Content Strategy for Small Business Owners

Create a strategic content roadmap to grow your business and stay ahead of competition.

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

Have you ever felt frustrated and confused about the content you’re creating for your brand and wondered whether or not it’s even effective? You need a content strategy and this article is for you.

Learn why successful companies like HubSpot create a strategic roadmap for their content to achieve business goals and how you can apply their playbook to grow your small business.

What is content strategy?

Leading pioneer, Kristina Halvorson, defines content strategy as plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content. In other words, content strategy is a roadmap for organizing priorities around how you will create and distribute text, visual graphics, audio, video, and interactive media like printed brochures, blog posts, and images and videos for social media accounts. Your strategy should be organized around both achieving business goals and meeting your customer’s needs. This isn’t a plan that you can set and then forget either. It’s an ongoing and iterative process that you, and your team if you have one, should revisit at least once a year. Most content experts revisit their strategy once a quarter.

Why is content strategy important?

Successful companies like HubSpot invest in content strategy because it helps their teams organize around common goals and create a consistent process to reach them. While not all small businesses have a team that is dedicated to content strategy, creating a strategic vision has many benefits even when you’re a team of one. First, it forces you to carefully think about your customer and how they interact with your business, from discovery to eventually purchasing your services or products. It’s important to know how your customers feel about these interactions and use your offerings to solve problems in their lives. Knowing this information will help you address gaps in your content that can improve their experience.

Second, the benefit of creating a strategic roadmap is that you have prioritized and planned your content ahead of time rather than scrambling last minute for ideas about what to post and where. This strategic vision can save valuable time while ensuring quality and consistency of the content that you produce. For example, companies like HubSpot develop a content strategy for lead generation through different channels while anticipating regular annual changes in consumer behavior such as the typical summer slump in traffic for B2B companies. HubSpot uses this downtime to audit and revise their existing content in preparation for the fall and holiday season when traffic begins to pick back.

Resources are precious to your small business. Don’t waste time and effort on content that isn’t useful to your business or customers. Invest in a content strategy that delights customers and improves your bottom line.

5 Steps for Creating a Strong Content Strategy.

1. Create a list of 1–3 challenges and opportunities and prioritize what’s most important. To help you prioritize, look through data such as success metrics from previous marketing campaigns, your sales history, and customer relationship management systems. If you’re working with a team, get their feedback on their top priorities.
2. Set a goal and create 3–5 metrics to determine whether you’re on track toward success. Once you’ve identified your top challenges and opportunities, you need some indication that you’re headed in the right direction. Since many digital strategies take time, you’ll need to choose some metrics that are not directly related to sales such as web traffic and engagement on social media. These metrics indicate brand awareness and can serve as sign posts that tell you which section of the sales funnel you should work on next.
3. Begin envisioning what kind of content will help you achieve your business goals and which channels you will use to distribute your content. Also, decide how often you will create and publish new content on these channels.
4. Develop a contingency plan in case you don’t see the results you expected. It’s common to run into roadblocks and to encounter issues that you didn’t anticipate. When this happens, you want to have a plan in place so you can quickly react. Your plan should include some room in your budget for any additional incurred costs and a time limit for campaigns before switching platforms or investing in more software.
5. Create a process for regularly reviewing and updating your content. Most companies review their content strategy every quarter to determine which articles were popular and create additional content related to those topics. They also update dead or broken links. You may not have to update your content as frequently if you do not write blogs or articles but it’s important to have a system in place to keep your content up to date. Regular blog updates and additional content on popular topics ensures your business stays relevant to your customers. It also improves your search ranking on sites like Google.

Case study.

Prior to the pandemic many stores could rely on foot traffic to their physical locations for 100% of their sales. However, many business owners quickly moved online once travel restrictions and stay-at-home orders were enforced around the country and the world. Here’s an example of a content strategy developed by one of these businesses, a couple who co-owns a nutrition supplement business. After creating a website, they had no idea how to generate traffic to their website and had zero experience with marketing and SEO. Naturally, this was their top priority.

1. Top challenges and opportunities: Increase search traffic to the website and entice visitors to sign up for their newsletter. The increase in traffic and signups would hopefully lead to increases in sales.
2. Key benchmarks of success: (1) weekly website traffic, (2) percent of visitors who signed up for the newsletter, (3) email open rate, (4) email click-through-rate, and (5) number of weekly sales.
3. Content ideation that will contribute to goals: (1) a popup that asks visitors to sign up for the newsletter after they have been on the site for 30 seconds, (2) create eye-catching email campaigns featuring 3 popular supplements that will be sent twice a week, and (3) write at least one blog post a week about the health benefits of nutritional supplements. The blog posts will help build trust with customers who want to improve their health.
4. Contingency plan: If less than 1% of website traffic signs up for the newsletter after 3–4 weeks, consult with an expert to see if there are any changes that would improve the landing page and email campaigns.
5. Content governance: Plan content on a monthly basis and review content semi-annually.

Note that the couple reviewed their strategy monthly for the first year because everything was so new to them. They wanted to be able to quickly react if something wasn’t right. Plus, monthly reviews helped them become more comfortable and familiar with the data. Now that they have over a year of experience with ecommerce, they’ve moved to a quarterly basis for planning content strategy. One thing that they learned over the year was the importance of A/B testing email campaigns. This helped them adjust prices and determine how many emails to send each week to reduce churn. In their case, they found that they retained more customers if they sent an email once every two weeks. They initially sent two emails a week but changed their strategy once they realized that customers began unsubscribing and marking their email as spam.

Key Takeaways

Content strategy is the key to meeting business goals and satisfying customer’s needs. A strong content strategy should include how you’re going to manage the content from creation to deletion and key benchmarks to achieving goals. Create a timeline for when you will revamp content that is underperforming and produce additional content on popular topics that drive traffic to your site. Your content strategy should also include a contingency plan for whenever things do not go as planned. Keep in mind that this process is iterative and should be revised regularly to help you stay on top of your business and ahead of the competition.