Are you struggling with content marketing?
Although content marketing is a relatively new term, it’s been a proven marketing strategy for a couple of hundred years. The Content Marketing Institute found the oldest known example to be from 1732.
Choosing a strong content marketing strategy and sticking with it is, is the foundation of any successful content marketing campaign.
In this article, we go over some of the most successful content marketing ideas for small businesses. Our suggestion is picking one content marketing strategy which suits your personality and master it.
These content marketing channels are great because they don’t require large financial investments. All you need is some spare time, and a few spare dollars possibly for some equipment.
Contents:
Podcasting for Content Marketing
Article Writing for Content Marketing
1. Podcasting
Photo from Pexels.
Podcasting has become one of most popular mediums for content marketing, and for a good reason. Being an audio file, podcasts can be listened to from anywhere and at any time. This has made them perfect to be consumed at work, driving your car, exercising at the gym or even in the shower.
Getting started with podcasting is easier than you think, you don’t need fancy recording equipment. If you have a smartphone, you have a microphone. I’d start by sitting down and just talking into your phone, this will build your speaking skills and confidence.
Another great benefit of podcasting is that it doesn’t require complex editing skills. Simply “top and tail” the audio track, this means make trim the file to start and end at the right time. And this is all you need to do, don’t waste time being a perfectionist. People are very comfortable with small imperfections in their podcasts.
2. Article Writing
Blogging and article writing is already a saturated industry, so be careful if you’re pursuing this strategy. You will need to do something special to make your writing stand out.
I recommend reading and doing research about similar blogs or articles in your industry. You want to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Then you can position your articles to be unique and different to your competitors.
For blog writing, I believe it’s important your personality comes across through the text. If you use the same boring, corporate style of writing like everyone else, you’ll get nowhere.
Writing an article requires a fair bit of work, you can easily spend hours writing a single piece. Plus you need to proofread the writing and add media (videos, images and audio files). In-comparison a podcast can be completed much faster, because all you have to do is talk.
Learning a little bit of SEO can go a long way in helping people find your articles.
3. Video Content
Photo from Pexels.
Youtube is the 2nd biggest search engine behind Google. So it’s fair to say that lots of people are watching videos.
Video platforms aren’t as saturated as blog writing, this means people are more likely to find your content. This is a massive upside to investing your energy into video content, you’re likely to get views immediately regardless of your following. In-comparison blogging can take several articles before you start getting readers.
Like podcasting, you can use “I don’t have the right equipment” as an excuse. But in reality, all you need is a smartphone to start creating video content.
Go download TikTok and have a look at the amount of video content being created by just using smartphones. If you open your imagination, there are plenty of ways to create video content.
TikTok might not be the right video platform for you, because it has quite a young audience. However you can take these video tactics that people are using, and apply it to platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and other popular platforms.
3 Tips for Content Marketing Strategy
What comes first- strategy or tactics?
We’re a firm believer in looking at your strategy first. We think about strategy as defining your long term goals, and tactics as defining small steps to achieve your long term goal.
Considering your content marketing strategy is extremely important, because it’s a long term strategy.
Here are 3 three tips for defining your content marketing strategy.
Who is your target audience?
This should be the first question you ask yourself when thinking about content marketing.
Don’t answer this question with “SMB’s with a revenue of more than 1 million per annum”.
Get more in-depth than that.
Who is running that SMB with a million dollar revenue? Are they young? Are they old? What are they interested in? How much free time do they have? What does their normal work day look like?
The more you define your target audience, the better you can impact them. You want to develop a persona for your target audience.
How is your content going to reach your audience?
You should have defined your target audience by now.
Now consider how your content is going to reach them. Think in-depth again with this question.
Is your audience searching for content? What social media platforms are they on? Where do they spend time on the internet? Are they actively consuming content? Are they mindlessly consuming content?
Answering questions like these will give you insights into how you can better position your content to be found on the internet.
How is your content going to genuinely influence your audience?
If your content marketing strategy is successful, your content is currently being consumed by your target audience.
But what happens if the content is bad? What if your audience doesn’t learn anything valuable from your content?
An easy way to make sure your content is impactful, is to include actionable advice for the audience. So after consuming your content the audience can take further action.
Content Marketing Summary
Don’t discount the value of a long term content marketing campaign.
The key to success lies in planning your strategy, choosing your content marketing channel and then defining your tactics.
The three strongest channels for content marketing we believe are podcasting, article writing and video content. Take one of these channels and master it.
