Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

This is post three in a series of posts on Inbound Marketing, focusing on developing your content marketing strategy for your small business.

Content marketing is creating, publishing and promoting value-based content to attract your target audience, position you as a trusted expert and advisor in your industry, help build your online brand presence and drive more traffic to your site.

Your value-based content can be blog posts, articles, videos, white papers, eBooks, presentations or other information products that focus on the problems your customers and clients face and you can help them resolve. The challenge for most small businesses is to provide engaging content on a consistent basis.

To develop your content marketing strategy, start by answering the following questions:

• What do you want to achieve? Before you start writing, set some goals so the content you write delivers actionable results. Goals can include develop an expert reputation, build brand awareness, drive more traffic, generate leads or grow your email list. Then you need to match your content to your goals. Blog posts drive traffic, help you build brand awareness and develop an expert reputation. Downloadable products help grow your in-house email list and generate leads.
• What does your target prospect want? You must provide content that your customers are looking for when they have an active need or want to learn more about what you offer. Know your target audience and compare what they are interested in with what you already have available. Perform a content audit and organize yours by type, i.e. blog posts, articles, white papers, videos and presentations, and by topic to determine where you need to fill in the gaps and whether you have something valuable already available that you can use!
• How often will you publish? Finding the time to implement a regular and consistent strategy is very difficult, but the key to success is to do what works for you. With client work and limited resources, small businesses need to focus on providing quality content on a regular schedule. Plan your schedule and stick with it as best possible. What works for me is:
  • Blog 3 to 4 times a month and syndicate to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn;
  • Update my Facebook page at least 5 times per week with information from other sources that benefits my audience
  • Provide an eBook quarterly

  Anything more would prevent me from servicing my clients properly!

• Where will you promote your content? Great content that is hidden is not supporting your strategy. Determine where you will promote it and make it easy for others to share broadly. Add a visible subscribe button on your blog and don’t forget to allow visitors to subscribe via email (MailChimp offers this ability). Add social share buttons to your website so visitors can like, share, tweet and Plus1 your content to their friends and followers. Post the availability of your new blog posts on your Facebook Page wall. Tweet out the link to the post to your followers. Integrate your blog into your LinkedIn profile.
• How will you measure your effectiveness? Don’t obsess over the ROI of inbound marketing. Measure your results based on what is important to you – how many inbound leads you get through your web forms, whether visitors sign up for your mailing list or you get  inbound inquiries from those looking to find out more about your products and services. I measure my return on investment by the percentage of my overall revenue that is generated through inbound leads (verses referrals or networking).

Content Creation is the Core

Remember that content creation is the core of your inbound marketing strategy and needs to be done regularly for it to be effective. Good content gets found, consumed and shared, fueling more traffic to your website and giving you an opportunity to build trust, credibility, and authority for your business.

What do you want to accomplish with your content marketing strategy?