The Definitive Guide to Content Management for Small Businesses

Many small business owners seriously believe that their company does not need content management. They communicate with their customers via mailing lists and also interact directly with the live sale of a product or service. Well, this approach has a right to exist even in the current context, when businesses are paying increasing attention to online presence.

However, content management is a comprehensive opportunity to give your target audience what they want and do it at the right time. This is a way to learn more about their expectations and to adapt your product or service to future changes. And if you already realize this, but don’t know where to start, in this article, we have described the basic points that will help you understand the essence of content management for small businesses.

Define Your Goals

So, why do you just have to delve into this dark forest with frightening names such as content marketing, content strategy, and content management? The answer, as always, is on the surface – this is another way to achieve your business goals.

Naturally, these goals may not be the same for all types of business. Therefore, let’s give some examples.

• If you sell products that are difficult to operate, you can make life much easier for customers if you shoot a visual video on how to use your product.
• If you offer travel services, then your expert articles can help your customers determine the place and date of their next trip.
• Even if you just sell buns in a small store in a residential quarter, content is a way to tell your customers what makes your business unique, useful and interesting.

Focus on the Target Audience

When you have decided on your goals, it’s time to draw a portrait of your target audience and focus on it. This will help you when we move on to the next point and determine the most appropriate types of content and the ways to distribute it.

So let’s get back to our examples.

In the first case, your target audience is most likely middle-aged men who have a technical education and can purchase your goods either for home or business.

• In the second case, these are young people with higher education and good income. Perhaps these are even young families with children.
• In the third case, the target audience is quite wide, because it can include people from the first two examples, as well as housewives, students, or the elderly.

When you understand what the average representative of your target audience looks like, let’s think about where this person will look for your content.

Highlight Key Types of Content and Determine How to Distribute It

Well, let’s not go far from our examples.

• When it comes to complex technology, it is better to see it once than to hear or read a hundred times. Therefore, your type of content is video, the main platform is YouTube and your website.
• For the tourism business, the best approach to content is expert articles describing travel destinations to the smallest detail, as well as video reviews of hotels. The platform for placement is your site, YouTube, and social networks.
• As for the business, whose target audience is very wide, here it is necessary to proceed from the specifics of the business itself. For example, those who buy the same buns that we talked about for their children would be glad to know how you cook them. In this case, the video of the process will be the most advantageous.

Make a Content Plan

So, just now we have identified the key types of content and the best sites for its publication, however, it would not be wise to limit ourselves to this alone. We recommend giving users the choice of how and where to consume your content. And for this, you need a content plan. Therefore, here are some preliminary ideas that you can include in it at the start:

• Monday – a new video about the life of the company, work processes, tutorial, review or how-to
• Tuesday – a post on social networks urging you to discuss a topic relevant to your business and your subscribers
• Wednesday – expert article
• Thursday – a bit of humor, relaxation, and entertainment
• Friday – the results of the working week, wishes for a good weekend, for example, on Instagram Stories
• Saturday – personalized promotional offer sent by email. You can use these hints to develop your comprehensive content strategy as well.

Compile the Semantic Core

So, when you’ve drafted this plan at least approximately, it’s time to find the keywords that will make up the semantic core of the new blog posts. By the way, they can also be used as hashtags for social networks.

Develop a Preliminary Estimate

So far, everything sounds pretty clear, but in practice, you will need real people to do it all. If you already understand that you can’t do it on your own, at least at the start, then you need a content marketer and at least a copywriter. It would be nice to have an SMM specialist, but in general, his responsibilities can be divided between the two specialists listed above.

Hint! To get started, you can hire freelancers either in house employees on a part-time schedule.

Obviously, the main points of your estimate for creating content will be the salary of these specialists.

And one more hint! If you need content in several languages, it’s not worth spending extra money on a full-time translator. Contact a specialized service, such as Pick Writers, to receive quality-translated and localized content.

Analyze Your Results

It is imperative to connect analytics to your website in order to understand what type of content resonates the most among your target audience. No content strategy makes sense without a thorough analysis of the results. We recommend using Google Analytics since it has all the must-have functionality, and the results are provided in a very understandable manner.

Takeaways

Content management is not difficult if you delve into the details and understand why you need it. The main thing is to adhere to the chosen strategy and analyze the results. In fact, the ideas that you can implement are endless, and modern technology makes it possible to do this almost in one click.

Bio: Kristin Savage nourishes, sparks and empowers using the magic of a word. Along with pursuing her degree in Creative Writing, Kristin was gaining experience in the publishing industry, with expertise in marketing strategy for publishers and authors. Now she had found herself as a freelance writer. Kristin runs her own FlyWriting blog. You can find her on Facebook.