If you’re a business owner, you should already know by now the importance of using online tools for your business. However, it is not enough to just use the internet to post and promote your products or services online. You also need to have a basic understanding of what content marketing is and how to use it to solve your business problems.
In simple terms, content marketing means producing and sharing content online such as articles, videos, or infographics that do not directly sell or promote your business. These things should catch people’s interest, provide valuable information, or be a form of entertainment.
Content marketing ideas are important for a business because it helps you connect with your target market online. It is also a way to improve your leverage by placing your business as one of the “authorities” in your industry. This can be achieved by sharing your own content and knowledge across the internet.
Plan and strategise. Marketing is a battlefield. The competition is tight. You have to plan and create a specific content marketing strategy to match your business needs. Your plan should be 100% ready to achieve a foolproof marketing campaign and eventually reach your goals.
Before starting any strategies, ask yourself about the ultimate goal of your business first. Is it to gather likes? Increase followers? Generate leads? Reach customers? Gain subscriptions? Knowing what you intend to happen with your content marketing campaign is crucial. It is important to stick to your purpose and objective because marketing, in general, is result-driven. At the end of the day, it’s the result of all the effort that counts.
Here are five tips on how you can use content marketing to overcome business challenges:
1. Pinpoint your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Competition is inevitable in every business. It is highly likely that your products or services are being offered by other companies already. There are a lot of people who can offer what you do. In order to stand out from the rest, you need to have a unique selling proposition or unique selling point. Your USP is something that you have that others don’t. It is what makes you unique and different from the competitors. Once you have known your USP, this is what you will promote.
2. Know your audience, your target customer
Always do some research and get updated with what catches the attention of your target audience. What do they like at this moment? What topics interest them? Look around your real-life and online communities to find ideas on what content to produce next and determine which content would fit into what platform. Short videos, for example, work well on Facebook and Instagram, while the articles are better suited for blog websites.
3. Choose your platforms
After knowing your audience, learn where they are and what platforms they use. There are many social media channels made available for content marketing. You have to choose which ones to utilize. Because some businesses don’t thrive in a particular platform, you have to decide what will work for you. Make sure that your efforts do not go to waste.
4. Produce original content regularly
While sharing other people’s posts online is good for riding trends and increasing interaction, it is important to produce your own fresh content. It could be a blog article or a video that you can then generate smaller content from. For example, writing out the script of a video you made, creating a blog article from it, and getting short excerpts from that article and putting them in photos. You can then share these bite-sized pieces of content to all your social media platforms.
Since content marketing is not just a one-time big-time effort, it is a long-term endeavour that you have to maintain as long as your business is standing. This means that you have to keep going with the marketing plan and always put out fresh content every time. Regular content posting will not just make your online presence felt, you also boost brand recall.
5. Track online engagement
After creating and posting original content based on the interests of your target market, it is time to look at the numbers. There are social media insights and reports which let you see all your content and their corresponding analytics. Here, you can check which particular post garnered the most interaction through likes, comments, or shares. You can analyse, compare, and contrast this with the others. Tracking your online engagement would help you better understand what content works well and where you should focus on.
For these content marketing tips to work best, you have to be patient, intentional, and creative when working on your strategy. And if you don’t have the time or skill to do these things yourself, don’t be afraid to invest and get some help. There are a lot of people, tools, and websites out there that can assist you in this journey of content creation and marketing. In the end, all these tips will ultimately help you overcome your business challenges.