Content Marketing Made Simple

5 Content Development Tips For Small Business

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Content marketing is an approach to business outreach that involves providing customers with useful information in order to generate interest in your offerings and loyalty for your brand. This differs from traditional marketing strategies, which rely on direct attempts to create a market for your products and services.  How?  By advertising overtly and creating awareness and demand, content marketing is a path to building relationships by generating interest in who you are and what you have to say.

This pays off over time by attracting potential customers who are engaged and listening, and readers who eventually support your company by making purchases.

A successful content development strategy incorporates a variety of techniques for courting customers without appearing to want anything in return. Here are five content development tips to help your small business create interesting and informative content.

• Write well. Your content development strategy should involve an engaging voice which provides an enjoyable reading experience for your blog's followers. Content marketing involves putting out material that keeps readers coming back to your page, and no matter how much good the information you provide, they're not going to return if your style is dry and academic, or pompous and patronizing, or sloppy and unprofessional. Use a friendly voice that will encourage them them to like you, while also providing solid information that encourages them to trust you and keep coming back for more. Proofread carefully in order to put a professional face on your company, and make sure that your meaning is clear and your sentences are easy to read.

• Write original material. A successful content development strategy should be based on giving your readers something  that they won't find anywhere else. After all, you want them to visit your site, rather than the site of one of your competitors.  For example, if you're a restaurant owner whose menu focuses on local ingredients, your customers will probably appreciate a blog that tells tasteful, inside stories about the endearing quirks of local farmers. You will be uniquely situated to provide these anecdotes, and you will be telling them to an audience that is especially interested in the idiosyncracies of direct vendor relationships, and food with a highly specialized story. You can directly monitor the interest that you are generating by paying attention to your site's analytics: the more interesting your customers find your material, the longer they will stay on your page.

• Know your audience, and write material that they will find useful. If you're selling high end athletic shoes, your clientele will most likely be sports aficionados and hip young adults, rather than professionals who wear business suits. Even if your content development strategy involves providing information that is not directly related to your products, it should still be relevant to the customers who will typically purchase your offerings, such as sports trivia for athletic shoe customers. Knowing your customer also involves writing in a voice that is appropriate for them, using the right jargon and the right tone.

• Post regularly, so readers will have a good reason to keep returning to your site. If you create a single blog post and leave it on your site for a year, then even potential customers who are interested in what you have to say will stop returning, because they aren't finding anything new. Even if you don't post frequently, try to post at regular intervals. If your content is good enough, then interested readers will learn the rhythm of your postings, and will keep coming back as long as you keep offering them something useful and new.

• Mention your products and services judiciously. The point of content development strategy is, after all, to encourage potential customers to purchase your offerings. But using this marketing tool effectively often involves striking a delicate balance between coaxing readers to make purchases, and appearing to be more interested in saying something useful than in making sales. If you're crafty, you can even navigate this apparent contradiction by joking about the fact that you want readers to make purchases.
  
  Alternately, you can compare your products and services with those of your competitors, as long as you do so in a way that doesn't transparently plug your brand at the expense of other options. In fact, describing scenarios in which a competitor's offerings may be more useful that your own could even work to build trust. For example, if your company manufactures olive oil, which is unhealthy cooked at high heat, you can establish rapport by offering suggestions for high heat alternatives.