Content marketing is one of the most important and valuable marketing tools that a small business has at its disposal. Compared to other forms of marketing and advertising available to small businesses, content marketing can be affordable, accessible in-house and, when developed and published properly, incredibly powerful and effective. Content marketing also serves to generate brand awareness, build on your brand identity and establish your business as an authority in your industry.
Effective & Powerful Content Marketing
As powerful as content marketing can be, it’s entirely possible that the content posted to your blog and social media accounts isn’t setting the world on fire as a marketing tool, which in the vast majority of cases is to be expected. The success of content marketing directly correlates to the size of your online audience, and online audiences – especially those grown “organically,” without the use of paid advertisements – aren’t grown overnight. While the ultimate goal of your content marketing should be to funnel readers back to your website and convert them into paying customers, it’s also important to ensure that your content is as effective as it can be in both attracting and engaging your readers. By boosting reader engagement, which can include likes, reposts and comments on your content, you can help ensure that your content is both interesting and compelling enough to grab the attention of your readers.
Get To Know Your Target Market
The first step towards boosting reader engagement is a familiar one, at least to regular readers of this blog! As with the vast majority of other marketing initiatives, it’s important to establish the demographic makeup of your target market – simply put, you can’t improve reader engagement if you don’t know who your readers are! If you haven’t done so already, sit down and write out who you’re actually trying to reach with your marketing, and make sure that the content you’re producing is geared towards grabbing the interest and attention of that market. Ask yourself, “What does my target market need? What do they want?” Specifically, in reference to your content marketing, “What would my target audience actually want to read online?” Too many small businesses who produce their own content make the mistake of producing content they want to read, rather than content their target audience would want to read. It’s an unfortunate fact that your readers probably aren’t going to let you know when your content is unappealing or uninteresting – they’ll simply remain silent and eventually stop following your accounts.
Translate Unique
Understanding your target marketing isn’t just important for the purpose of creating appealing content, it’s also vital to bridging the divide between your business and your target market and establishing a relationship with your readers, even if they aren’t eventually converted into customers. Your business is unique in some way, and that uniqueness is already enshrined in your brand and the associated branding elements. In order for you to bridge this gap and create a relationship with your readers through engaging content, you must translate that uniqueness into unique content marketing. Don’t just write about what you think your target market will want to read; instead, write about that subject from a perspective or in a way that is unique to you and your business.
In our next post, we will discuss specific ways that you can put these concepts and ideas into practice, boosting your social media engagement and converting more readers into clients and customers.