Most businesses that want to thrive today create content as part of their digital marketing efforts. It’s a smart move, considering most shoppers check out a business online before purchasing a product or hiring a service. Most businesses, however, fail to execute on a content strategy that produces the following results, and that’s a problem.
Give Your Business Exposure
If exposure is correlated with sales, then it only follows that the more effective content you produce, the more likely your business is to gain customers or clients. To increase your business’s exposure, you need to create content at a pretty consistent rate. At a very minimum, you should be creating new content once per month, though a few new thought pieces per week will drive more results. You’ll also have to find a way to get your content in front of your prospective audience—i.e., the people who you think could benefit from reading it. Once you start creating content consistently and getting people to read it, your business will gain the kind of exposure that it needs to continue growing. People will get to know your brand and start to rely on you for advice.
Engage Your Audience
To get people to actually read your stuff, though, you’ll have to pull on the right emotional strings. If you can achieve this with your content strategy, then people will start to engage with you. They’ll comment on your posts on social media that link to your original content. They’ll share it across platforms. This engagement will grow your audience exponentially, which will grow your leads and sales.
Lend Your Business Authority
As you continue to create and share content that people read and engage with, more and more people will see you as an authority on your niche topic. You might be tempted to keep the most helpful bits of knowledge you have for paying customers. Doing so would be a mistake. When you are an expert, you not only have theoretical knowledge—you’ll also know how to execute on that knowledge, and that’s why people will pay you. So, share your knowledge freely in your content. The authority that you build will only drive more people to your business.
Why Most Businesses’ Content Strategy Falls Short
If all of the above is true, then shouldn’t it be easy to build a successful business using content? Not necessarily. Here are four reasons why most entrepreneurs fail to create compelling content.
- They think it takes too much work. And they are right—effective content creation requires a lot of time and effort. You have to spend hours researching and writing just to create one piece of content. Most business owners don’t have the time.
- They are afraid of speaking for themselves. When business owners do finally sit down to write that blog post, they find themselves parroting other authorities. While it’s fine to react to others in your area of expertise, you should aim to make your content yours.
- They don’t keep pushing. Starting is easy. Keeping up with a regular writing schedule is difficult.
- They don’t solve their readers’ problems. It’s important to create content that tells your story, but if it doesn’t remove roadblocks from the readers’ lives, then people won’t engage with it.
Talk to the Content Experts about Your Content Strategy
If this sounds like you, you’re not alone. We’ve helped many small businesses create compelling content over the years, and we can help you too. Get in touch with us today so we can get to know each other.