When done correctly, content marketing remains one of the most effective ways to gain attention and generate quality leads for your business. Do it right, and you can expect a great return on investment because of increased traffic, sales from leads, and better SEO.
Despite what you may have heard, providing successful content marketing for your business need not be cost-prohibitive. Your videos and content can pull in an audience for your small business or startup, even on a shoestring budget. Here’s how:
Research and Create a Strategy
Creating a content marketing strategy is easier than you think. Set realistic goals for your campaign based on the research on how your product or service helps your customers and how it measures against your competitors.
Research the best platforms for your content according to the age of the leads you want to attract. For example, Instagram’s users mostly range between 18 – 34, whereas Baby Boomers and Gen Z prefer Facebook and YouTube. Therefore, aim to publish content on the platform your desired audiences use most and create a calendar with all your campaign details.
Next, work on the SEO that will boost your search engine rankings and see how you can combine calls to action and lead magnets into your content. Again, a well-planned strategy can often bring better results than a pay-per-click campaign.
Finally, key performance indicators are vital metrics required to analyze the results of your content marketing efforts. Use free marketing tools like Google Analytics to help you with this.
Maximize Your Content
Content marketing is about giving your audience quality content that produces effective results. Therefore, when planning each piece for your campaign, aim for quality rather than quantity. For example, don’t waste hours of your time trying to create a boring blog post; instead, pay someone to create a wow one that you can use in several ways.
Besides publishing it on your blog, you can also take the content from your single post, repurpose it to your benefit, and publish it on social media, etc. The money spent on that single post makes it more economical to turn it into a podcast, slideshow, etc.
When you have video content, cut it into smaller pieces, and share it on social media in small snippets.
With that in mind, you can also repurpose older content similarly or add a fresher spin.
Furthermore, create content like short videos or share a story as you go about your busy day. Besides requiring a tiny budget, these give your audiences authentic content to enjoy and share.
Make Sure Your Topics are Relevant
Content is expensive to produce, so always choose your topics wisely. Of course, researching keywords and looking for topic ideas is the first way to do this. If you find it hard to decide on ideas and topics for your content marketing, you could look to the competition for some or check out what online communities are saying.
Additionally, depending on your audience, adding a twist to current events can give you ample content that reflects their needs.
Get Your Content Seen
Great content needs to be viewed by as many people as possible, especially those in your target audience. Once you put your content out there, promoting it is the best way to ensure everyone sees it. Encourage views by linking content back to your website, but also encourage audiences to see your content by using tweets, newsletters, Facebook posts, and email blasts to get more mentions, shares, and views.
Importance of Customer Retention
Returning customers make up a massive share of business revenue; the same applies to e-commerce stores. After all, it is cheaper to maintain an existing customer than attract a new one. Therefore, don’t miss the opportunity to use your content marketing as part of your customer retention strategy.
You can do this by sharing blogs with them on newsletters or emails with little or no money. Also, use your social media to combine your content marketing and social media strategy effectively.
Remain Authentic
Besides creating lead generation, content marketing is also about building trust. Therefore, you need to remain authentic by creating connections through relatable content. Build a consistent presence, and don’t give up quickly because it takes time to see the results – but they will come!
Takeaway
Effective content marketing is possible on a budget with good planning. First, research and create quality content, then use what you have learned to maximize, ensuring you get the most out of it on a shoestring budget.
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