A Practical Content Marketing Strategy Guidebook for Small Businesses on a Budget
Let’s face it. No one wants to throw money into the deep, vast marketing sea. We have to be practical.
Unless you are a full-time content creator earning big bucks from your content, you should not be wasting your time.
This is what I mean.
There is no need to create content all day, all time.
The content treadmill never ends.
Instead, learn to hop off.
Instead, learn to hop on when it is required.
This newsletter is about that.
This newsletter shares a practical content marketing strategy used by practitioners.
It is particularly useful for small businesses on a shoestring budget.
Small Business Real Talk: A Practical Content Marketing Strategy
Gurus believe we need to be consistent in pumping out content. Not just any glazed-over-I-am-good-and-so-can-you kind of content. We must create good content in text, images, audio, long-form, video formats.
Before we know it, we are on our smartphones the entire day creating a digital presence on Facebook, YouTube, Anchorfm, Linkedin, Twitter.
Where is the time to take angry little Fifi for a walk?
This is not a viable strategy for a small business.
Here’s Why
We have a business to run.
Period.
End of story.
Where is the time to find customers if we are creating content all the time? How are we going to develop better products? Improve on customer feedback?
So, no.
We cannot spend our entire day creating content.
We will go nuts.
Yes, content creation may drive business growth. These are reasons driven by business necessity:
Awareness.
Brand story.
Customer testimonials.
New product release.
Our content strategy must align with business needs and growth. That way, we create a content marketing outbound channel that leads to inbound leads.
We want customers who are willing to give us a try.
We want customers to buy our products and subscribe to our services.
We do not want bots to raid our Direct Messaging because we have 14,000 followers. It makes us their natural targets.
Focus, focus.
Work on what matters and let others fall into place.
Now the How
“Content strategy is the high-level planning, execution, promotion, and on-going management of the content lifecycle to support key business initiatives. Essentially, it’s your brand’s game plan for driving traffic, leads, engagement, sales, and other business outcomes through content. When executed well, content strategy is one of the most important components of your marketing strategy.”
- What is Content Strategy? How to Develop a Content Roadmap
A strategy states the how.
It is an action plan.
When it is done correctly, our content strategy drives organic engagement that leads to sales. The devil is in the execution. Where should we start? And how many channels or platforms should we juggle?
This is my go-to strategy.
I call it competence stacking.
I start off with one platform. I try to master it. I really do mean all aspects of the platform. When I am done, I move on to the next.
That means I may start with Linkedin, conquer it, move to Twitter, conquer it, move to YouTube, so on and so forth.
This is a logical approach. It takes time to learn the characteristics of any platform. Get the results you desire for your personal branding or business needs from one platform before moving on.
This is what I mean:
Master the outbound channels — Content posts, comments, likes.
Understanding the inbound channels — Direct messages, inboxes.
Play around with raw metrics in mind.
Experiment with different forms of content and message formats to determine the ones that bring leads and customers.
Then you move on.
Refer to this link to read the entire article.
This is the YouTube show on Small Business Real Talk – Staying Relevant.
Our YouTube Channels – Knowledge Topics
On our Youtube Channel, we produce content to uncover topics that permeate all walks of life. Our community can understand what it means to be in the trenches of our interest.
Here are some topics of interest we recorded with high viewership:
Our goal is to share our research with our community from a practitioner's standpoint.
Enjoy!
Summary
We need to stay relevant.
Marketing on a shoestring budget requires us to stay focused and relevant in the marketplace we are in.
The job of Bottomsup Perspective is to research, discuss, and share our findings so our community can grow with us.
This topic is one example of sharing our practitionership.
Do you believe in what we do?
If you do, push this big purple button.
Aldric,
On Behalf of the Bottomsup Perspective Team