Content is King

At Comprehensive Consulting Solutions for Small Businesses, we help clients with content development strategies that engage and build credibility for their brands to build awareness, sell more, or engage with the local community.

The company, industry, product/service, customer demographics and psychographics, and other factors highly influence which mediums are used (Website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) to post content on, what is posted, when it is posted, and why it is posted. These areas are developed by focusing on the marketing objective, which is a topic for another blog. In this article, we are going to focus on content – which is derived from the marketing objective.

The content strategy varies based on the factors above, but there a few things that do not change. The item that remains constant across product, industry, customer demographics, etc. is the IMPORTANCE of consistent content! Content can help build awareness, credibility, visibility, but it also can bring people to your website and social media pages and even help potential customers enjoy the website/social media experience even more.

By this point, you are probably thinking – what encompasses content?

Content is everything you publish and for most small businesses or brands, it is given away for free. According to Techopedia, “Web content refers to the textual, aural, or visual content published on a website. Content means any creative element, for example, text, applications, images, archived e-mail messages, data, e-services, audio and video files, and so on.” For example, when a video is recorded and published, or a blog is written and posted – everything in both is content from the colors used to the text displayed or written.

With the video or post, the business is trying to achieve a marketing objective and engage with customers, leads, and prospects. The content should align with the end user’s demographics and psychographics (target customer), achieve an objective, and represent the brand well. If all things are in alignment, the content could even potentially go viral and be shared to the masses outside of the target customer profile.

According to Sprout Social, “Viral marketing is a style of promotion that relies on an audience to generate the message of a product or service. Marketing is considered “viral” when it reaches the point where it's being shared by the public at large rather than just its target audience.”

When content goes viral, the public is sharing your brand to networks of people (and potential new clients), which costs the company $0! Free marketing – just saying! Besides the importance of virality, content brings leads and prospects to your site to learn more about your business. This can help businesses exponentially – especially those that may be restricted in traditional advertising areas.

Or even those that had one of their marketing buckets closed because of COVID-19 – such as a business owner that focused on networking as a part of their marketing strategy. Networking was completely shut down for a while and is still, for the most part, extremely limited. Based on the right content and the right keywords, content can improve website visits, bounce rate, shares, and ultimately sales, which is why we believe - Content is still king!

If Content is so Important – why aren’t more businesses creating content for their brands?

Content takes a lot of time – from creation to distribution. Content must be specific to the medium. From the text to the pics, each platform may have variations for what they want on their platform. For example, some content is appropriate for Twitter but needs a little more detail for Facebook or another example, the pic needs to be a certain size for Facebook, but different from LinkedIn. Website content should be detailed, relevant, and informative – so it will be much more detailed, compared to social media posts.

Blog posts can take multiple hours to write and post, depending on the length. Many small business owners do not have 10 hours a week (or more) to create and distribute content and many will not hire someone to do – even though the power of content is such a powerful tool for small businesses. Another reason that businesses do not have a content strategy is because they don’t even know where to start or understand what content can do for their business.

Their strength is operations, sales, retention – not content. Every one of our business owner clients has a weakness – our top business owners, know they must hire it out – if they don’t have the capacity to do it or don’t want to do it. There are a lot of ways to develop and distribute content in a profitable manner – just need to select the strategy that works best for the small business’ needs.

If you enjoyed this article and are looking for more resources on content, please check out the list below. We also included a list to other blog posts that you may find helpful.

Resources:

• Content Meaning – Definition

• Reasons Why Content Marketing is Still King in 2020

• Content Marketing – Why Content is King in Today’s Marketing

• Content is King – Essay by Bill Gates

• Why Content Will Always Be King

Other Blog Posts to Read:

• Customer Acquisition Costs Five Times More than Customer Retention

• Lead Generation for Small Businesses

• Lead Follow-up and Why It Is Important to Small Business

• Marketing Your Small Business

• Power of Observance in Sales

Please note: the resources listed above aren’t endorsements by us – they are provided only as information. We were not paid by or affiliated with any of the companies listed.

Comprehensive Consulting Solutions is a consulting firm located in Fayetteville, Arkansas. We help clients with strategies and tactics to attract and retain customers and employees. If you need help with your social media strategy or other marketing buckets, please reach out to a Small Business Consultant at 479-935-2488.

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