5 Content Tips That Grow Your Business

How Content Marketing Enhances Your Overall Marketing Strategy

Quality content supports your overall marketing strategy and business objectives, fueling growth. Though it might be fun to make the leap to a new platform (hello, Threads) or join in the latest trend (we see you, Barbie memes), neither of those activities will guarantee results.

Remember that content marketing is a long game. The chances of a prospect being persuaded to buy by a single blog or social media post are next to zero. What’s important is having a clear marketing strategy, defined goals, and consistency.

If you want to improve your content strategy and grow your business, we recommend getting back to the basics. In this blog post, we’ll cover our top 5 tips that will bolster your strategy so you can win the content marketing game. 

5 Content Creation Tips to Improve Your Content Strategy and Grow Your Business

Your content strategy must have a solid foundation to keep up the momentum long-term. By dedicating time and attention to these 5 tips now, you’re setting your future marketing efforts up for success.

1) Know Your Audience and Have a Strategy

Does the thought of niching down frighten you? We get it. It seems counterintuitive that focusing on a smaller, specific audience is more effective than speaking to everyone. Remember this: If you’re speaking to everyone, you’re speaking to no one.

Spend time getting to know your audience. Who are your customers? What do they have in common? Does your business serve the same market as your competitors? Who is browsing your website, and where are they coming from? Answering these questions will help you develop your ideal customer profiles around which you develop your content strategy. 

Once you have defined your target audience, you will know their pain points and where they go to find answers to the questions they are asking. These key pieces of information should influence your content strategy. Create content tailored to your target audience and for the different stages of the customer journey, and then share it on the channels they’re already on.

2) Be Where Your Audience Is

The movie Field of Dreams really had us believing, “If you build it, they will come.” Boy, were we wrong!

After getting to know your audience, you now know which channels you should focus on. By being where your ideal customers are, you are providing value and adding a positive touch point in the customer journey that helps keep them moving forward.

There is one caveat: Don’t try to immediately be everywhere your target audience is. Don’t overextend yourself when you don’t have to. Focus on a content distribution strategy that meets your prospects where they’re at on a consistent basis that’s sustainable for you. You’ll see better results that way than if you spread yourself too thin across multiple channels–you can add more channels later if you have the appropriate resources.

Wondering how you select the best distribution channel for your content? Go back to the customer research you did, and answer these questions: What does your ideal customer do in their downtime? What media are they consuming and when? What websites and/or apps are they visiting or using regularly? Now take that information and build your content distribution plan around it. This will help you deliver the right message at the right time on the right channel.

3) Focus on Your Brand: Stay Consistent and Don’t Forget Your Differentiators

Curt Anderson of B2Btail wrote a whole book called Stop Being the Best Kept Secret. That such a book had to be written should tell you how often businesses forget to focus on what makes their brand special.

You might think there’s nothing special about your businesses or that you don’t really do anything different from your competitors, but that’s just not true. McDonald’s and Burger King both sell burgers and fries, yet they each have their own devoted following. Why? They embrace what makes their brand, well, their brand. And you should do that too! Take whatever it is that sets you apart from your competition, and bake it into your content. This will help your message break through the digital noise.

Your brand is what helps people remember you. No doubt you can recognize McDonald’s golden arches from the highway. No doubt you know you can “have it your way” at Burger King. By using branding to differentiate themselves from each other, McDonald’s and Burger King also help diners choose between them when they’re in the consideration stage of the customer journey. Use your branding consistently across your content, and you will begin to build brand recognition like McDonald’s and Burger King.

4) Find What Resonates and Do More of That

Our first 3 tips will take you a long way in improving your content strategy, but don’t stop there! Your content strategy should be ever-evolving.

Do this by experimenting. Diversify your content types (don’t reinvent the wheel though–be sure to repurpose your existing content!) and use analytics to see what’s resonating with your audience. What is the data telling you? If you get more engagement on LinkedIn than you do on Instagram, perhaps you should give more attention to your audience there. If short-form video content outperforms static imagery, how can you work to incorporate more of that into your content calendar?

Returning to the data and responding to your ideal customers by producing more of the content they want helps keep your focus centered on the customer, which in turn will improve performance.

5) Share Testimonials and Case Studies 

When developing your content strategy, don’t forget to include testimonials and case studies! Testimonials can sometimes be a challenge to get, and case studies can be more time-consuming to write. (We can help you with that!) But these content types go a long way in building trust with your target audience.

Take a moment to think about how you make buying decisions in your own life. Maybe you go straight to online reviews. Or maybe you crowdsource product information from your Facebook friends. Perhaps you text a friend to get their opinion. The experiences of others matter to you and have the power to influence your purchases. 

Testimonials and case studies serve a similar purpose for your prospects. They’re also a way to stay customer-focused because you’re giving them content they need to help them make a decision. Case studies are especially helpful to potential customers sourcing expensive products or services. They are real-life examples these prospects can identify with. Knowing a business faced a similar problem and that you were able to solve it helps them feel more confident in your solution.

Let’s Recap

We’ll remind you again: content marketing is a long game. To win at any game, you have to know the rules and understand how to win (know your audience and have a strategy), show up at the right field (be where your audience is), practice (stay consistent), score (do more of what resonates), and be a team player (share testimonials and case studies).

A winning content marketing strategy is simple, but it isn’t always easy. 

If you need a coach to help you up your content marketing game, we can help. Check out our digital marketing services!