Once upon a time, it may have been the norm to publish a blog post every other week, or post a random photo on social media that had nothing to do with your business just for the sake of posting. The thing is, however, if content marketing is a method you’re using to promote your brand or business, this kind of haphazard and irrelevant posting just isn’t going to work. No matter how interesting your blog post is or how cute that picture of a dog doing ‘doga’ (dog yoga) is, if you’re using content marketing, you need to have a ‘why’, which is where having a content strategy comes in.
A content marketing strategy is vital, especially for small businesses, as it can help you improve your marketing results and ROI by helping you understand why you’re using a certain type of content, who you’re trying to reach, the kind of content you’re creating, your goals, the channels you want to leverage and more. Having a cohesive, comprehensive and documented content strategy is one of the most strategic ways to guide your company’s marketing efforts to ensure you achieve the results you desire. Here are some additional reasons as to why having a content strategy is important for your small business.
It Makes Creating Content Easier
Do you struggle to come up with great blog ideas? Do you know what type of content you should be sharing on social media for maximum results? If not, don’t worry, you’re not the only one. There’s no denying that content creation can be a tricky thing to master, but when you have a solid content strategy, it becomes a lot easier. Having a content strategy helps you begin to understand the ‘why’ around creating content, which then makes it much easier to start coming up with ideas, topics and inspiration for content creation. Your content strategy should be based on your buyers, where they are in the buying journey and what information they’re looking for.
It Helps You Target a Relevant Audience
Do you know who your ideal customers are? Your ideal customers are the people who are most likely to buy what you sell. One of the benefits of content marketing is that it helps you better target your buyers. Furthermore, a content strategy will ensure you create content that is relevant to their wants, needs and challenges. At the end of the day, the point of content marketing is to provide the right content, to the right people and at the right time. A comprehensive content strategy can help you do just that.
It Creates Deeper Connections
An effective content strategy should create a connection between your business and your customers. This connection is created when your buyers feel like you understand them, and there is an emotional connection between your buyers and your brand. We know that emotions play an important role in the consumer’s decision process, which is why a content strategy is so important. This is because it’s tailored to the interests of consumers, which empowers your business and makes it stand out from the competition as more relevant and relatable.
It Helps You Stay Consistent
Even though images of dogs doing yoga is cute and popular at the moment, if your business is all about selling bikes, this kind of content is not relevant. Now if it was a cute image of a dog on a bike, well, that’s another story. The thing to remember is having a lot of disconnected and random pieces of content posted across various channels will only confuse your audience. This also goes for using a different tone of voice and publishing irrelevant content. Furthermore, posting inconsistently makes you look less reliable to your audience. Your audience will visit your website, blog or social media channels and expect to see fresh, new and relevant content, regularly. They’ll also expect the same type of quality content centering on similar topics. Having a content strategy will greatly help you meet your audiences’ expectations by improving your content creation consistency and delivery.
It Will Strengthen Your Business Brand
The brand of your business is vital. That is, how potential customers perceive your brand is extremely important in securing them as customers. Having a solid content strategy that guides your content creation and delivery can greatly help you strengthen the brand of your business and how it’s perceived by online consumers. You control the narrative of your story and how the online world will see it, and having a content strategy in place will help you get your story out there in a way that is strategic and impactful.
It Saves You Time and Energy
Everyone knows that content marketing can be incredibly time consuming and energy-draining, but it doesn’t have to be. Understanding how to create content, knowing what types of content work best for your business, understanding what your audience wants and having a streamlined process thanks to having a defined content strategy can greatly help you reduce the time and energy you invest in content marketing.