- So you're a small business content creator
and you might be wondering,
is the content you're creating
working for the business?
So before you get started creating any more content,
here's five rules for content marketing success.
(offbeat uplifting music)
But I came up with these five rules because I've met
with hundreds of small businesses all around the world,
and what we found out is that most
of them don't have a strategy,
and they don't know how to break through all the clutter
and actually make a difference in their customers' lives
and actually show a return for the content they're creating.
So if you follow these five rules
what I can promise is,
you're going to be following a strategy
that makes sense for your company,
and it's going to be a strategy that's going
to make sense for your customers.
So rule number one is that you have
to figure out your marketing need
and your marketing needs could fall
into one of three categories, sales, savings, or sunshine.
So the first initiative would be sales.
Are you trying to create content to drive revenue
in some way?
Is it a savings initiative?
Are you trying to create content that maybe
will replace some customer service role?
Or is it a sunshine initiative?
Are you trying to create content to build more loyalty
with customers or have them buy more in the future?
You have to make a decision, whether it falls
into one of these three groups, because if it doesn't,
you probably aren't creating content for the right reasons.
So rule number two is, what is the content need?
Who's the audience you're trying to target
and what are they struggling
with from an informational standpoint?
And you know what it's like to engage in content.
You don't want salesy content, you're gonna be bored.
You're watching an ad.
This has to be information that really,
really helps your audience.
You wanna focus on what really keeps them up at night
and you wanna position yourself
as an expert and you have to break through all
the other content clutter out there.
So when you're doing this, the more specific,
the better.
Type in certain keywords
like cloud computing, and Google Trends will come up
with all sorts of variations that people are searching
for that maybe you never thought of.
So once you figured out the marketing need
and you figured out the content need from your audience,
we've gotta figure out what are we gonna do
with this content thing, and where is it gonna live?
And the best advice is less is more.
So when I meet with the most influential content creators
from around the world,
they do one thing really well.
So it's a YouTuber.
It's a podcaster.
Doesn't mean that they don't share their stuff on Twitter
or Facebook or Instagram,
but they focus on being great at one thing,
that's the biggest problem I see with small businesses.
I talked to a small business the other day and said,
oh, we gotta be on TikTok.
I said, why do you have to be on TikTok?
Because everybody's there.
I said, who's everybody are your customers there?
I don't know.
Hey, maybe we should focus on somewhere
that our customers are actually gonna get the content,
and then we wanna figure out all
the idiosyncrasies around doing that thing.
So if you're gonna focus on blog, you wanna figure out
how that content's found in Google and search engines.
How are they gonna find it in newsletters?
How are you gonna work with influencers about that?
That's just one type of content.
So first we wanna figure out
how we can be really good at one thing,
and then we can be masters
of all those other content creation initiatives.
Where do we get all these content ideas?
And the best place to look is inside your own organization.
Create a regular process for putting down
the informational problems that your customers have.
If you want to position your CEO as a leading expert,
get the content from that CE, however you can,
and then hire really good editors to edit
that down into whatever it is.
Figure out who those people are in your organization,
and then a regular process
to unearth that content from them
however they will give it to you.
Don't force them to say, hey, write this down for me.
I want a blog post.
I want an article.
I need a podcast.
However they're going to get you the content
that's gonna solve your customers' problems,
you want to get it, that's easiest for them.
The fifth rule is something a lot
of small businesses don't think about, but is so important.
Maybe the most important
is that you already have a lot of content out there.
You already have a lot of blogs.
You have a lot of webpages.
So before you create any new content,
we want to figure out what old content we have.
For example, you might have a piece
of information that ranks really high on Google,
but is outdated.
So maybe you have the wrong links in it.
So make a list of, let's say,
the top 20 sites
that your customers are already going to.
So figure out the timeless content you have already
in your organization and figure out a way to make it better
because people are going to look at it
whether it's new or old.
So start with these five rules
and you'll see that your success path probably
looks a little bit clearer that it did before.