When it comes to marketing your small business and generating awareness of your brand, content is king. For many businesses you no longer can afford or want to buy people’s attention with advertising; you have to earn their attention by creating original content that is educational, entertaining. There is no point just making me ‘noise”. Your content has to add value.
Why content?
Content provides value to web visitors and builds trust in your business from your potential customers and retains your exisiting ones. A recent survey of B2B marketing conducted by MarketingProfs shows that brand awareness, customer retention and lead generation are the top reasons for content marketing. It also is vital if you want your site to be found by Google. Google likes fresh content.
What is content?
For businesses, content typically includes reports, books, blog posts, webinars, presentations, videos, case studies and more. These can then be repurposed and used in email and social media. Without content you have nothing to talk about.
Some content will be be lead-generation focused, like a report or video about common problems that your target audience has, along with a solution. For example, say you develop and sell slimline water tanks for urban areas You could feature a report on your website called Retention and Detention Tanks. When someone downloads the report, your marketing automation system sends a sequence of emails that speaks to the issues of harvesting water and meeting council requirements. This drives them to pick up the phone to speak to an expert.
Other types of content focus more on brand awareness and are purely informative. In this case, the topic is one your target audience thinks about within the sphere of their role—which serves to substantiate your thought leadership position in the industry
In this case, you could have a blog post titled “Rain Gardens – other way to harvest your water.” This content is more for brand awareness since this is not about the water tanks but shows the commitment to sustainability and rain water use which is key to the brand. It’s a topic that’s important to your target audience of people who want to harvest their own water. You’ll see traffic increase as it attracts people to your sales funnel and, more importantly, the quality of your leads will improve because those who are educating themselves and consuming your content are more interested and knowledgeable about what you offer.
How do I create content?
Once you know why you need content, the next question is “how.” It’s no surprise that producing engaging content is a challenge. Many people do not have the time or ability to do this and outsource it. At The Connector we provide content generation services.
Your content needs to be timely and relevant to your target audience, while at the same time supporting the position you want in the minds of your target market. A good rule of thumb is to think about the type of information your audience is most likely to consume and which channel is best to showcase it.
Want to do it yourself? It’s best to start and thenbuild your library one piece at a time. Before you know it, you’ll have built a body of work that raises your brand awareness and trust among target audiences. This will generate leads and leep our existing customers loyal..
