentially Pinterest and YouTube? Ok, let’s just go ahead and say YES they are, so having an optimized and mobile-friendly website that achieves optimal search recognition as well as an optimized Google My Business profile are absolute must-haves here.
Are they likely to use email? For established businesses with a list of previous and prospective clients, an email campaign may be a smart and feasible approach to stay in front of and top-of-mind with ideal clients.
Are they on social media? If so, which platforms specifically? Pro tip, identify the most relevant platforms (and list them in order of most relevant to least). This allows you to establish a place to start and have a clear understanding of where you will go next. For do-it-yourself marketers, we recommend starting your social media marketing with the two most relevant platforms, harnessing your strategy, consistency, and achieving success, and then evolving to the next relevant platform.
Are they leveraging industry-specific sites like Angie’s List or Houzz to hire a professional? Are they doing a combination of all? This is important information for you as the marketer to know, so that you can create a marketing strategy that effectively reaches your ideal customer WHERE they consume information. Lastly, remember that your capacity is a key factor in all of this. For beginners and do-it-yourself marketers, it’s important to establish the most relevant content marketing avenues as well as the avenues that you can execute within your capacity and budget, and start there, then evolve.
3. Create Your Content Creation Workflow
Now for the fun part! You get to build your own content creation workflow. One that works for you, to drive your business forward to reach all of those potential customers.
The path to a successful content marketing strategy is simple… do the parts you love, and outsource what you don’t. You need to create a content creation workflow that works for you and your business. So yes, you need content marketing, but you don’t necessarily have to do it all yourself.
Crucial Questions
Here’s what you need to consider while you’re laying the groundwork for your content strategy:
- Who’s in charge here? Who will drive the strategy and oversee its execution?
- Who’s going to write the content?
- Who will be the one to review the content and give the final stamp of approval?
- Who will manage the publishing of the content on your website, emails, and/or social media platforms and make sure everything’s up to your standards?
We understand, this is a huge commitment, so it’s okay if you feel like handing the reins off to an expert in content marketing. There are people out there who love doing this, and will be more than happy to take over. But, if this is something you’re ready to commit to, and you’ve got the time, then dive in!
Best Practices to Stay Organized
Here are a few suggestions for best practices when it comes to your content creation workflow:
- Build your content in advance to maximize consistency and efficacy. ProTip: Having a schedule for up to a year is incredibly helpful… with the flexibility to adapt when necessary, of course.
- Create content pillars or content categories for the content you’re planning to achieve a well-rounded content strategy.
- Address your ideal customers wants, needs, pain points, and challenges in your content. Your content should focus on solving these issues so that you educate, inspire, entertain, build trust, and lead your ideal customer to choose YOU.
- Get organized… and stay organized. Use a content calendar to keep track of how, when and where you’re creating, publishing, and promoting.
- Optimize! Don’t be afraid to repurpose high-performing content like emails, blogs, and social media posts. Consistent content is how you’ll stay fresh in the minds of your potential customers, it doesn’t always have to be 100% new and if insights tell you that a specific piece of content wins with your audience, you should re-use it strategically.
A Few Final Thoughts
See! Content marketing isn’t nearly as scary as it sounds! It’s just a matter of embracing the fact that you need to sit down and formulate a content strategy and then giving yourself the permission to start somewhere (that is within your capacity and budget) and move on from there. Whether or not you’re going to do this on your own or outsource to someone else, you now have a more clear understanding of the pre-work involved and how to put it all together in a way that works for you and your business goals.
And don’t worry, it’s natural to feel slightly overwhelmed by all the to-do’s. 64% of small business owners feel unable to effectively market their businesses the way they’d like to. This can mean gaps, poor results, confusion, overwhelm or even being too paralyzed to start. But, what if you had a GUIDE?
We designed My Digital Mojo with Marketing Coordinators and Do-it-Yourself marketers in mind with a goal of giving them the tools to be successful and efficient in their marketing with more ease (and dare we say, joy!).
Build your online presence, increase your brand awareness, and build a marketing engine that exceeds your business goals with a My Digital Mojo online membership! Learn more and jump onto our community waitlist here: