Great content marketing ideas for your small business website begin with a comprehensive plan. Your plan should include valuable content, understanding who your intended audience will be, market research and content delivery.

Valuable Content

SEO is essential to direct potential customers to your site. These customers may be located anywhere around the world and they can have access to your marketing content 24 hours a day 7 days a week. When using SEO you need your content to provide an answer that your potential customer is looking for. An example, you sell fitness equipment and your potential customer is looking for “the best fitness equipment” or they may be interested in “home fitness equipment.” Your marketing content should answer your potential customer’s questions be it on the product page as well as other articles where you plan to market your content. Keywords help but more importantly your content needs to be quality. When customers arrive at your site they need to know that the content you are providing to them answers their questions and that it is fresh, not old information.

Your Intended Market

When marketing your content it is essential to understand who your intended audience is. It does no good to write content about the best golf swing when your audience in interested in the latest fashion outfit. When starting out and you are just discovering your audience you may get an idea for the kind of content they are interested in by their buying patterns. You may also use Google Analytics to discover which content was popular and what actions your audience took. Always provide your intended audience a call to action be it by encouraging them to comment or click a given link. It is also helpful to only include one call to action at a time in your content marketing.

Competitor Analysis

What is your competition doing? Are they doing it better? Can you improve on their methods to gain a competitive edge? Research the content that your competition is marketing. Discover why your competition chose a given topic. Read people’s comments and see if there are still questions that will lead you to provide answers in your content marketing. Pay attention to how your competition using social media. Are they using Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social media? See how involved your competition is in social media such as topics and pictures they post. See how many followers or likes they have and analyze their audience interaction.

Content Delivery

Treat your content marketing as an essential and timely message your intended audience is waiting with anticipation to receive. Be excited about your message and provide your content at just the right time. Think about how you will schedule your content to be delivered either by setting up anticipation or scheduling it at just the right season. For example, once you have learned about your audience intended buying patterns you may present certain content at a given season when your audience is most likely to be interested in it. Content marketing is essential to stay one step ahead of your competition and providing your intended audience with the answers they are looking for.

Citations:

• Photo taken from Flick with CC license. Author: Krzysztof Urbanowicz

Attached Images:

•  License: Creative Commons image source

Ben Sawyer is a content manager for a few small business websites. Here he shared his strategy which he is performing for ArverneByTheSea , one of his clients.