Content marketing is extremely important to your business’s future success. High-quality content marketing helps:
- Establishes a trusting relationship between you and your target market
- Drastically boosts conversion rates
- Helps you build a solid and engaged social media audience
- Improves your audiences’ retention and drives repeat business
- Improves your search engine ranking
- Creates lead generation
- Establishes you as an industry authority
The challenge many business owners face, particularly as they prepare to launch their business is that they don’t know how to get started with content marketing. If you are currently mystified about how to generate content or confused as to what type of content you need, keep reading.
Set Goals and Keep Things Simple
One of the biggest mistakes business owners make when they’re getting started with content marketing is creating content and hoping for the best. While there have been instances where this works, more often than not, the result is inconsistent content that fails to generate any real results. It usually doesn’t take long before the business owner is both frustrated and burned out.
Setting measurable goals for your content marketing is the best way to avoid this particular situation. Have a specific goal in mind for each piece of marketing content you intend to create. Measurable goals include:
- Boosting your overall search engine ranking by creating content that is loaded with high value inbound/outbound links
- Attracting members of your target market
- Educating members of your target market
- Gaining social media followers
- Improving social media engagement
Having a final goal in mind for each piece of content marketing material you create helps you determine the tone, topic, and style the piece needs to use to help it achieve both your long and short term marketing goals.
Avoid the urge to create widely complicated goals for your marketing material. In the long run, it’s best to keep things simple. Also remember that marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. When you’re measuring the effectiveness of a particular piece of content, look at how it has performed over several weeks/months.
Measuring your Content’s ROI
Setting goals is important when you’re getting started with content marketing. Determining whether the material is meeting your goals is equally important. Measuring the ROI of your marketing material isn’t always easy. Obtaining the ROI of your content marketing requires that you:
- Determining the cost of the marketing material
- Determining your distribution cost of the marketing material
- Calculating the overall return of the material (this could be the number of clicks the CTA received, increase in web traffic, improved social media engagement, etc.)
- Subtracting the return from the total investment
Great Marketing Content Takes Time
It doesn’t matter if you’re putting together a marketing video, posting pictures to your business’s social media site, or creating a written post for your blog, creating effective and high-quality marketing content takes time. This is especially true when you’re first starting. However long you think it will take to create the piece of marketing content you want to you use, you should automatically double the amount of time you give yourself. Budgeting extra time gives you a chance to double-check your data, tighten up the content, and have a few other people review the work so that you’re posting high-quality content that will achieve your marketing goals.
Determining the amount of content you need is a bit confusing. You need enough content to attract your target market to your website, and the content needs to be updated frequently enough that it not only gives consumers an excuse to visit your website over and over again but also encourages web browsers to frequently explore your website and update your SEO. Before launching your website, give yourself a few months to create marketing content that will go live when you’re ready to launch. Once your website is fully operational, create a content marketing schedule, and stick to it.
Focus on Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey
You’re marketing material should act like a sales funnel. You should have content that guides your target market through each stage of the buyer’s journey. This journey includes:
- The awareness stage where you alert the consumer to a deficiency in their life and explain how your product/service can fill the void
- The consideration stage where the consumer judges just how big the deficiency is and explores the pros and cons of resolving the issue
- The decision stage where the consumer either buys your product/service or moves on
Knowing which stage of the buyer’s journey each piece of content is dedicated to helps you determine what amount of information/background the content needs as well as the type of CTA you should use at the piece’s conclusion.
The bulk of your content marketing material will likely be focused on the awareness and consideration stage of the buyer’s journey.
Consider Outsourcing your Content Marketing
One of the hardest things business owners like yourself face when it comes to getting started with content marketing is being honest about your strengths and weaknesses. Creating a content marketing strategy and manufacturing the necessary material is time-consuming and requires a great deal of marketing experience. Trying to handle it all on your own could do more damage than good. In the long run, it might be in the best interest of your business to explore the possibility of having your content marketing needs outsourced.
If you decide that outsourcing your content marketing is the right thing to do, make sure you choose a company or individual who has a solid background in marketing and understands your target market. Make sure you sit down and discuss your long and short term content marketing goals with them before they start creating the first piece of content you’ll use on your website.
Contact Brand Syntax Today!
Brand Syntax has the software needed to help you business establish, clarify, launch, and measure the marketing strategies needed to make your business stand out from the competition. The software is easy to install and use. It gives your business the marketing edge it needs to thrive in this highly competitive world.
Contact us to learn how Brand Syntax will help your business consistently earn an outstanding profit.
