Content marketing is one of the many options you have in the digital marketing world. It’s a fantastic technique that can help entrepreneurs increase awareness about their brand and themselves, drive organic traffic to their websites and into their sales funnels, and maybe even gain customers in the long run.
Here is how new entrepreneurs can do content marketing more efficiently:
1. Create meaningful content
One of the most important unwritten rules about content marketing is that your content should provide value to the people consuming it. Your main goal with content marketing should be to provide value to your audience. Start creating content with that simple notion in mind, and you’ll do wonders.
You’ll need a minimal marketing budget if you’re producing great content. Word of mouth will be all the marketing you need, at least at the start.
Meaningful content that provides real value to your audience will perform far better than lower-quality content. High-quality content is much more likely to be shared by your audience.
2. Avoid grammatical mistakes
Grammatical errors are off-putting.
As a new entrepreneur, your reputation is on the line. The internet is ruthless, and one wrong step could result in you becoming a viral meme.
With that said, all of us are going to make mistakes, especially in the beginning.
Avoiding grammatical mistakes will help you sound more professional and authentic. If you adopt good habits at the start of your career, you’ll find it much easier to continue following those habits in the future.
Even if you’re a little weak at writing content, most word editor software come with a spell and grammar checker. Grammarly is another excellent tool that you should use to make your writing more readable and professional.
3. Understand your target audience.
Understanding your target audience is a vital part of content marketing.
If you start producing content without paying attention to the preferences of your audience, you’re not going to make much headway.
Before you start producing content, it would be best if you made a couple of buyer personas.
A buyer’s persona is a fictional representation or depiction of your target audience. With a detailed description of a person in mind, it would be easier to determine what kind of content a particular audience would like.
It is best to use data about your audience to build your buyer personas, but if you don’t have the data, you can always make a few educated guesses.
4. Make data-driven decisions.
Most organizations have been collecting data about their business for quite some time now, but only a hand full of these businesses are using that data to make decisions. Either you are collecting data through live chat app or emails or analytics, you should always put it to use in making more sound decisions.
Data-driven decisions allow you to replace the guessing and estimation with facts and figures.
The first thing that you need to do is to collect data about your business. Using Google Analytics on your website is a great place to start. All you need is to copy-paste a piece of HTML code on your website.
Social media platforms provide you with superb analytics that you could use to make future decisions.
Also, Google Trends tells you the popularity of different trends, which can be helpful if your business relies heavily upon patterns.
Analyze the data available to you and make better choices. Make data-driven decisions to ensure the longevity of your entrepreneurial journey.
5. Distribute your content on multiple platforms
As an entrepreneur, you need to identify where your target audience likes to spend the bulk of its time. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, LinkedIn et al. There are so many platforms to choose from.
So what is the best platform to distribute content on?
Everywhere. Distribute your content everywhere.
In the online world, you don’t want to miss out on an opportunity to engage with your existing or potential customers.
The best way to distribute content is to shape and trim your content in a way that corresponds with the kind of posts that are prevalent on the platform.
6. Make a content marketing plan
Without a detailed plan that lists down all your content marketing activities, you’re most likely going to miss your deadlines.
There are several things that your content marketing should include.
The first thing that your content marketing plan should have is the goals and objectives that you hope to achieve by content marketing.
The second thing is a proper strategy that details how you’re going to reach your goals.
The third thing that your content marketing plan needs is a schedule that you need to follow.
The fourth thing is to know your audience and create audience personas.
These are the main things without which your content marketing strategy would be incomplete. You can add more stuff to the list as you see fit.
7. Use high-quality images and videos.
No one has the time to read a bunch of text anymore. People have short attention spans, and you’re only going to have their attention for a moment or two. In that case, you’re going to need to go all out and make your content stand out from your competition.
High-quality images and videos have become a foundation of today's content marketing. Most people find extracting information from images more comfortable than reading loads of text. Click To TweetInfographics are an amazing way to get your message across in a more digestible form. Use colors and designs that match your business, so that people have an easier time associating the content with your business.
Always make sure to have some form of branding in your content, especially images and videos. Otherwise, people are going to steal their content and re-brand it as their own.
Video is also becoming an increasingly necessary form of content that businesses and entrepreneurs need to cash in on.
Making a video now is easier than ever. All you need is a smartphone and a visualization of the kind of content that you want to make.
8. Consistency is key
Producing quality content is a laborious process. It takes a lot of effort and time to produce high-quality content that can provide value to your audience.
In the race for pushing out more content, it is a possibility that you might choose quantity over quality.
In my opinion, entrepreneurs should maintain consistency. Your audience would have grown accustomed to a particular level of content they expect from you.
Over time, you’ll establish a following if you’re consistent with the type of content you’re producing, and gradually improving the quality of your content. Your audience is going to increase rapidly.
The whole purpose of content marketing is to promote a positive brand image. With consistency in your content, your startup will grow and prosper. Click To TweetFailing to meet that standard would lose you the loyalty of your audience.
9. Incorporate relevant keywords into your content
No discussion about content marketing can be complete without the mention of keywords.
Keywords are the phrases and words that people enter into a search engine.
Keyword research is a vital part of content marketing. Before creating content of any sort, it would be in your best interest to figure out what your audience is into.
There are numerous ways to do keyword research. Using a tool like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs will help you identify keywords that your audience is searching for.
If your target audience is searching for apples, and you’re creating content about oranges, you’re not going to get views from the audience that you want.
Incorporating relevant keywords into your content will help tell search engines that your content is relevant to what your audience is searching for.
But be warned. Your first priority should be to provide value to your audience. Stuffing keywords into your content is not a good practice and can be penalized by search engines.
10. Learn from others, but don’t copy
Marketing is such an enormous field that not one person is going to have all the answers. For a new entrepreneur, it can be a little intimidating.
Learning from people who are giants in the industry is a high starting point. Leaders like Gary Vaynerchuck, Seth Godin, Grant Cardone, Neil Patel, are a great place to start learning about business and marketing.
As a content marketer, you can’t expect to know everything. With time, you’ll need to learn new strategies and incorporate them into your content marketing plan.
Technology changes rapidly, but the behavior of your audience can change even faster. You need to be in a position to know what to do in a given scenario.
After a while, you’ll have enough knowledge and information to come up with your own content marketing strategy.
Make sure to learn from everyone, but don’t start copying. Nobody likes a copycat. Have a unique voice and style if you want to stand apart from other entrepreneurs.
11. Make your content easily shareable
One of your objectives in content marketing should be to provide so much value to your content consumers that they end up sharing your content within their circle of people.
To make this happen, you need to make the share option on your website prominent and never too out of reach for your content consumer.
One thing that you could do is to have a floating button on your website that can share to different social media platforms.
A mistake that many marketers make is that they focus on the content creation of content marketing but forget about the marketing part.
That way, your content will be viewed by more and more people.
By providing value with your content and making it easy to share, your audience is more likely to want to share your content within their inner circles. Click To TweetA lot of savvy marketers are using the 80-20 principle. These marketers are spending only 20% of their time creating content while the remaining 80% is spent on marketing the content.
12. Update old content
Creating new content that provides value to your audience is great, but updating old content is also necessary for multiple reasons.
There is something about new content that search engines love.
Over time, you can expect to see the accuracy of your content declining. Things change, and all you can do is keep up with the change. By updating your content, you’re making sure that your content is relevant and provides value to the content consumers.
By updating your old content, you could remove any broken backlinks in the material. Updating also allows you to include links to new resources that are substantially better than the old ones.
If you stop updating your content, you’re going to lose the apparent SEO benefits. But apart from that, your audience expects your content to be relevant.
Live up to the expectations of your audience and
13. Engagement is necessary
Engaging with your audience is an essential part of content marketing.
By engaging with your audience, you are building a long-lasting relationship with your audience.
As an entrepreneur, engaging with your audience is a great way to increase your popularity. It also shows that you’re human, and that you’ve taken the time out of your busy schedule to respond to other people.
Engagement also helps with conversions. If you make an actual effort to help your audience, you’ll end up with a loyal following who would be more willing to make a purchase.
There are a few things that you could do to increase engagement:
- Ask people to write down in the comments if they have any questions that they might want to ask.
- Share other people’s content that you think might provide value to your audience.
- Use visual content, including images and videos.
Conclusion:
Content marketing is an excellent way for entrepreneurs to get started with their digital marketing journey. It is a technique that doesn’t require vast amounts of capital upfront.
As a new entrepreneur, it is understandable that you might not have a lot of resources to work with. The best thing that you could do is to start small but gradually scale up and produce content that will help you and your business grow in the future.
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