You could spend all day, every day writing content (blogs, emails, social media content …) to promote your business. But then when would you find the time to actually DO the business you love?
When you don’t have much time, knowing what content will get you the best connections is one way to work smarter not harder on marketing your small business.
So, let’s take a look at the different types of content you could be producing, and find out where you’re best spending your time.
But first - What is content?
‘Content’ is any kind of information or experience that a business (you) shares with the public with an aim of getting them to take action or build awareness of their brand.
Content is what our customers consume - read, listen to, view to learn more about our brand.
So, what’s content marketing then?
Content marketing is using the different types of content you produce to guide someone along a journey in your business with the end goal of having them book, buy or call you.
The content you produce to help market your business should be
- Valuable to your customers
- Relevant to their goals, problems, solutions and transformation
- Consistently delivered
- Designed to give them a clear path to connect with you
Different types of content
There are many different types of content you can produce to market your business. Social Media Today categorises 12 main types of content.
Blog posts
Podcasts
E-books
Whitepapers
Infographics
Case studies
Interactive charts
Video
Visualised data
Checklists
Guides
Slides
How do I know what type of content I’m best focusing on?
Okay, so this is the interesting part.
What type of content should I focus on creating if I’m trying to work smarter not harder. We don’t have endless hours to spend promoting our business. And even if you work with a great Virtual Assistant, you still need to provide them with something to get started with.
Focus on your customers first
This is SO important!
The more you know about your dream clients, the more you can focus on what they want and where they want it.
Here’s an example.
A couple of years ago I worked with a new course creator on establishing a clear brand story and all the marketing foundations for her business. One of the things that we discovered through profiling her clients was that she needed to create video content. But not only that, we were able to establish that the video content needed to be presented in bite-sized chunks (10 minutes or less) and had to have subtitles. Her client group? Brand new mums who would likely be watching the video while breastfeeding their baby. So they needed short videos and the ability to get value with no sound!
Read this blog about the depth to go into when focusing on discovering your dream client.
Having really in-depth information about your dream client will give you is information about
Who your clients are
What solutions your clients need
What kind of content they want to/need to have to make the decision to interact with you
How they want to consume this content
Answering your question - “where should I focus my attention on to produce content that gives me the best connection with my clients?”
Other places to look for content to focus on.
Look at your Google Analytics or Google Search Console to see how much traffic blogs bring to your business.
Find out your top performing piece of content and ask yourself why it’s doing the best. Can you replicate this?
What are your customers talking about and looking for? Do you have content to share about this?
Blogs are universally one of the best bang-for-buck pieces of content that small businesses can produce.
You can use blogs to create content that moves people through your customer journey.
Blogs don’t need to be written. Videos and Podcasts are the visual and audio versions of blogs.
How do I share my content?
Sharing your content is essential to get it in front of eyes! And by eyes, I mean paying customers!
Social media is a great way to share content.
Write a blog (record a video or podcast), and share snippets of it on social media.
Use your blog to drive people to your website and have a really great call to action to drive them to your sales pages.
Are you ready to take control of your content marketing?
By spending time getting to know your clients, you’ll be able to focus on what content to produce that will get you the best connections and convert them to paying customers.