As a budding entrepreneur, you know that marketing is a crucial part of growing your business. Every time you sit in front of your computer, the words “Content is King” echo in the back of your mind as you stare at a blank page in Canva.
When it comes to promoting your business, it can be hard to know what to do and where to put your energy. This is where strategy comes into play as your guiding light. But what do you focus on, a marketing strategy or a content strategy? When used correctly, these two strategies can help you find your ideal client, convert audiences into customers, and ultimately increase your revenue.
Let’s break down what you need for a marketing and content strategy and how to apply either one or both to your business.
What is marketing?
You probably have a good sense of what marketing is, but let’s go over the definition to be clear. Marketing involves activities done by a company to promote the buying or selling of its products.
There are four main elements of marketing known as the Four P’s, which were popularized by Neil Borden in the 1950s. The P’s stand for: product, price, place, and promotion.
The focus on product emphasizes that the key to successful marketing is knowing the product or service, inside and out. What problems does this product solve, how is it different from similar products, and how does it stand out from its competition?
Price might be self-explanatory, but many factors go into setting the price of a product or service. These elements include the cost of making the product, additional costs for marketing and distribution, and how similar products are priced.
Place is where the product will be sold, such as in a storefront or online.
Lastly, promotion is the activity of sharing your product with the world. It can involve public relations, advertising, direct marketing, guerrilla marketing, or sponsorship.
As you can see, marketing isn’t putting up a picture of your product on a billboard; it’s about how you position and promote your product. Because marketing can be complex, it’s important to have a marketing strategy.
What is a marketing strategy?
So now that you have an understanding of what marketing involves, let’s talk strategy. A marketing strategy is something you put together, typically when you want to achieve a certain goal or outcome in your business. It is a way for you to plan out what marketing action steps to take.
For instance, if your goal is to increase your brand awareness, your strategy will take into consideration your niche, your target audience, and your competition, and propose different marketing activities such as posting on social media or speaking at events to help you achieve your goal. The strategy also includes understanding metrics on how to measure your success.
What is online content?
“Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.” – Andrew Davis.
Now let’s jump over to content, or online content to be specific. While creating content is similar to marketing, they are two different areas of your business.
Content is any material that is created for or posted online. This can include text, audio, videos, and images, and take the form of blogs, social media posts, videos, articles, etc. The content you post is often connected to your brand and business.
Basically, content is how you build trust and authority with an audience.
Content can be used to communicate information, send a message, advertise, or entertain.
What is a content strategy?
Similar to a marketing strategy, a content strategy tackles the question of how you’re going to use your content to achieve a goal. It involves how you are going to create, manage, and distribute your content.
More than just saying to yourself, “I’m going to make a “get-ready-with-me video,” your content strategy will consider if that type of video will help you increase your followers, engage your current audience, or just be content to post.
Elements of a content strategy can include:
- Defining your goals
- Identifying your target audience
- Conducting a content audit
- Having a content management system
- Brainstorming content ideas
- Publishing and managing your content
Tips for putting together a marketing strategy that works with your content strategy
If you run a business with a clear product or service, you’re going to need a content and marketing strategy. However, depending on where you are in your business, you’ll most likely want to put more attention on one or the other.
But before you grab your business notebook and start brainstorming ideas, the first thing you need to do is consider your business goals. If you’re looking to increase sales and gain more clients or credibility, your strategies should reflect these goals.
With your business goals in mind, let’s start with a marketing strategy.
Putting together a marketing strategy
Here are some simple steps to put together your strategy.
Create an elevator pitch: This is a short 2-3 sentence phrase that describes what you do and how you do it. It should start with a hook, something that grabs attention. Next, you want to identify a problem in your industry and how your business solves it. Lastly, you’ll end with what makes your business unique, aka your unique selling proposition.
Once established, you can use this pitch in different areas of your marketing, such as presentations, networking events, sales copy, and more.
Define specific goals. Identify where you’d like to see growth in your business and create marketing goals. Be specific, such as a goal to increase website visitors to 300 per month in the next 6 months.
Research the market and your competition. See how your product or service compares to similar products. What is the market need for your product? Where does your target audience spend most of its time?
Evaluate your marketing channels and prioritize. Understand which marketing activities have worked best for you. Did you get more responses from that Facebook ad or a podcast appearance? Whichever activities bring in more results, that’s where you should be putting your efforts.
Putting together a content strategy
Before putting together your strategy, consider the following:
- Who is your content for
- What kinds of content do you want to make, such as video, written or audio
- Where do you want to publish your content
- What is the goal of your content
- How will you manage your content
Start with your goals. There’s no way around this. Goals give you direction and will keep you from posting content that doesn’t have value for you or your audience.
Research your audience. You can tap into your marketing strategy with this. Consider a customer profile to help you identify the specific problems, pain points, and joys your service or product provides.
Evaluate your current content. Look at what content is performing well. How can you repeat those results as you make new content?Where are the gaps in your content? What are the problems or areas your content isn’t addressing? Is there content you can repurpose? You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you need to make new content.
Brainstorm content ideas. Based on the previous information about your target audience, content gaps, and content you want to repurpose, start brainstorming different content topics.
Plan out your content. Once you have an idea of what topics you want to post about, create a system. Determine the topics, the format, the platform, and the frequency of your content.
Next, make sure you have a content management system to help you stay organized.
With a content and marketing system in place, you’ll find it easier to reach your business goals.
