Small Business Essential Content Marketing Checklist – As content marketing continues to gain popularity, simply creating blogs and social media posts is not enough to impact the bottom line.
To be successful with content, you need to develop a comprehensive and holistic strategy. Ultimately, this will allow you to attract and engage a clearly defined audience and, ultimately, generate beneficial customer action.
Small Business Essential Content Marketing Checklist
By following the in-depth guide below, you’ll map out the key steps needed to create a solid content marketing strategy for your business.
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A strategy is a plan to get where you want to be. So, what is a specific content marketing strategy? Let’s distinguish it from some similar industry terms:
We found out that 40% of businesses do not have a documented strategy. But why is it important to map out and document your content marketing strategy?
It helps you move from chaotic content creation to creating an organized system with specific goals, success metrics and processes for continuous improvement.
Of the 1,500 marketers we surveyed for our State of Content Marketing report, 78% who believe their content marketing strategy will be more effective by 2021 have documented their strategy.
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An effective Content Marketing strategy must have these five key elements to succeed: audience personas, brand positioning, media value proposition, business case and action plan. Let’s take a look at why these elements are important and how you can start implementing each of them.
You can’t really tell your brand’s story if you don’t know who you’re telling your story to. So your first step is to identify the audience you are trying to target with your content. There are several ways to do this:
Once you have your audience in mind, you can use our free Personas tool to write them.
You want to be able to clearly and concisely communicate who your audience is to all stakeholders and everyone involved in a brand message.
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A clearly defined brand and product position will help you provide a consistent experience for your audience and create the right image across all your content marketing channels.
A brand story is a summary of your company’s history, mission, purpose and values. This will help you choose the right direction of your content marketing strategy, identify the right messages and topics to translate into your content.
Use this free brand story template to complete this step and document your efforts. This move will be especially beneficial for small businesses and startups that can leverage their unique backgrounds and identities.
To establish your brand as a trusted content publisher, define your owned media value proposition. This will help you find a point of differentiation in your content strategy and compete more effectively. To do this, answer the following questions:
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Another important thing to include in your strategy is your content marketing mission statement. It should summarize why you are creating content and provide information about who will benefit from it.
For example, ‘Our content is where digital marketing managers find multimedia information about SEO and content marketing so they can help their companies grow through organic channels.’
Providing value to your audience is an important part of a successful content strategy. But in addition to attracting new readers and followers, content marketing needs to drive your business forward.
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Identify the business goals your company needs to achieve and learn how content marketing can bring your company closer to those goals. How much resources do you need to invest in your content strategy and what results do you want to achieve?
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A documented business case will help you better understand the benefits, costs and risks of implementing a content marketing strategy in your company and convince decision makers of its value for the company.
Finally, you’ll list your top content marketing campaigns and deck projects for the year and add them to your content plan. Think about how they can achieve the content marketing goals you previously set for your business.
Doing this will allow you to think through each step of the content strategy. Be sure to include the following information:
To decide on your best content formats and channels, you need to look at your historical content performance and further analyze your audience, which we’ll discuss next.
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We’ve listed the key elements to include in your content strategy. Now, let’s see how you can do this and develop effective content step by step.
Long-term planning allows you to anticipate challenges and allocate resources efficiently. Putting these seven steps in place will help you develop and implement a content strategy that aligns with your marketing and business goals.
As mentioned before, you need to document your plan. This can be a slide, Google doc, spreadsheet, or other format that works for your business model and can be easily shared with all key stakeholders.
While your buyers will be the basis for your content strategy, your audience isn’t just buyers. An audience includes people who start interacting with your brand before they plan to buy.
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It’s important to deliver content that engages your potential customers before they enter the buyer’s journey.
In addition, being a valuable source of information will help you build a community of brand advocates who will spread the word and reinforce your thought leadership.
We sometimes call these people “readers,” emphasizing that it’s all about providing value to your audience versus pushing your products or services.
Red Bull is a great example of a brand that creates content for audiences, not buyers. Red Bull’s owned media does not focus on its product; it covers topics that the audience is interested in, such as extreme sports and once-in-a-lifetime experiences. You can easily identify the target audience – young and adventurous, sports enthusiasts and active lifestyles.
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These content offers help them recognize the brand and encourage loyalty beyond the purchase of their beverages.
Red Bull demonstrates the importance of integrating your brand into every piece of content and every message sent to your audience. Remember your mission, where you stand, and why you’re sharing content in the first place. Creating this unique voice and attitude will help you stand out in the age of “content shock.”
An empathy map is a collaborative tool that allows you to better understand your target audience. Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur describe this method in their book “Business Model Generation”.
The empathy map is based on a comprehensive approach: By adopting the perspective or point of view of your customers, you can step back and improve their experience based on what they think, feel, see or hear.
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The “Works to be done” framework is an easy way to understand your customers’ needs and find the reason why they might turn to your brand. It organizes your entire content marketing strategy from the jump.
The idea is to put yourself in the prospect’s shoes and identify the jobs your customer is trying to accomplish (what your customer wants to accomplish in a given situation).
Example: When I work, I spend a lot of time to complete all my tasks, so I want to find a tool to improve my time management so that I can spend more time with my family.
In this example, “a tool to improve time management” is what you’re selling, and “more family time” is what the customer is buying.
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Remember that your prospects don’t need your product and content just like that; they aim to improve their personal or professional lives by solving their problems.
Once you understand the prospect’s current problem, the solution they need, and the outcome they envision, you can create compelling content that will transform them from newcomers to your brand advocates.
Such metrics can be primary: for example, revenue generated by content marketing or organic traffic and the number of leads. Others may be secondary: for example organic traffic, rankings and shares.
To establish a benchmark, analyze your analytics dashboard (for example, in Google Analytics) and check how your content is performing against those goals.
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Remember that we all live in a world with limited resources. Your goals and plans are closely related to the available budget and capacity of your team. So, be sure to consider this when setting your goals.
According to our research, brand awareness, attracting traffic and generating leads remain key content marketing goals in 2022.
But we encourage you to always look at the bigger picture and see content marketing as an important part of your overall marketing strategy. An example of a general goal could be: “By 2022, we want to achieve a 20% increase in revenue generated from organic content and generate 15,000 MQL with a budget of $30,000.”
Pro tip: Consider the buyer’s journey when setting your content strategy goals. For example, in B2B, the sales cycle tends to be longer than in B2C. Therefore, multi-touch attribution can be more optimal when analyzing your content performance and defining your KPIs (key performance indicators).
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Let’s take a look at some progressive targeting frameworks that can help you with this step. While you may be more comfortable with traditional goal-setting frameworks like SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound) goals, flexibility is key to creating realistic benchmarks. Consider using the
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