7 Strategic Steps to Small Business Content Marketing Success

Here’s my take on strategic content marketing for small businesses and organizations.

The need to produce content in marketing has grown as today is more about being found—earning attention—and less about going out and hunting. If you’re interested in marketing your business effectively (and who isn’t at this point), you can’t escape hearing about content marketing. It’s everywhere you look, or listen.

Content marketing for a small business is educating people (with free information) so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you.

Now that it’s the “thing,” for all types of businesses, we have a tendency to overcomplicate it. This was also the case when websites became the “thing” as well as when email, and SEO and social media got trending. But I have one piece of advice that will serve you well as new technology and marketing trends capture our attention and share-of-mind:

People who make things more complex than they are either know less than they think, or are trying to sell you something.

Here’s the good news, you don’t have to try and figure it out on your own – I’ve cracked the code for a simple content marketing process.

Below is the strategic seven step process I use for content marketing. Perhaps it’ll help you see through the decoys and traps that is starting to creep into the content marketing process.

Now that content marketing is all the rage, far too many small businesses and organizations are creating content just to be able to check that box on their marketing tactics chart. To truly make content work, you need to understand your marketing and business goals. Your blog posts, seminars, workshops, email marketing, special reports, podcasts, advertising … all of it needs to fit into a larger picture.

Content can serve different purposes within a company, and the best content marketing programs define the role of content beforehand, not after the fact.

Here are 7 Content Marketing Goals Worth Pursuing

What does your target audience want? What types of content would help you gain their trust to the extent that they recommend your products? It’s important to research:

How do you intend to use content marketing to achieve your above business goals? For which audience is it intended? At what stage of the purchase funnel? What is the key question or need that this content fulfills? How do we know that this need exists (social listening, search engine keyword analysis, customer feedback, etc.).

For example, if one of your stated annual goals is to dramatically increase sales through referrals, you would produce content with referral motivation in mind. Or, if one of your stated goals for the year is to significantly increase your subscriber list, you would focus on producing landing pages, events, and workshops that have email capture built into the content.

What form should this content take? In many cases there isn’t a right and wrong way to do content creation, just that the strategic way will be based on your ideal customer profile and their information consumption preferences.

This is my model, but many of these channels work for any kind of business and should be considered in your business.

Develop a list of core topics and assign one to each month for the next 3-6 months.

Each theme should be a substantial topic related to your business or industry and represent an important keyword search term. It might be helpful to think about it like a cd album. Each month might represent a single track in what will ultimately become a body of work by the end of the year.

Here’s an example:

You must  market your marketing . The notion that you can simply create interesting content and people will magically find it is a lie. If you build it, they won’t necessarily come. You have to treat your content executions like a product, and launch them the same way you would a product.

What gets measured gets managed. ~ Peter Drucker”

You can actually double or triple your profits by measuring the results of your content marketing. Some marketing tactics hit your target right in the middle. Others miss it completely. Unless you measure, you won’t know which are which.

You must track your marketing to ensure that it yields awareness, trust, sales or profits.