Content Marketing Strategy for Small Business
What is Content Marketing?
According to the Content Marketing Institute: “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
More succinctly, content marketing is about building relationships. And, how is this done? We do this by offering thoughtful, useful, interesting information in different forms to help satisfy the needs and interests of our audience of customers, friends, members, donors, etc.
The term "content marketing" is just marketing industry jargon. However, its place in the overall marketing process is important to recognize due to the growth of search engines such as Google.
People Search Online A Lot!
People are so accustomed to finding everything on Google that this is very often the first place people turn when they need or want anything. This includes everything from serious research, shopping and just finding entertaining videos.
According to Internet Live Stats, as of July 26, 2018:
“Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.”
How Does this Relate to my Business?
Today’s customer behavior is important to understand since your customers are searching online for you (and your competitors) before they call you. That is, if they ever call you.
People interested in finding anything (or answering a question), grab their mobile device (or ask Alexa or Siri) and find it online. If they are looking for what you offer, will your website come to the surface in these search results?
The next step is narrowing down their search to specific companies to get what they want, and critically, to see what other customers have said about these companies. This is referred to as “social proof” and is the same as asking your neighbor if they have a plumber they like.
One More Thing
One more thing to understand about today’s customer behavior. Are customers searching for you by name? Probably not. People typically start with a more generic search (e.g. “good plumbers in my area”) and then narrow their focus as they (briefly) check out a few websites that catch their eye.
This is where Content Marketing comes into play. By putting different types of content, such as articles, videos, interviews, Frequently Asked Questions, topical lists, checklists and infographics on the web, people are more likely to find something that very specifically matches their interests and answers their specific questions. This is where a new relationship will often begin. This is the essence of content marketing. Being found and providing interesting, useful, relevant information that helps someone.
How Does Content Marketing fit into Your Marketing Strategy?
Content marketing is about building relationships by sharing thoughtful, useful, interesting information in different forms to help satisfy the needs and interests of our audience
At Endorphin Advisors, we help organizations create content that meets the needs and interests of their particular audience and helps to demonstrate expertise, share knowledge and draw more visitors to their website.
We develop content of all types and offer content curation services, digital advertising services and social media training. We specialize in working with a range of marketing technology to make digital marketing work.