Content Strategy

Every year social media audiences grow. As of July 2024, active users on these platforms have swelled to 5.17 billion people worldwide. With this continued growth, your brand needs to have a social media strategy, and it starts with defining your social media target audience.

The Key To Your Social Media Presence

Coming up with a social media strategy doesn’t happen overnight, but requires time, thought, and attention to your brand presence and your target audience. Knowing your target audience is key to social media marketing.

Who Is Your Target Audience?

It’s essential to keep in mind that your target audience is not “everyone.” Sure, you may want “everyone” to buy your products or sign up for your service, but that doesn’t mean those are the people who will.

Your task in defining your social media target audience is to identify and understand your brand’s position so you become the best choice in your industry.

Optimize Your Marketing

Audience research will help you create relevant content and messaging for your social media posts and ads. This can lead to higher conversation rates and better social media ROI.

To optimize your social media marketing efforts, you need to know:

▪️ Who are your customers?

▪️ Which social networks do they spend their time on?

Easy Steps to Find Your Social Media Target Audience

Step 1. Identify or create customer personas.

Ask very specific questions about your customers, including their age, demographics, income, etc. You want to construct detailed personas to understand your customers.

Step 2. Determine where your audience is most active.

Where do they hang out online? Once you know your customer persona, you can hone in on what social network they use most frequently and what content they prefer.

Step 3. Check out your competitors.

Where are they posting? What content is getting comments, shares, and likes? You can even use your analytics to check out competitors.

Step 4. Survey your customers.

Nothing beats real data from your current customers. Send out a survey and find out what they like, love, and dislike.

The Takeaway

Once you have a better understanding of your customers, you can use it to create better social media content that they will love.

Remember to revisit your customer personas periodically because interests change, and you want your social media marketing strategy to reflect that.

What do you think? How do you identify your target audience?

Content marketing builds trust, generates leads, and cultivates brand loyalty. Technology has made content marketing more relevant, but don’t be fooled, content marketing is a pretty old strategy (think 1672). It’s still important because it works, and businesses continue to use various types of content marketing to attract customers.

Content Marketing Is Not Traditional Marketing

The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as:

 a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Traditional marketing efforts include direct pitches about your products and services. Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating valuable and useful content for your prospects and customers. With content marketing, you’re helping your prospects answer questions, solve problems, and make choices.

Customer-centric Marketing

Times and customer trends have changed. Traditional marketing efforts are not as successful at reaching audiences as they once were.

Now, customers are looking for value and engagement with brands they love. As a result, content marketing is how marketers meet customer expectations.

Why Do I Need Content Marketing?

Content marketing benefits include increasing customer engagement, brand awareness, lead generation, and sales. In addition, content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as outbound marketing, can lead to 7x more web traffic, and drives six times higher conversion rates. Content marketing is the future.

Infographics Transform Complex Data Into Shareable Content

Studies show that 65% of people are visual learners. So, it’s no surprise that infographics perform well with consumers. Infographics display informative data in a visual and engaging way.

A good infographic can drive website traffic, increase visibility, and boost engagement on social media. But, infographics don’t need to complicated. There are plenty of free tools to create engaging and shareable images for your audience.

Email Newsletters – Old Reliable

Email marketing is a tried and true content marketing strategy because it’s effective at attracting and retaining customers. Over 90% of Americans check their email daily, which means email continues to be a great way to reach audiences.

Email newsletters are a perfect way to connect with customers. You can use email newsletters to showcase a new product, share a blog article, and offer discounts.

Drive Traffic and Build Trust with a Blog

A blog is one of the easiest content marketing strategies to drive website traffic and grow your business. People turn to blogs to answer questions, learn about new topics, and find products and services. In fact, blogs keep prospects close by building trust with your audience and boost traffic through search engine optimization (SEO).

Get Your Camera Ready for Video

Data shows video will represent 83% of all internet traffic by 2021. Consumers want more videos from brands. Videos can provide value to customers by showing how things work, answering questions, and building relationships with your audience.

Videos don’t have to be lengthy productions. But, they do have to be authentic and relate to your customer’s wants and desires. Truly, when done well, videos build relationships with prospects.

Wrap-Up

With so many different types of content marketing, there is no singular best solution for all businesses. Which ones you choose will depend on your business’s services/products, customers, and strategy.

Ultimately, the best type of content marketing is the one that you have the time and money to implement now.

What types of content marketing are you using?

Don’t have the time to create your own content? Contact me today to get started!

Why does having a business blog matter?

How are you marketing yourself online? Do you have a website showing off your products and services? Are you using social media?

As you may have realized, no matter the size of your company, creating an online presence is never easy. You are competing with everyone else and the online field is crowded.

How can you make sure your website gets seen and drives customers to you?

One of the easiest ways for your website to get noticed is by having a blog. But why is a business blog important?

Think of a business blog as another channel for your business to connect with customers and market your products and services. It’s an individual area on your website where you can create content that is useful for your audience.

Blog posts create strong connections with consumers. According to QuickSprout, 61% of US consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post.

So, if you think about it, every blog post could lead to a potential sale!

A blog is another tool in your inbound marketing toolbox that will bring in leads and grow your company. There are also 3 huge benefits blogging has for your business.

3 Big Benefits Blogging Brings to Your Business

1. A Business Blog Drives Traffic

So, you have a gorgeous and well-designed (maybe even expensive!) website, but you just aren’t getting many visitors. Sound familiar?

Unfortunately, you can’t just have a website and hope the visitors will find you. Websites need to be optimized for search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) and updated frequently. This is known as SEO (search engine optimization).

What does SEO have to do with driving traffic?

Search engines are looking for content on websites to index. They are looking for information that gives them an idea of what your website is all about. But most importantly they are looking for fresh content.

If your website has frequently written content about what you sell and your industry, your website will be easier to find when customers search.

More frequent content means more is indexed, and it’s more likely your website will be higher ranked in search results.

How do you create content to be indexed? (A business blog!)

Websites with a blog tend to have 434% more indexed pages, which means they appear more often in search results.

If your competitor is creating content to index, they are more likely to pop up in a Google search than you.  In fact, companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website than those who don’t.

Don’t wait for visitors to find you! Create content on your blog and drive business to you.

2. A Business Blog Builds Trust (… and relationships and conversions)

Content marketing is all about building trust. When you create relevant, educational, and helpful content for your audience, you position your company as a trusted brand.

People are more likely to buy from brands they trust. SproutSocial recently reported that, “when customers feel connected to brands, more than half of consumers (57%) will increase their spending with that brand and 76% will buy from them over a competitor.”

Valuable content builds trust over time and keeps prospects close. According to survey data from Conductor, if the customer’s journey down the sales funnel begins with educational content, they are 131% more likely to buy.

Even with declines in consumer spending due to COVID-19, 40% of consumers noted trust in a brand as the biggest influencing factor driving purchasing decisions.

What content is most trusted?

Blogs are considered the 5^th most trusted source for accurate online information.

Companies and marketers continue to invest time and money into ensuring blogging is part of their online marketing strategy.

According to Hubspot, 53% of marketers say blogging is there top content marketing priority. Another 52% of respondents on a content marketing survey agreed that blogging is their most critical content marketing tactic.

Each blog post is an opportunity for your company to build trust through well-written and relevant content and a direct way to:

• Convert leads to sales
• Turn past customers into repeat buyers

5. The Price is Right

Are you looking for the best ROI (return on investment) for your marketing efforts? Well, a blog is a cost-saving option with big benefits.

The cost of starting a blog is affordable for most businesses because the bare minimum it requires is:

1. A website
2. Relevant and educational information to share (let your knowledge shine!)

That’s it! Yes, really.

Hubspot noted that marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI. In fact, B2B companies with blogs get 67% more leads than those without.

But maybe you are asking, “Why can’t I just drive traffic through Ads?”

Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising are great options, but they require a long-term strategy and financial commitment.

What are the costs for Ads?

• The average cost per click on Google Ads is between $1 and $2 on the search network.
• The most expensive keywords in Google Ads and Bing Ads cost $50 or more per click.
• The average small business using Google Ads spends between $9,000 and $10,000 per month (not including extra costs of strategy, platform, and maintenance).

To be effective, PPC and Ads require a substantial investment of time and money to develop and achieve success.

If you don’t have a strategy, then PPC and Ads aren’t going to drive traffic.  

But even if PPC and Ads aren’t right for you now, it doesn’t mean they aren’t in your future. And a major (and low-cost) way to pave the way for that is by blogging.

Why? Because Blogging is going to help with your SEO, optimize your keywords, and drive organic traffic (unpaid traffic).  And organic traffic will support your website when it’s time to invest in PPC and Ads.

Did you know people are more willing to click organic results over ads? 70% of the links searchers click are organic. People trust organic results.

People trust organic results.

The content you provide in your blog will give organic content that can help your ranking in the search engine.

A business blog is something you can start immediately with minimal costs that can generate organic traffic, leads, and sales to grow your company right now.

Wrapping Up

Do you read blogs? (You’re reading one now!) I do, and so do most people.  75% of internet users say that they read blogs regularly, so, it’s no surprise that businesses are investing time and resources into blogging.

Maybe it’s time for you to start a business blog too, so you can:

1. Drive traffic to your website
2. Build trust and makes sales
3. Bring in leads with low costs

82% of companies admit that blogging is critical to their success. Will you be one of them?

Need help with your company’s blog? Let’s chat.