Content marketing is creating, publishing and promoting value-based content to attract your target audience so they get to know, like and trust you. But content marketing should not be done without a well thought-out content marketing strategy.
It’s no surprise that customers and visitors to your website have questions about your business, product or service that need to be answered. And we try to answer those questions through our blog posts and page content. But often the visitor needs a simpler way to find the answer they are looking for.
Your content strategy is the blueprint for what content your business needs in order to accomplish your business goals. And your content strategy is needed before you can implement a content marketing strategy.
When I ask the question “How Will You Find Your Next Client — or Will They Find You?”, it is a direct challenge to business owners to define an inbound marketing strategy to encourage those who are ready to buy to contact you.
We know that providing great content is important to our online marketing strategy, but creating that content can be a burden. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 57% of content marketers just simply don’t have enough time to produce content. And when you are a small business owner, time is a precious commodity.
All construction must begin with a solid foundation otherwise you risk building a structure that requires constant maintenance and repair. Effective content marketing is no different. Your content strategy must be architected and built as carefully and with as much care as the foundation of a building.
I must be getting more sensitive to bad grammar in blog posts, email newsletters and other types of content marketing. These errors glare out from the content and totally distract me from the topic of interest. The sad truth is that these grammar mistakes are found in the material of some of the top content marketing authors.
We all know that content is becoming more central to your overall marketing strategy. In fact, you will have trouble implementing any type of inbound marketing strategy if you aren’t able to produce great content. However, creating great content is difficult for most of us but the key is that you just need to start.
We love our smartphones and tablets. Usage of both devices is growing rapidly with more people using their mobile devices more than a laptop. Given the fact that more and more people are finding and consuming content on tablets and smart phones, our content marketing tactics must support those devices seamlessly.
Small business owners really don’t need one more thing to think about when it comes to online marketing. To add anything else to our already overflowing plates will make us ineffective. But small businesses, regardless of their industry, should add a blog as the central component of their content marketing activities because creating relevant content for your target audience and optimizing it for search engine visibility is too important to ignore.