This blog post will make your life easier. There how is that for a topic opener? Are you curious?
I wrote 50 Free Marketing Tips: Help for the small business owner and this blog is an expansion of tip two.
Corporate life v.s self employment
When working for a company you are paid to do a job. You are a computer programmer. A Marketeer. A PR manager. That is your job.
What you don't have to do is tell people that you do that job.
Now as a small business owner you do. All the time. Every day. And if you don't someone else who offers your product or service will. And you will lose sales, and potentially your business.
When you hear the word 'content marketing' or simply 'content' this refers to the need to create ways to speak to your customer. Hope that is simple to understand?
How do I find the time to produce content?
We all have the same 168 hours per week to work with. It is up to you to put content creation into your to do list as a priority within those hours.
You may be the sort of person who likes creating content, and this article is for you really.
If you really feel that just focusing on your day to day business is what you most want to do, I would highly recommend that you outsource the important work of content creation to a social media manager or content marketing company.
One way or the other you need to be visible to your client, with a reputation for being useful & giving value. Either your create content yourself, or pay someone to do it for you.
Image by @stefano_intintoli via Unsplash
You said you were going to make my life easier, go on?
If you want to create great content then you need to focus on your customer not you. Grab a pen and note down the following:
Who is your customer? You may have more than one group of customers. Think about all the main ones.
What might they need help with? How can you solve a problem they may have with your business
Now with those two bits of information think about up to 5 topics that you could produce content on that would educate, uplift, assist your customers
What content should I be producing?
Anything you produce should be meaningful. Endless motivational quotes are not meaningful on any platform. Neither are overly sales based posts. You will scare people off.
I would advise you working in the following way:
Plan for a set time period, a month for example
Have a central idea/theme for content and create a big piece of content around that. Whether that is a video or a blog post.
Think about how you can pull out little pieces of the bigger content and turn them into something else. For example if you write a blog, you could chop it up into 10 posts that each have a tip on them. Visually that is very easy for readers to take in. Less is more on platforms like Instagram, Twitter or Pinterest.
A lot of people batch create content, so you record an afternoon worth of video, or write blogs. Then you always have content ready to go.
Thanks for reading!
Shona
Would you like more help with your marketing? My new book is out now
If you would like a book of 100 Marketing Tips written just for small business owners then do have a look here. I wrote this book to be easy to read cover to cover or to be kept as a reference to dip in and out of!
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About Me
Shona Chambers Marketing is a Marketing Agency based in Nunhead near Peckham. Specialising in helping Small Business Owners and Freelancers with their Marketing. Based at 61 Cheltenham Road, Peckham, SE15 3AF