You’ve heard that producing content can get you more customers.
But so far, creating consistent and valuable content has been a high mountain you can’t climb.
How can you build a content strategy to help create content your audience will love?
I can tell you this for free, creating content consistently is hard.
Thousands of small businesses start content marketing with good intentions.
But in a few months, their content marketing efforts have fizzled out.
It’s not because of a lack of good writers. But usually a lack of small business content strategy.
One key difference between small and large businesses is the amount of resources available.
So, you need to create a unique content strategy that fits your marketing budget.
Then, you can increase your chances of achieving marketing goals through content.
Without further ado, let’s see how you can create a unique content strategy that works for your small business.
What is a content strategy?
A content strategy is a plan created to ensure you provide the needed content for your audience to achieve your business goals. Having a content strategy helps you to produce content consistently and provide the information your website visitors need.
As a result of this, they engage better with your business, become leads, and buy your product or pay for your service. But creating a content strategy is a difficult task for marketers.
In fact, 64% of marketers say how to build a scalable content strategy is their greatest educational need surrounding content management.
What are the important elements to keep in mind to develop an effective content strategy for your small business?
I’ll explain 9 of those elements in details shortly. By the end of this post, you’ll be ready to create an effective content strategy for your small business.
1. Set content goals
People create content for many reasons. Some reasons people might create content are:
- Creating brand awareness
- Capturing leads
- Converting customers
In some cases, you might even have different pieces of content created towards achieving all of those goals. One important fact to keep in mind is that you should know why you’re creating content.
This is the end result and it will help to streamline the whole content creation and distribution process. Likewise, when you have these key performance indicators (KPIs), it helps you to understand what failure or success means for your content.
Apart from just stating these goals, it’s vital to be specific. If you want to gain organic traffic with your content, how many visitors do you want to attract? 1,000? 10,000?
Using the SMART acronym will help you to set goals for your content. You should set goals that are:
- S – specific
- M – measurable
- A – attainable
- R – realistic
- T – time-bound
After doing this, you need to know more about your visitors.
2. Create a buyer persona
Who are you trying to target with your content? If you’re running a small business, then you have to know who your ideal customers are.
A buyer persona is a fictional document that contains all the details of your ideal customer. This includes details like:
- Name
- Age
- Gender
- Income
- Location
- Job
- Ambition
- Solutions they want from your product
- Likes
- Dislikes
You should have as many details as possible in your buyer persona. There may be some slight variations on your buyer persona depending on whether you offer a B2C or a B2B product.
Having a buyer persona will help you to understand your potential customers. You’ll know their struggles, their needs, and what keeps them up at night. This will help you create content that resonates with them and attract engagement.
Check an example of a detailed persona below:
If you offer more than a product, then you may need to target more than a single ideal customer. This means you’ll have to create a few buyer personas to represent your different ideal buyers.
3. Carry out keyword research
While creating content for your website, you want these pieces of content to rank on search engines. Because they’re a source of targeted traffic.
People are coming to your website because they’ve searched for a term related to the service you offer. But to get the right traffic from Google, you need to target the right keywords.
You want to target the keywords your potential customers are using. To do this, keyword research is a must. This will help you determine if the keyword you have in mind is the right one to target.
In case it’s not, you’ll find ideas of keywords you can target. To do this successfully, you can use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Majestic SEO, Ubersuggest, KeywordTool.io, etc.
While using these tools, you have to note important characteristics of a keyword like:
- Search volume
- SEO difficulty
- Click-through rates (CTR)
- Conversion rates
- Paid difficulty
- Cost per click (CPC)
As a small business, you need to have a different approach when looking for keyword opportunities. And I’ll tell you why.
In most cases, if you’re running a small business, then your website will have a lower authority than bigger businesses.
There are few exceptions but that’s the rule. When you have a website with a domain authority (DA) of 20 to 50, it will be difficult to rank higher for a similar piece of content than a website with a DA of 80 to 100.
While you’re looking for keywords that will bring organic traffic, you also need to be realistic about the keywords you can rank for. When carrying out keyword research, you need to consider these points:
Does the keyword show the intent you want a visitor to have? If you want to use the content to sell a product, does the keyword have a transactional intent?
Is the competition low enough for the keyword that your website can realistically rank for it?
Does it have enough search volume? The search volume doesn’t have to be 10,000 or even 5,000. But you should target a search term people are putting in the search box.
Before targeting a keyword, it’s important to search on Google and other search engines to see the websites ranking for it. For instance, look at the results for the keyword “content marketing”:
For comparison, look at the results for the keyword “content marketing for HVAC and plumbing”:
If you’re providing content marketing services for plumbers, then I think you can see which keyword makes sense to target.
A well-crafted piece of content can get you to the top 10 for the second keyword as you can see pages without backlinks ranking in the top 10.
From your keyword research, you’ll get a list of keywords that you can target for your business website. This will also give content ideas for your website that you can use for months.
4. Determine content format
There are many content formats available today and you have to pick some based on your audience preferences. When people talk about content today, many are referring to the written content.
But for your content strategy, you should consider all the content format you’re going to use to attract potential customers to your website. What are some content formats to consider?
Written Content
This is the most popular form of content. On your website, you’ll have to employ written content on different pages. This could be on your blog posts or service pages.
If you want to rank high on search engines for your desired keywords, then you can’t avoid the written content. You have to create content that your potential customers can find on search engines and click-through to your website.
According to a study by HubSpot, companies that publish 16 or more posts monthly get 4.5 times more leads than those that publish 4 or less. If you find it difficult to write, you can get a writer to create the type of content you need according to your specifications.
Video
Over the years, videos have become more popular as a content format. When you consider that YouTube is both the second most popular and second largest search engine, then you need to pay attention to making videos.
It’s really simple, videos boast of higher engagement than written content. In fact, according to a study, our brains process videos 60,000 times faster than text.
If you offer a service or product where customers might need extensive tutorials to use it efficiently, then you need to create videos to show your customers how to carry out tasks.
If you’re like me and other internet users, you probably want a video tutorial to “see” how things are. You can also use videos to market the important features and benefits of your product.
Infographic
This is an image used to explain complex concepts in a simple way. Infographics can be a way to repurpose your popular written content to increase engagement.
A study found that Infographics can increase your website traffic by up to 12%. Added to this, you can gain many backlinks to your website through infographics.
By publishing 47 infographics on the KISSmetrics site, Neil Patel generated 2,512,596 visitors and 41,142 backlinks from 3,741 unique domains in 2 years.
Podcasts
For people who move around a lot, they may be unable to read written content. However, an audio version of your post as a podcast is suitable for them.
For instance, if your ideal customers are real estate agents, then you can create podcasts to suit their needs. They can listen and still gain from your content while moving around.
Podcasts have become a popular form of content consumption. A study by Edison Research and Triton Digital revealed that 26% of Americans listen to podcasts monthly. That’s 73 million Americans.
You might experiment with a few content formats and track how they work for your business. Going for too many content types will eat into your marketing budget.
5. Have a content calendar
To get results from producing content, you need to do it on a consistent basis. But in the process of creating content from assigning topics to research to the actual writing, there could easily be a delay.
Having a content calendar can help you check this and ensure all the steps in the content creation process are laid out. With your content calendar, some important steps to lay out are:
- Time to assign a topic
- Deadline for writing
- Deadline for editing
- Deadline for creating accompanying images
- Time to publish
- Channels and schedule to market content
With all these mapped out in your content calendar, it’s easier to keep your content production consistent. Everyone knows their duty and when they should carry it out.
You can create a content calendar using tools like Asana, Airtable or Coschedule. There are other tools you can use. If you’re just starting out with your website, you can use Excel or Google Sheets to map out this process.
See an example of a content calendar by Buffer on Trello below:
You’ll probably need to produce content on a lower scale than Buffer. But regardless of that, you should have a content calendar you follow.
6. Create a content outline and write
Writing is a difficult task. That’s why you need to create an outline before you begin to write. This way, you’ll see how your posts will go. What are some of the benefits you get with a content outline?
- Put down your points.
- Help you put down what you’re aiming to achieve with each point.
- Helps to remove unnecessary parts of your post.
- Prevents rambling in your content.
- Makes your content easier to produce.
With your content outline, you’ll have a brief summary of your subheadings and sub-subheadings you want to address. You can then fill in each part.
A content outline helps you to think about the various points in your content before you write them. There’s no surprise to catch you off guard and derail your writing.
See an example of a content outline from Michael Pozdnev. You can see the post draft beside the outline:
After creating your outline the next step is to do the actual writing. While creating your outline, you may have done a bit of research. Here, you’ll have to go into deeper research to get a total view of the topic you’re writing about.
You need to read what’s already online. Then you can find ways to improve on it and satisfy your audience. During the research, you’ll also get new insights to apply to your content.
After you’re through with your research, you need to write and communicate with your audience.
With your writing, you should be communicating with your buyer persona and appealing to their emotions.
Apart from your words, you should format your content properly to make it easier for your readers. Some tips to keep in mind are:
- Write short sentences.
- Write short paragraphs.
- Use subheadings to break your post.
- Use bullets for points.
- Add the necessary supporting images.
This makes it easier for your audience to read or skim through your post.
7. Edit and Publish
After writing your post, you need to edit it. This includes proofreading the post to pick grammatical errors and changing ineffective words.
While editing your post, you should criticize it as hard as you can. Will the points help you to achieve your goals? Am I communicating with the reader?
Do they provide the right information to the reader? Do you have redundant parts that should be cut from the post?
Are the words easy to read? One way to check this is to read your post out loud and find sentences that sound unnatural. I do this for my content and it helps to catch many words that need to change. When you find them, rephrase to make them sound better.
When you’re through editing your post, the next step is to publish it. If you’re publishing the post on a later date, you can schedule it to publish on that day.
8. Determine content marketing platforms
Creating content is good. But if nobody reads it, then it’s useless. Therefore, promoting your content is just as important as creating it.
There are many platforms you can use to promote your content. For your small business, you’ll have to find the best platforms for your audience.
This means you need to promote your content on platforms where you’re likely to reach your ideal audience. For instance, if you’re selling a B2B product, then you need to use LinkedIn as one of your platforms since most of your ideal buyers are here.
I find social media as the most popular way of marketing your content. You can reach a large portion of your audience this way. Some social media platforms to consider are:
- Snapchat
For all these platforms, you need to consider the best practices applicable to each. These include the frequency of posting and the type of content expected on the platform.
You can even make your work easier with social media scheduling tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, or Edgar. These can promote your post at various times on social media according to the schedule you set. See an example by Hootsuite below:
As a small business with a low budget, you don’t need to promote your content on all platforms. You need to find a few that’s effective for your audience and focus on them.
9. Track your results
An important element of your content strategy is to have a plan to track your results. With the content goals you put down earlier, you need to see if your content is meeting up with those goals, exceeding, or coming up short.
Depending on your business’s unique key performance indicators, some important results to track are:
- Traffic
- Organic traffic
- Number of leads acquired
- Best performing pieces of content
- Worst performing pieces of content
- Number of customers gained
You can use a tool like Google Analytics to track many of your website’s performance metric. Likewise, the Search Console will show you insights about your search performance.
To track your content social media performance, you can check the number of shares you’ve gained through your content with BuzzSumo.
When you’re able to track these metrics effectively, then you’ll be able to see if your content strategy is successful.
Meanwhile, if your content failed based on these metrics, then you need to analyze and adjust your content strategy and go again.
Conclusion
Creating and promoting content is an important part of any business online. For a small business, it’s one of the most cost-effective ways of achieving results online.
But for many businesses, creating content is hard. Furthermore, many businesses are unaware of the effects of their content.
With an effective content strategy, you can create better content and know whether it’s producing results for your business or not.
Have you created a content strategy for your business? Did you face any issue along the way? What would you like to add? Drop your comments and let me know.
