Creating and developing an effective content marketing campaign can go a long way in helping your small business register greater profits. However, the first step is to identify effective ways to run a successful content marketing campaign that will work for your small business.
Here are a few tips to run an effective content marketing campaign for your small business.
Work on a budget
All marketing efforts require an investment. Before planning and executing the content marketing campaign as owner of the business, you must decide how much you can afford to set aside for the campaign. Depending on the funds that are available, the campaign can be planned.
Create demography of your target audience
Every marketing campaign is aimed at target audience. The first step is identifying who your target audience really are. You can create a database of your consumers which will have information like who they are, which geographical location they are from, their age, gender, occupation, level of education and income. You can also determine media usage habits of your target audience. Having understood who your target audience are you can determine their likes and dislikes.
Determine strength and weakness of your product
Before you start planning a content marketing campaign for your small business, you can spare some time to review the campaigns of the past that were associated with your business. By doing so, you will be in a position to analyze where you went wrong in the past. This will help you avoid repeating the same mistakes with your new content marketing campaign. Be doing a review, you will also be able to determine the strength and weakness of your product or service.
Plan ahead of time
The timing of any content marketing campaign is paramount. The time when the campaign is launched plays a crucial role in driving sales. You must plan and launch your campaign at a time you are assured and convinced that it will bring you business. Else regardless of how good or creative the campaign may be, it will not bring in the best results.
List out goals of content marketing campaign
It is necessary that you make a list of what your business aims to achieve from the content marketing campaign. Every marketing campaign is initiated with the intention of achieving a few business goals. The aim of the content marketing campaign can differ from one business to another and this depends on the nature of the business. The business goal could be anything from creating awareness about the product or service or it could be reaching a targeted sales number this season.
Create effective content
In order to make your content marketing campaign successful, you must create content that is original and unique. Content must be created keeping in mind the needs and interests of target audience as all marketing efforts are directed towards them.
Choose and adopt the right strategy
It does not stop with determining the strength and weakness of your product or service or listing out the businesses goals that you wish to achieve through your content marketing campaign. An effective strategy to achieve the same must be planned. Any content marketing campaign must be finalized only after weighing its advantages and disadvantages.
Use various available tools
There is no dearth of availability of tools that can help in the creation and launching the content. You can take advantage of such tools for the various activities of the content marketing campaign.
- Blogging: WordPress software and WPengine hosting, for assistance in Grammar, Grammarly can be used.
- Video: Wistia and YouTube
- SEO research: MajesticSEO
- Email marketing: Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor
- Webinar hosting: GoToWebinar
- Research: Google Keyword Planner and BuzzSumo to identify popular topics
- Landing page design: Unbounce and Leadpages
Promote content to increase reach
Every content marketing plan needs a promotion plan to make it work. For every hour that you spend on creating the content, you need to spend double the time to promote it. Writing a unique blog post is just not enough. You need to create and implement a plan on how to make the message of blog post reach its target audience. Often people work very hard in creating content but they do not pay attention to promote it. There three most effective ways to promote content and increase reach are:
- Email marketing: Send email letters to target audience on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
- Offline: Using the various offline channels like face-to-face discussion during quarterly business reviews with clients or direct mailing hard copies of e-books.
- Social media: Connecting with target audience and having them follow you on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
Analyze your campaign
Once the content marketing campaign for your small business is up and running, its performance can be checked and monitored using various tools. One such tool that you can use is Addictomatic. This tool allows you to gather websites and forums simultaneously in one single dashboard. Through this tool, you can also check if your content marketing campaign is talked about on the various platforms. Depending on the results, you can plan what strategy to adopt next.
While you are doing all that it takes to make your content marketing campaign work for your businesses, you must take a closer look at what your competitors are working on. This will help you plan on what techniques you need to adopt for your business.
