SMB Tips: 7 Ways to Increase your Audience through Content Marketing

Content continues to be a key factor in a business’ marketing strategy. It is an indispensable aspect of your marketing campaigns.

Your content should have the ability to not only keep your current audience engaged – but it should also be able to help you increase it. This is especially needed by small businesses who need to keep up against how their more established competitors can invest in other forms of advertising.

Content is where you can level the playing field. And here are seven easy steps on how you can utilize your content to increase your audience:

Strategize Your Way

When you come up with a content marketing strategy, it is best for you to have a firm plan first. This often leads to misdirected efforts that often results in less efficient campaigns. It should be a practice, as a business, to always be diligent about planning and strategizing all your efforts to ensure that you will be able to pull anything off in the best way possible so that results can be maximized.

As you plan, it is always essential that you determine what your goals are. Specifically for this campaign, the goal is to increase your audience. All your efforts should then be able to highlight the need to achieve this objective.

Know and Engage with your Audience

With the aim to improve your audience, it is best to understand who they are. This understanding will help you come up with strategies and how you can tap them, and how you can capture them through your content.

The most basic understanding of your audience involves setting the applicable demographic profile of your customers. It is important that you know what age, gender, level of education, and level of income appeal to your business and your campaigns as well.

But aside from these, you should also be able to understand your audience’s interests, and there are tools such as Google Analytics that give you more insights on that.

Set KPI Standards

With your audience properly identified, and your goals set, you should then make use of these to form key performance indicators around for your content-related marketing strategies. Having KPIs will ensure that your goals are guided by the SMART principle. Having KPIs will further ensure that your campaigns contain quality, and will deliver the results that you would like to achieve.

Your content KPI should include:

• Being able to achieve a certain number of new email subscribers within a specified time.
• Being able to drive traffic from your social media accounts to your website
• And of course, since the content is king in search engine optimization, a better search result ranking.

You’ll also need to make sure that you are on track with your marketing spending as you do not want to go overboard. If you have set a limit in your content marketing, you should aim not to go beyond it.

Know what type of Content to Post

With planning, audience identification, and KPI establishment in place, the next step is brainstorming on what kinds of content to create. And there are many forms of content to choose from. Not to mention that there is a limitless ocean of topics to write about.

But with the knowledge of who your audience is, and what your business is all about, you should be able to pinpoint just about which topics can appeal to them the most. Blogs on your site should form part of your core strategy, and spreading these across your social channels can help you deliver great results.

Make use of a variety of content types. Make use of images, videos, infographics, and many more. The idea is to come up with quality content in an assortment of quality of expressions. This way, your audience will keep on coming back for more.

Make sure that your content is easily shareable for your current audience to be able to share these and help you out to invite more audience for you. If you come up with quality content, it would not at all be difficult for them to work their magic in engaging your current audience, and in gaining new ones.

Organize your Content Calendar

You should also come up with a content calendar to ensure that you will be able to regularly come up with quality content topics throughout the year. While you should not be condemned to follow the calendar 100% especially when something more interesting pops-up at any time of the year, it is still best to have a collection of topics that you can look into.

This will also remind you of the need for regularity of your content. Being consistent is a key factor that can help you make the most out of your content. For you to come up with numerous topics, it’s best that you do your share in researching what topics to write about, and how these can be pulled off in the best way possible

Study and Enjoy the Results

When you do your content marketing campaigns, make sure that you routinely assess and evaluate the results. Were you able to achieve your goal of increasing your audience? Were you able to engage your current customers? It is best to check how your efforts rated against your own KPIs.

Doing this will provide you with insights on how you can do your campaigns better, and how you will be able to maximize the results of your future campaigns. A lot of businesses find post-campaign evaluation not interesting, and they end up committing the same mistakes over and over again.

Conclusion

This is how you do proper content marketing not only to grow your audience, but also delivering your message, and for engaging your current audience. It starts will planning and ends in the evaluation. And with these seven easy and effective steps, you can make the most out of your content.

Make your content work for you with the help of this guide. Follow it, and you’ll see a lot of difference.