Why Every Small Business Should Document Their Content Marketing Strategy
As a small business owner, you’re likely involved in almost all aspects of your business — from legal and financial decisions to operations and client relations. While this keeps the business going, it makes it hard for you to stay on top of your content marketing. However, there is a way to make your content marketing more effective without adding much extra work to your full schedule. By planning and documenting your content marketing strategy, you increase efficiency and get better results from your content. You’ll create blog posts, website copy, and ebooks that build on each other and help you connect with your ideal audience and meet your business goals.
“A whopping chunk (58%) of B2B marketers rate their content strategy as merely moderately effective. Nearly half of those say their strategy struggles because they lack clear goals.”
A proven way to increase the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts is to document your content marketing strategy. When you take the time to step back and see the big picture of what you’re trying to achieve and how you plan on doing so, you lay the foundation for marketing success. Very few small businesses take this step. Imagine how well you will do with your content marketing if you become one of the few small businesses that do.
How a Documented Content Marketing Strategy Can Make a Difference
1 – It keeps you focused
When you lay out the goals for your content, determine who you’re trying to reach, and coordinate content topics so that they build on each other, you have created a clear path for your content creators. Each piece of content has a specific objective, publication date, and distribution plan. Your consistent content marketing efforts will continue to move your business forward.
On the other hand, if you only write a blog when you feel inspired or have an idea, there may be long periods without content. Those gaps are missed opportunities to provide helpful content for your ideal readers.
2 – You’ll be more efficient
When you take the time to lay out a schedule for the next few months, you set yourself up for more productive use of your time. You will know well ahead of time what you need to be working on, when it’s due, and where it will be posted. This allows you to manage your time better.
Save time with a content marketing strategy
3 – Increases engagement with your ideal reader
When you create a content marketing strategy and focus on addressing the pain points of your ideal clients, you will be providing content they want to read. Rather than using a random topic that you just came up with simply to get some content up on your site. This will generate better-quality leads.
4 – Your content will be more consistent
Your documented strategy will not only keep you on schedule but also help to maintain a consistent brand image through messaging, tone, and voice. The more consistent you are with your content marketing, the more trust you’ll build with your audience.
5 – You’ll know what’s working and what’s not
An important part of your documented content marketing strategy is measuring the results of your content. Did it perform as you expected? Maybe a topic you thought would resonate with your audience, missed the mark. With that new information, you can look at your upcoming schedule and decide if you need to make any changes. Over time, you’ll learn more about your ideal readers by continuously refining the content that best connects with your audience.
6 – It builds brand authority
Producing content that provides solutions for your target audience builds trust and credibility. When your expertise is helping them, they will turn to you for guidance on matters where you have previously demonstrated your knowledge. This becomes part of your professional reputation and helps to position you as a thought leader in your industry.
7 – You are more likely to achieve your goals
Studies show that writing your goals down increases the likelihood of achieving them. The powerful combination of documenting your goals and the process of thinking and planning involved in creating your strategy sears them into our minds.
“Vividly describing your goals in written form is strongly associated with goal success, and people who very vividly describe or picture their goals are anywhere from 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to successfully accomplish their goals than people who don’t.”
How to Create a Documented Content Marketing Strategy for Your Small Business
Step 1: Create a content mission statement
Your mission statement sums up your content marketing strategy in one concise sentence. It includes three key items:
Your target audience
Your topics
The benefit to your reader
Here’s a format you can use: We provide [target audience] with the latest insights on [topics relevant to target audience], helping them to [benefits for your readers].
The statement provides a broad overview of your strategy and keeps your content marketing efforts focused on the needs of your target audience. If you take no other steps to document your strategy, take this one: it will at least serve as an overall guide for your content creation team.
“65% of the most successful content marketers have a documented strategy vs. 14% of the least successful.”
Step 2: Identify your goals
Each piece of content you create should be produced with a specific goal in mind. For example, maybe your overall goal is to establish yourself as a subject matter expert in your field. The content you would create to do so could include more long-form content in your area of expertise, white papers and reports that allow you to showcase your knowledge, and case studies that demonstrate how your expertise helped a client.
Step 3: Create a persona for your ideal client
If you have already created a persona, then include that in your content marketing strategy. If you haven’t created one yet, it’s time to take an in-depth look at your ideal client. Include everything you know about them:
· Who are they? Include demographics such as their age, sex, job, etc.
· What are their pain points and challenges?
· What do they hope for? What are their fears?
· What platforms do they spend their time on?
· What type of content do they prefer?
When you create a persona, you are creating a fictitious person. For example, a health food store may create a persona like this:
Jeanette is 48 and works full-time as an advertising account representative. She goes to the gym 3 times per week and hikes with her husband on the weekend. She has a long commute on the train and doesn’t like to cook, but she still likes a quick, healthy meal. She fears that with a sedentary job, she’s not doing enough to stay healthy. She spends some time on LinkedIn and Instagram, but she feels guilty about how much time she spends on social media. She doesn’t have much time to read, so she typically prefers short content, but occasionally, if she finds an in-depth article that helps her, she’ll spend some time reading it.
Once you have established a persona, you can create content that will resonate with this individual (and others like her!).
Step 4: Audit the content you already have
If you already have a website, blog posts, reports, and ebooks, it’s time to review them. Use your analytics program to determine what content is performing well, which ones need to be updated, and if there are any gaps in your content. An audit provides an opportunity to improve, repurpose, or add to your current content. Think of this step as addressing the low-hanging fruit in your content marketing strategy.
Step 5: Select your topics
Look back to steps 1 and 2 (your mission statement and the business goals of your content) and step 3 (your persona and their pain points). Brainstorm to come up with 6 or 7 topics that will both help your reader and meet your business objectives.
A note about brainstorming topics: While I am leery of using AI too much for content creation, this is one area where it can be helpful. Make sure to tell it about your persona and what you are trying to achieve with your content and ask for some ideas for topics. Then refine it and ask for more suggestions. Keep providing more parameters and you will get better answers.
Step 6: Decide what format you’ll use and how you’ll distribute your content
Don’t limit yourself to just blog posts and website content. You can also create videos, infographics, case studies, and white papers. But always remember what your buyer persona prefers and where they’d like to get the content. Would they prefer to receive an email newsletter with case studies or view a short video on LinkedIn?
Step 7: Set up your content schedule
A schedule will help you manage your time better and create content more consistently. Create the schedule for a few months for best results but stay flexible. You may need to adjust your content schedule if your priorities change. Include the following in your schedule:
· The topics you selected
· The date you plan on publishing the content
· If you work with a team, indicate who will be working on the content
· The platforms you will use to distribute the content
Step 8: Review the performance of your content
This is the critical step that small businesses tend to overlook. By taking the time to go over the analytics of your content, you will learn what type of content is truly connecting with your ideal readers. Armed with that knowledge, you can continue to refine your future content to build on your prior successes. Some of the metrics that you might find helpful include:
· Website/page traffic
· Engagement with the content
· The quality of the leads generated
· Bounce rate (an indicator of how long site visitors spent with a piece of content)
· Conversion rates
If your website host doesn’t provide these metrics, there are several other free tools available to obtain this information (Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Matomo to name a few).
Step 9: Compile your content marketing strategy
You’ve done all the leg work, and now it’s time to bring it all together into one document. Take all the information you gathered in the previous steps, put it in one document, and print it up.
You’re done, right?
Not quite. A written content marketing strategy is not a “one-and-done” type of document. It is a flexible document that you need to keep near you as you generate content and keep reviewing it. If something has changed in your business environment, it would be a good idea to revisit your strategy and revise it to address the recent changes. If you rigidly stick to your schedule, you may miss the new opportunities provided by the changing conditions.
Finally, if as a small business owner, you feel overwhelmed after reading this post, consider hiring a content editor to help you with the process. An editor will ensure that your content marketing strategy is aligned with your business objectives and your target audience to achieve the best results from your content. Your editor will also polish your content so that each piece further enhances your image as a subject matter expert in your field.
If you’re looking for a content editor to help with your small business content marketing strategy, let’s chat and see if we’d be a good fit to work together.