After years of dreaming, planning, and execution, you've finally started your business. It's alive, running, and stable! That's great and an amazing feat to accomplish! Now that you've achieved your dream it's time to shoot for higher stars; time to grow your business.
Aside from developing your business internally, marketing is going to be key for growth. Marketing helps build awareness and reputation, attracts new customers and leads, and helps set-up a solid foundation of continuous business growth for your business. However, many small businesses struggle with marketing. For example, the ads they pay for aren't getting the right leads they want, or no one is paying attention to the ads at all! This means their marketing strategies are flawed, and isn't achieving the milestones that they can achieve, but only if they develop and implement the right strategy. Successful marketing campaigns only happen with the right marketing strategy and good execution.
Here are 3 common content marketing mistakes and how to avoid them:
1. Understanding the Consumers
Many small businesses believe that they already know who their consumers are. This is only true on the surface. Most business owners can tell you things like their consumers are mostly male or female, old or young, and other superficial things like that. However, many of them have yet to truly understand why consumers choose them over competitors, or how to maintain a relationship with their consumers.
A critical aspect of developing the right marketing strategies for your business is understanding who your consumers are. After all, connecting with customers is always at the center or end-goal of every marketing campaign. This means you'll need a Buyer Persona. It helps you understand what age group your ideal consumers fall under, what they seek out the most, how they best understand things, and most importantly, how to create a positive connection with them. To get this information you might send out surveys, ask customers satisfaction questions, reflect on past customers, and do online researches. Once you've understood who your consumers are you can then begin to develop and implement strategies based on the consumer data you've collected.
Download our free Buyer Persona guide to help you better understand your consumers!
2. Wrong Content & Platform
One reason why small businesses aren't getting leads from their ads, website, or other marketing efforts, is because their content and messaging aren't relevant to consumers. If the content isn't related to your consumer, then they won't pay attention to it. If the content is relevant and it's still not attracting people, then the problem may be that it's shown on the wrong platform, so the ideal consumers never see it!
You can make sure your content is relevant by understanding who your consumers are. What kind of information do they like to see or hear; how-to's, tips, or statistics? What platforms do they like to be on; Twitter, Facebook, or maybe radio? How do they like their information to be given; video, infographics, or images? These are just a few examples of some things you should consider when sharing content, and choosing which platform to use. Make sure that the content you share is also compatible with the platform you choose. For instance, if using Twitter, your content should be short and quick.
3. Quantity vs. Quality
Some businesses believe that having a lot of marketing activity is excellent, but it's not necessarily true. Quantity will indeed spread outreach, but it's inefficient. You can do a little of everything; posting on all platforms and creating all kinds of content, but what if your consumers only care about specific platforms and certain types of content? If that's the case, then you're definitely being inefficient, and it's likely that your content isn't be noticed among many who are doing the same thing. What you want to do is makes sure to be sharing quality content. Make sure the information you share is unique, or that the way you share it is unique. Videos, images, etc. are also easily understandable, while relevant, and shows that a lot of effort was invested in them. This will make your content stand out from the rest, helping you bring in the consumers you want. So you don't need to hit all the bullseye, you only need to hit the one that really matters.
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