How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy with Limited Resources (And the tools to do it)
Time and resources – the two most evasive elements of a small business entrepreneur’s life. Running a large scale and expensive marketing affair is not an option for most businesses, which is why pulling in smart and nifty tactics becomes a necessity. To hack your content marketing strategy, you could use a combination of sure-fire ideas and free online resources (tools).
Improvise research with digital communities
Market research is expensive, in terms of both time and monetary investments. The goal is to understand which questions your audience is asking, and which ones to answer with your content.
While hacks can’t substitute market research interviews or surveys, you could take quick peeks into “question hubs” or communities that are destinations for queries and information to identify the trending questions in your niche. Quora, with its 180,000 strong Monthly Active Users is a great resource for keyword based searches.
Identify your questions and brilliantly answer them with your content, but remember to connect it to your business and add a clear call to action in the piece or you’d be simply creating content and not marketing via content.
Employ a powerful tool to curate compelling content
In times where content is produced by the millions each day (2 million blogs according to Marketing Profs), discovery and presentation of content becomes just as important as creation of it.
This is great news for small businesses. Content creation is costly and time consuming, and curation could help you fill the engagement gap on social media while also helping you build authority, garner your audience’s gratitude and trust.
Use an app (You couldn’t sift through 2 mil posts anyway, not when you have a business to run). DrumUp is an interesting app that surfaces brilliant social media content recommendations.
The interesting part is you single click the recommendations to schedule or store them in your own super secret and super formidable content reserve for you to use at a future date.
Create content that sets you apart from the GenPop
I mean general population without the prison reference. “Stand out” is a marketing cliché, but how does one really make it happen?
The answer goes back to the most important element of a content marketing strategy – your unique value proposition. Describe your business in a way that can’t be matched by any other. Be uncommon. You don’t have to invent something, just state what you do better than others.
While your company may not be #1 at something, maybe the waiting period is shorter? Think anything that your customers can gain from choosing you over your competitors.
Another implementable idea is the content format. Non-textual content formats are taking precedence over plain text.
Get with the times. It isn’t hard to create decent visual content with the help of tools like Canva and Google Slides.
Develop a simple but smart distribution plan
Curating and creating excellent content isn’t enough. This is what draws the line between a content strategy and a content marketing strategy. The marketing aspect should share a fair amount of the aspect ratio of that picture.
If your content doesn’t travel on social media, it won’t return a good amount of leads conversions. The sales conversion funnel explains that with each step your numbers dwindle and if you begin with low numbers, you will finish with even lower numbers.
Distribute your content on social media and in relevant communities. @mention or tag sources, researchers and resources you have used to curate and create content.
Not only is it great to give credit, but this is also a nice way to initiate relationships with people online. Nothing is more valuable than social capital.
Monitor, analyze and adapt
The fittest survives. Natural selection applies to marketing equally. Unless you have feelers out in your environment, sense the repercussions of your content and re-structure it accordingly, you won’t reach your marketing potential.
There are hosts of social media analytics tools that you could explore to monitor your progress. Quintly is one such tool that provides you with “competitive benchmarking” which is basically a report of your analytics in comparison with competitors’. You could also use the app’s visual representations of data to help make sound decisions in even lesser time.
It is all about the little shortcuts you discover and the resources that you create for yourself. The more you explore, the more options you will find and the closer you will get to building the best possible content marketing strategy for yourself.
Disha Dinesh is a Content Writer at Godot Media, a leading content agency. Her interests include social media and content marketing. When she’s not writing, she’s on the hunt for social media trends and inspiration.