Businesses of all sizes have started noticing content marketing and most of the companies are planning to increase their content marketing budgets over the next few years. One of the reason behind this is that consumers have developed a blindness to advertising. We rarely notice banner ads or other forms of advertising. Today’s consumer finds information, consumes it and then makes a buying decision.
If you are a small business owner you can follow these 3 tips to content marketing success:
An overall content marketing strategy: Having an overall content marketing strategy is the first step without which you aren’t going to achieve much success with content marketing. Ask yourself a question. Why I need content marketing? What goals I want to achieve through content marketing? What is my budget and time frame ?
You can add more questions if you think you need more soul searching before embarking on content marketing journey. Answers to these questions will help you in defining your objectives and you’ll get a pretty good idea of your business needs . This introspection will help you in identifying main goals which you want to achieve through content marketing and you can build a strategy based on your needs and goals.
Social Media and SEO: After creating content the next step is to distribute it using various channels. Ideally your content must satisfy your readers and search engines alike. Social media has emerged as the most popular channel of sharing content. So your content marketing and social media marketing strategy must be in sync with each other. Create content which will have your primary keywords and is optimized for search engines and social media sites. Hashtags are an important feature of social networks such as Linkedin, Twitter and Google+ and Facebook will also soon integrate hashtags with their search. So include these hashtags and keywords in your content to make it easier for users to locate your content. But don’t overdo this, search engines specially hate content stuffed with keywords and if you include too many keywords your site can also be penalized for keyword stuffing.
Measure your campaign: Set up the metrics which you want to track. There is no one size fits all formula for success in content marketing. Every piece of content and content marketing campaign is different in nature. What works for others may or may not work for you. If some marketers are measuring a particular metric it doesn’t means that you also need to measure the similar metric. Decide which metrics you are going to track and then track these metrics . It’s up to you to decide which metrics to track it can be sales, increased visibility, traffic, page views or how many times your content is shared over social media.
Many times marketers make the mistake of measuring wrong metrics which can give a distorted view of your campaign. Metrics which you need to measure must be decided even before you create content. Remember one thing not every piece of content which you create is going to result in an increase in sales. Some of your content is going to generate sales and some is going to increase your visibility in eyes of search engines and your audience. In order to succeed with content marketing you need a holistic approach which gives weight to every metric and focuses on all aspects of content marketing.
There are many ways to succeed with content marketing and you have to choose your own path. As I mentioned above no two content marketing campaigns are identical what works for others may or may not work for you. Please leave your comments below and share this article if you find it interesting.
Read more: Advertising Tips For Small Businesses