What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic advertising approach of creating, developing and distributing helpful, relatable and consistent content to capture, acquire and retain a clearly defined audience with the goal of driving profitable consumer action. Companies send information all the time that is not valuable or relevant, for instance, electronic spam messages. Value and relevance differentiate content marketing from all other informational trash you receive from companies trying to sell you something. Quality content is a part of all forms of marketing, and the pertinent and helpful information is vital to your content marketing plan.
How Do You Develop a Content Marketing Strategy?
To be effective you need a strategy. In lieu of pitching your goods or services, you want to deliver information that makes your customer more knowledgeable. The goal of this strategy is to consistently provide ongoing valuable information that drives new consumers to want to reward you with business and keep existing customers loyal. Consider these five points as you are developing your plan:
Use Social Media as an Information Gathering Source
According to Internet Live Statistics, on average, every second, around 6,000 tweets are tweeted on Twitter, nearly 800 photos are uploaded to Instagram, over 70,000 YouTube videos are viewed and in excess of 2.5 million emails are sent. Social media affords you the opportunity to listen to your audience and understand their needs and what is important and relevant to them. It also gives you a chance to deliver content from your business directly to the consumer. Content marketing and social media are similar, but different, in that content is needed to drive social media. Therefore, your content marketing plan should be established before your social media strategy. The two go hand in hand as part of an overall marketing approach.
Establish a Website
Web presence is critical as it is a simple way to build brand recognition and establish a great platform for sharing quality content about your business.
Allocate Resources to Keep Your Content Informative, Relevant & Consistent
Once you have established your web and social media presence you want to make sure you have the resources allocated to keep content up to date. Stale information could be worse than having no web or social media presence at all.
Content Planning
Ask yourself these questions: Who is your target audience? What content will you be delivering? What platforms will you be communicating?
Start Small
If you are a new business, or new to content marketing and/or social media strategizing, consider checking out the top platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter or YouTube) as a starting point for your company’s social media presence. With a little research you can find out where your target audience is socializing, then pick the top platform and focus there for information gathering and message delivery.
Tiny Giant is here to help you get noticed. We can work within your budget to develop a content marketing strategy that meets your small business needs.
