Why Your Small Business Needs a Content Strategy and How to Create One
Before you create any digital content – whether it’s social media postings, email marketing, branding, or a website – you need to understand why and how the content will ultimately support the business so you can properly facilitate the customer journey from start to finish. A content strategy organizes your owned, earned, and paid media efforts into a coherent and consistent relationship with your customers for accelerated market growth and maximum brand loyalty and advocacy.
At FlyDog Digital, a marketing and content strategy is our first step when working with every single client. This process ensures that 1) we understand the wants and needs of the business and 2) we dive into the nitty-gritty of what they do, who they service, and their ultimate business and marketing goals. This allows you and your team to understand your business better internally so you can properly promote it externally.
Once we have completed your small business’s content strategy, we’ll create a holistic digital marketing plan that can include organic social media, email marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and paid advertising. The content strategy guides our team when creating content that will resonate with your ideal customer.
Target Persona
The first step to any content strategy is understanding your target persona. This doesn’t just include demographics; this persona should encompass everything related to your ideal customer, including:
Feelings and emotions
Buying habits
Personal life
Hopes and dreams
Pain points
The target persona of your ideal customer is the driving force behind how they relate to your brand and the problem you are solving for them. If you can’t make the connection between the two, then spoiler: you probably don’t have the correct persona. When writing content, you want to speak to this individual and, ultimately, solve their problem with your product or service. If you have properly defined your target audience’s pain points, they won’t just be passive followers and potential customers – they’ll be desperate to hear from you and will need the solution you offer to achieve their goals.
Once you identify the basics about your target persona, it’s time to form a narrative about the individual. What does their day-to-day life look like? How do the choices they make daily affect their buying or purchasing habits? Telling their story will ultimately help you better understand and connect with your ideal customer as a person - separate from who they are as a business.
Competitive Analysis
Once you’ve nailed down your target persona, it’s time to check out your competitors, their target persona, where your business overlaps with them, and, most importantly, – where there’s a gap in the market for you.
The easiest way to find your competitors? Start stalking them (we know you’re good at that if you’re in social media!). When stalking checking them out, ask yourself these questions:
Who are their ideal customers?
What are they doing well?
What are they not doing well?
Where can you add to the sphere that others can’t?
What strengths do you have that others don’t?
The identified space (or gap in the market) is how you will differentiate in messaging and strategy to stand out in the digital void and sea of competitors.
Point of View (POV)
It’s time to start putting everything together, and your first step is to create a Point of View (POV) statement. This internal statement is used to develop key strategic direction and messaging. Ultimately, you want it to position your business’s value clearly and distinctly to help you stay consistent with your content’s messaging.
Your POV is divided into three sections:
What’s the biggest problem and/or fear facing your ideal customer?
What’s the status quo of your industry, and where is there room for improvement?
How can you improve the status quo (where’s the competitive gap and what’s your advantage), and what do you bring to the industry?
The POV should be a few sentences that succinctly but pointedly answer all of these questions. This is your opportunity to provide a fresh perspective on your industry as a whole.
Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
Once you have established a more general view of the industry in your POV, you can move into the Unique Value Proposition (UVP), which focuses specifically on what your business brings to the table! Your UVP explicitly clarifies what you do, who you do it for, and how you do it differently than anyone else. While this is also an internal statement, it is pivotal in driving foundational messaging and strategies for your business.
Your UVP should answer the following questions:
What do you specifically do? Be direct and detailed!
Who do you help? Who are your ideal customers?
What makes you stand out from the rest of the competition?
Similar to your POV, the UVP should be a maximum of a few sentences. It should expand upon what makes your business unique and how your product or services fill the competitive opportunity in the industry.
Brand Voice
Once you establish your POV and UVP as internal messages, it’s time to figure out how you will express it all externally. That’s where your brand voice comes into play! Using a consistent brand voice across platforms establishes familiarity and strengthens brand identity, making your content recognizable and trustworthy to your audience.
Your brand voice ensures a coherent, unified message that resonates with your followers. The more detailed, the better!
Remember to follow the 3 Cs of brand voice:
Clarity: Be bold about what you do and don’t represent in simple, clear language. When creating messaging, keep in mind your values, POV, and UVP.
Consistency: Ensure your language (and imagery!) stays consistent across all platforms. This helps create a stronger external message and build trust when your ideal customers encounter your content.
Constancy: Go beyond consistency with constancy! This isn’t just represented in your tonality, copy, and imagery – it’s how your company lives out its values from customer interactions, product and service quality, and every other touchpoint.
Content Pillars
Now we get to the fun part – it’s finally time to start narrowing down the type of content you’ll create for your business. Content pillars provide a systematic approach to communication that increases community growth, engagement, traffic, and ultimately, sales and brand equity over time through consumer-centric storytelling and consistency.
Most content falls under one of three categories:
Pillar 1: Awareness/Consideration
Pillar 2: Sales/Revenue
Pillar 3: Loyalty/Advocacy
Content pillars are NOT three to five topics you talk about often or the idea of “Educate, Entertain, and Inspire.” Instead, each content pillar should have a specific goal based on where the audience is in the customer journey, such as generating demand, converting demand, and retaining loyalty.
For example: Social media is a big topic for us at FlyDog Digital (duh!). However, that’s not a content pillar for us. We could talk about social media in all the pillars – what differs is how we talk about social media. Having distinct goals for each pillar (generating demand, converting demand, or retaining loyalty) allows us to track our results better and measure KPIs (hint hint: read below for more!).
Once you decide on your pillars, establish how much of each pillar you’ll post. Your content split between the pillars will vary depending on your business goals. Going into Black Friday and Q4, most companies will prioritize Pillar 2. Going into a slow season, you’ll probably want to focus on Pillar 1 (finding new customers) and Pillar 3 (retaining your current customers).
KPIs
If you’re not tracking your numbers, how can you make data-driven decisions for your business? Based on your content pillars, you’ll have different digital and social media KPIs you’ll want to track. Take note of them every month and use them to drive where you can improve and change your content.
What’s working? Do more of that!
What’s not working? Why isn’t it working, and how can you change it?
Does seasonality play a role in your KPIs increasing and decreasing?
Invest in Content Strategy
While you can use this outline to create your own content strategy and publish your own social media postings, working with FlyDog Digital on your business’s content strategy and digital marketing efforts ensures results backed by analytics and data.
Ready to invest in a holistic digital marketing package to level up your small business? While we start with a content strategy, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to your overall online presence. We’ll evaluate your branding and website to ensure that our organic social media, paid ads, and email marketing direct your ideal customer to a website that will convert. And all of this is backed by data, analytics, and A/B testing to ensure we’re producing results and creating content that resonates with your audience.
