How to Optimize your Content for Small Business
For small business or startups, a content marketing is one of the best Marketing ways to connect with your ideal clients and targeted audience. Before putting all your efforts and research together in overall digital content marketing strategy, you’ll need to know little about the 4 types of content that you should be sure to use in your Content Marketing plan. It’s not difficult to create a content marketing strategy for your business but having one will definitely make your content marketing far more effective.
But, you’ve got to start with an understanding of the 4 types of content you should be using.
1) Teaching content.
Teaching content is incredibly important. It’s going to be a cornerstone of your content marketing strategy. There's three things that teaching content really allows within your content marketing strategy.
The first is that it really allows you to grow your Following. Three biggest search engines,
· YouTube
All do well with content that's geared towards answering a question. When people go to a search engine, they usually type in a question for something. When your content comes up as the answer to one of the questions they're looking for, that allows you to start bringing in more new people into your audience.
The second reason that creating teaching content is important is because it allows you to give a lot of Value to your audience and this is important in establishing like and trust factor. Like and trust factor is what you want to build up with your followers, with your readers, with your audience that are going to allow them to eventually want to buy from you.
One of the most common things that I hear in relation to this is, well if I give away everything for free, I won't have anything left to sell. I hear you and I understand that, but it's not really a valid concern
and here's why.
Yes, if someone can find everything for free, they may take that approach
and some people will. However, a lot of people will pay for something that saves them time. Here's how you can think of this and is what really cemented it for me.
Two of our most valuable resources are Time and Money. Money is a resource that replenishes. If you have a business or if you have a job, then what happens? You earn some money. You got out and spend it. Your money that you had is gone but more comes in and this is what happens for everyone. Money comes in, money goes out. It’s like breathing and replenishing resource.
Time however, is not like that. Once you've spent your time, it's gone and you're not going to get it back. So, for a lot of people, they see the value in using a resource that replenishes like money if it's going to save them time. So that's really the thing that you want to keep in mind is that people love systems. They love having the blueprint. They love knowing step by step what they need to do. So even if all your
content is available for free online somewhere else, it doesn't mean that someone wouldn't be willing to pay a premium price even to get all that content in one place together in a step-by-step approach.
The third reason that creating teaching content is incredibly powerful is because it sets you up as an Authority. Being an authority is incredibly influential. Teaching content does well as YouTube videos and blog posts.
Regardless of whether you're doing it as long written posts or videos or some combination thereof, I do suggest that you also create graphics for all of them and put them on Pinterest. One more search engine where you can be found and set yourself up with some authority. Type of content that's going to become a part of your content marketing strategies.
2) Inspirational content.
Something that can inspire your readers, something for them to aspire to. Something that they see in you or in your results that they would want. This is the rags to riches story. That single to married story. The unhealthy and overweight to the fit and energetic story.
All these transformations that people make. This idea that ultimately all selling the same thing, and everyone is constantly buying the same thing. Which is a better version of themselves because humans want to improve. We want to grow, we want to be better and so most of the things that we decide to buy is we think that we will feel better or be better in the halving of it. People buy from the heart.
We buy based on our emotions and later we justify that decision with our reason and logic. But the emotional part comes first and that's where inspirational content can be useful. It brings up more emotion through people. It also gives them something to work towards. People are very likely to buy from you if they see that there's something in you that they also want.
Inspirational content works well in social media. People are scrolling through their feeds and they want something that's going to make them feel good. So, using this as an Instagram post or Facebook post works every time. Sharing your story also works well in emails.
3) Connection content.
This is sharing more about yourself, more about your story and it allows you to connect with your ideal clients and customers at a deeper level. So, types of content that would fall into this would be a little bit more personal. Things about your beliefs and values. Now people are sometimes hesitant to using this type of content but there can be a fear about that. This idea that if I put out something that I distinctly believe, and other people disagree with it, they won't want to buy from me. Now that may be true, but for the people that agree with you, it's going to connect them with you at a deeper level.
Additionally, this can be powerful in terms of setting you apart from your competition. If you're offering something really similar to someone else in your field, then your particular beliefs and your values are going to allow you to align with your ideal clients and customers. This type of content, like the inspiration content, is really well suited for social media. It's also very well suited for your Email Marketing.
4) Sales content
Sales content is really just about getting the person who's consuming your content to take a particular type of action. So, one of the things you want to keep in mind with this is that, you're going to start by asking for smaller actions. Start by asking for them to comment on a blog post or to comment on a video or to follow you on a different place. These micro-actions so that they get used to taking advice from you from following instructions from you. Eventually once you've primed them and you've shown them value. You've created yourself as an authority.
You've inspired them and connected with them. It's going to be much easier for you to then use sales content to get them to take a bigger action which is going to be giving you money in exchange for whatever
product or service you provide.
So, here's a general rule of thumb that you can follow. Because people sometimes ask, well how much content should I give before I start selling?
So, here's a simple rule of thumb that you can follow.
THREE to ONE.
Meaning for each three pieces of non-sales content that you put out, you can do one piece of sales content. As if we're referring to your email marketing. So, you've done three emails that are non-sales at all where you're teaching, inspiring and or connecting and then one sales email. So that's a really easy way to think about it.
For some people, this may be that every month you're selling something. But for most people, they're going to do more like a sales campaign where they're gonna send out several emails that are related to whatever it is that they're offering or selling.
Let's say instead that for example, you have a sales funnel that has six emails in it. In that case you're gonna want to send out 18 emails that have no sales in them where you're teaching, where you're inspiring and where you're connecting and then you'll send out your sales funnel.
So, it's the three to one rule. I'm not giving it as a hard and fast rule. I'm giving it as a general guideline if you are wondering how
to best approach this.
