All companies need to have a strong marketing plan. It’s essential that you know how to position your business on the market and answer your target audience's needs to boost sales. Fortunately, as expensive traditional media is becoming less relevant and online marketing is becoming increasingly popular, marketing has never been cheaper. No longer do you need to pay for expensive billboards or TV ads. Instead, you can funnel your marketing budget into modern technology and connect directly with your target audience. Better yet, online marketing allows you to reach more people for less. And it’s content marketing that has become the backbone of any business's marketing efforts. Content marketing is not only surprisingly inexpensive but also offers tremendous value to your product.
Why Your Business Needs a Content Marketing Plan
Content marketing covers a wide variety of mediums. From YouTube videos to social media posts and blog articles, everything your audience consumes is considered content. In short, content marketing is anything you produce that either informs or entertains your target audience while boosting your brand. Like everything in business, content marketing needs planning. This is the only way to get a higher return on all the benefits content marketing can offer you.
For instance, let’s imagine that you own an accounting firm. As tax season is approaching, you write several guides that answer the most common questions posed by small business owners and share them online for free. Soon enough, you start getting organic traffic to your website and some of the readers of your comprehensive advice are then converted into new customers. Better yet, other companies in the industry now link to your content on their own blogs, giving your content a wider reach and expanding your network.
In other words, those inexpensive guides prove your company’s expertise, building your brand authority at an affordable cost. Of course, this only happens when you truly stand out from the crowd. Fortunately, several content marketing apps and tools can help your business do just that.
Recommended Content Marketing Tools
Due to the number of solutions available, it can be challenging to find content marketing tools for your business’s needs. To help out, we narrowed it down to the following platforms:
Social Media Scheduler: SocialPilot
Printed Photo Book: Blurb
Graphic Design Service: Penji
Screen Recorder: Movavi Screen Recorder
Online Marketplace: Fiverr
Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
In the same way that companies need to have a business plan, all marketing efforts need to be backed up by a marketing strategy. You should only get started after carefully planning, as this will allow you to pinpoint how to get the best results. Marketing plans can be as comprehensive as you want, but a nice place to start is by first answering the six W’s (who, what, when, where, why, and how).
- Who is your target audience?
- What is your audience looking for?
- When should you publish?
- Where should you publish?
- Why should people get your service?
- How will you measure success?
By answering these questions, you’ll have a clear goal in mind. Let’s imagine you sell wedding cakes. After answering these questions, you conclude that one of the best places to advertise your cakes is on Pinterest – where most brides create boards for their wedding planning. Additionally, you notice that it’s worthwhile writing blog articles that answer the most searched wedding questions by engaged couples to increase web traffic. Of course, what channel to use and content to create depends on the product you offer and its competitive advantage.
Additional Advice for Small Businesses
Marketing is one of the most important parts of a business, but so are productivity, finance, and team management. Company owners need to be on top of their game in all areas and it can be a bit overwhelming. Thankfully, we live in an era where technology substantially cuts the time spent on each activity, letting you focus on the more strategic side of running a business.