Do you wish to increase offline and online traffic to your business? Then, you need to consider using the digital world to achieve this. One effective tool for reaching this is content marketing.
Contrary to popular opinion, content marketing involves more than just writing blogs and uploading them on your website.
What Content Marketing Involves.
Goal
You need to define your goals for content creation. Each content must have a specific purpose. It could be to increase brand awareness, reach out to prospects, customer retention, or much more. Having clear goals would help you to determine what type of content to develop.
Audience
Know your audience and determine what content would be appealing and appropriate for them. If you have an e-commerce site, you can gather information about your audience from Google Analytics, and identify their demographic variables like age, location, and gender as it would help you plan accordingly. Using Google Analytics, you can also determine what channel drives traffic to your site, it could be e-mails, social media, organic search, or something else. Here’s something to guide you with Google Analytics. (How to use Google analytics-full guide) Once you have identified it, focus more of your content creation on that platform because you likely have your largest audience there. You can also create online polls/surveys to understand the pain points of your audience and create your content around them.
Research
Conduct research to know what your audience is currently talking about. Your content should be relevant to your audience. Do not create content based on assumptions, rather make research to know what your audience needs. Remember that you are writing for your audience. You can do keyword research to identify trending topics in your niche. One effective tool for this is the Google keyword planner. Other tools available are Ubersuggest (a Google Chrome extension), answerthepublictool.com, or Quora to know the trending issues. You should make an effort to learn more about keyword research. https://mangools.com/blog/keyword-research/ Craft a compelling headline for your content and ensure the information presented is up-to-date as at the time it is being published. Narrow the focus of your content and align it with your marketing goals. Also, use hashtags strategically, do not use irrelevant ones just to increase visibility.
Engage With Your Audience
Do not just post content and leave. Engage your audience by responding to their comments. It is advised that you stay online for at least an hour after posting content to engage with your audience. Some of your clients /prospects may make irrelevant comments, be discerning and respond to them with compliments, this is important to make all your clients/prospects feel valued. Do not post long boring lectures, instead ask your audience to share their opinions, everyone loves to be heard and understood.
Monitor The Metrics
Observe the level of engagement to your content, within the first hour, and subsequently, as it could provide insight into the most appropriate time to share your content. Try to determine the reason for low engagement, it could be your style of communication, your visibility, social media algorithms, or time of sharing such content. Once you have identified the reason, seek solutions and implement them. Find out other possible reasons for low social media engagement. https://www.socialmediaworldwide.com/blog/social-media-marketing/the-5-reasons-your-social-media-engagement-rate-is-low/ Do not be outdated, use these to stay up to date in the business world. (10 current tech trends to influence your marketing)
Always optimize your content strategy and keep up with the latest trends to keep your brand relevant and expand your market share.
What Should Be the Size of a Marketing Budget?
After establishing your business, the next thing you would want to do is to let people know about your business. Anything you do in an attempt to let people know about your business and want to patronize you is marketing.
You can verbally (orally) tell people about your business products, hand out flyers to them or make posters (this is known as field marketing); or you can go on the internet to tell people about your business and why they should buy from you (this is known as online marketing).
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Any way you choose to let people know about your business, you will surely incur some expenses and costs. In this article, we will discuss why you need to have a marketing budget and how much you should spend on marketing.
How Important Is it to Have a Marketing Budget For My Business?
You should know that a budget is simply a list of items and the estimated resources to be spent on that item. Simply put, it is the amount of money you set aside to take care of a particular expense or cost.
In this case, a marketing budget will help you to determine the amount of money you would want to spend to take care of marketing expenses. It acts as a check on you when you attempt to spend more than required or necessary on marketing your products.
Through your marketing budget, you can assess whether you have overspent or underspent on marketing and adjust the budget accordingly.
Have trouble marketing your business? Quickly, give us a call on 07053772178
Is there a limit on how much I should spend on marketing?
Putting a limit to how much you should spend on marketing may sometimes seem as though you are underselling yourself. However, this doesn’t mean that you should spend carelessly on marketing. It means that, since there should be a limit to everything, including your marketing budget, this limit should not be too rigid and strict. It should allow revisions.
For example, say you intend to spend N100,000 in marketing your business for June, and by June 20th, you discover a very attractive marketing opportunity that is sure to generate large sales, but you would need to spend N120,000 to seize this opportunity.
Such a situation would make you quickly revise your marketing budget to accommodate this new opportunity.
Essentially, there should be a limit to how much you spend on marketing but this limit should not be too strict and rigid. It should flexible enough to accommodate any upward or downward revisions as the case may be.
How Big Should My Marketing Budget Be To Be Considered Acceptable?
An ideal marketing budget should be set between 2% to 10% of sales revenue. This is according to the U.S Small Business Administration. Some businesses however exceed this range and even spend as much as 20% of sales revenue on marketing activities.
It is also important to note that the size of your marketing budget would vary depending on the industry and the size of your business.
For example, JUMIA, a large online retail & wholesale store, may set its marketing budget at N5 million. A small retail supermarket won’t be able to set such an amount. Rather the supermarket may set its marketing budget at N10,000.
Generally, the size of your marketing budget will be considered acceptable if it accommodates the following:
Any anticipated changes or developments in your brand. For example, if you sell wigs and you are looking to add perfumes to your line of products, your marketing budget should take care of the costs of advertising those perfumes.
The ongoing/current level of marketing expenses. For example, you have observed that to market your wigs, you usually spend at least N50,000. It is only wise that your marketing budget should not fall below N50,000.
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