You don’t need to be a giant company to benefit from content marketing. As a small business owner, you can benefit from content marketing’s ability to help you differentiate your business online, increase your brand awareness, help your audience develop an emotional connection to your brand, drive traffic to your website, and more. Ready to succeed at content marketing? Here are five content marketing tips for small business owners.

1. Develop a Content Strategy

Before creating content, create a content strategy. Define your target audience, decide on the types of content you'll produce (such as blog posts, videos, infographics, etc.), and the topics you'll cover. Additionally, choose the channels you'll use to reach your audience and determine how you’ll use your content. For example, will you post to social media to grow brand awareness, or add content to your site as a free downloadable in exchange for the reader’s email address?  Be sure to also set goals and know which metrics you’ll track to see how you’re doing.

2. Create Valuable and Relevant Content

Produce high-quality content that educates, entertains, or solves problems for your target audience. Focus on providing value rather than pushing sales pitches. Make sure your content is relevant to your audience and their interests and needs, and is aligned with your brand and your products or services. It can also be helpful to keep an eye on industry trends and adapt your content strategy accordingly. Address current topics, incorporate emerging technologies, and stay relevant to remain competitive.

3. Experiment with Different Content Formats

Don’t be afraid to try new things when it comes to content marketing! Experiment with various content formats to cater to different preferences. Consider using videos, podcasts, ebooks, case studies, memes, and other visuals to engage your audience effectively. See what resonates best with your audience and what doesn’t, and use that knowledge to adjust your strategy. When certain content does well, you can repurpose it for different channels, such as taking the transcript of a podcast and turning it into a blog post or captions for social media posts.

4. Be Consistent

Maintain a regular publishing schedule to keep your audience engaged and to build trust. Consistency helps establish your brand as a reliable source of information. To help you be consistent, consider creating a content calendar so you know what you’re posting to which platforms on which days. If you’re posting to social media, you can even create your content ahead of time and schedule it so you don’t have to publish each post manually. Come up with a schedule that works for you. It’s better to post less often and share high-quality content, than post every day but share low-quality content that you threw together at the last minute.

5. Monitor and Analyze Results

Track the performance of your content using analytics tools. Look beyond vanity metrics like follower count or number of likes (Remember, it’s better to have a smaller following of engaged users than a larger following of disengaged users). Consider monitoring metrics like website traffic, search engine results page ranking, social shares, engagement rates, cost per acquisition, and conversion rates to identify what works best when it comes to content formats, topics, and placements.

Get Help with Content Marketing

Content marketing can be fun, but it also requires a lot of time and effort. Want some assistance? Contact Healthy Dash of Social. We offer content marketing services like content creation, graphic design, and copywriting, as well as social media management, influencer marketing, blog management, growth and community management, and more. Schedule a free call with us.