Content Strategies for Local Businesses

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How to Start Crafting a Content Strategy for Your Local Business

Would you like people to remember your brand for a longer time? Would you like to make a lasting impression in the minds and hearts of your customers? How can you talk to your chosen audience compellingly and unforgettably?

If you want all the abovementioned things to happen to your business, you should hire an expert copywriter to create captivating content for your brand and business.

Words that Sell

For your business to flourish, you need a mix of branding efforts with strategic business techniques. One of these efforts that will help elevate your enterprise is through creating meaningful and relevant content.

What is the content in the first place? Content is anything that will communicate your brand message to your intended public. It can be anything from the written word, videos, or oral communiqué intended to pass on appropriate information about your business to a specific end-user. It can be transmitted or shared through various communication mediums such as e-mails, e-books, webinars, or video marketing.

Your content will be more advantageous to your business when it is thoughtfully planned and executed. For your content to work, you need to have a sound content strategy in place. A content strategy will serve as your blueprint for all your content efforts to communicate your business successfully.

Whether you already have an established business such as the best steakhouse in town or you’re only starting in your entrepreneurial venture, you will surely appreciate the benefits that an effective content strategy will bring.

Here is a quick guide that will help you craft a content strategy that will help your business:

1.     Start Right

When designing a content strategy, you need to take into consideration your company’s mission and vision. What your company stands for and where it aims to go are fundamental pillars on where your content strategy should be hinged on. Know what your business and communication targets are before you craft a complementary content strategy.

When you have your mission and vision in place, you need to set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are your specific targets from which you can measure the effectiveness of your content strategy. These indicators also carry a particular weight or scoring parameters. KPIs include measurable goals such as increasing the number of email subscribers, hitting a sales quota per month, or reaching your specified markers in search rankings.

2.     Talk to the Right Audience

As with creating effective marketing strategy communication, a content strategy will also require you to know your target market.

You should know the demographics of your target audience. You can get a market research agency to help you or cull it from your database (if you already have one). Demographics will include basic information about your customer bases such as age, educational attainment, gender, income, and location.

Aside from this, it would be best if you also looked into the customer psychographics. Psychographics will generally tell you about the lifestyle your customers are leading. Information such as their hobbies and interests, brands that they prefer, or malls that they frequent are telling signs that may be used to craft content that they can relate to.

3.     Know Where You Are

Knowing where you stand at the moment will also give you a clearer picture of where you want to go. This will also help you design clear pathways to success. What are your current goals, and how does your performance measure up to them? How do you rank against your competitors? Do you have any existing content?

Check whether your existing content is reaching the right audience at the right time and with a suitable medium. Identify any gaps between your content and your objectives, so you can better craft a strategy that will address discrepancies.

4. Use the Right Vehicles

You also have to determine which content channels to use. Based on your KPIs and objectives, these channels must consider your target audience and the budget you have.

Content distribution is the way you share your content with your various publics. While distribution happens after you have created your content, identifying the channels beforehand is crucial in creating your content strategy. You need to know where your content will come out so you can appropriately create relevant content.

There are three kinds of content distribution channels. Owned channels are content properties that you own and have direct control over, such as your email newsletter, social media sites, or website.

Earned channels are channels that are typically shared with third-party partners. Third-parties are people or groups that share your content for free such as brand or product mentions in social media posts by bloggers, customers, or journalists.

Paid channels are where your content is shared through paid media such as paid social sites, paid influencer mentions, or paid advertorials.

5. Curate and Create

After you have identified the channels, then you can create the content that will best suit the particular site and the audience it caters to. It should be aligned with your objectives and KPIs. Typically, the content you create must answer the questions that your customers or audience asks. It can also be a way to clarify steps, explain products or services, or simplify business messages.

Your content should be compelling, coherent, and consistent with your brand identity and values. It should help you build customer loyalty and trust, nurture leads and current customers, generate inquiries and sales, and encourage a healthy interaction with your intended audience.

Words that Deliver

Your content strategy must bring forth a clear message that will connect you to your target market. It should be carefully planned so your content will be published in the proper channels at the right time and talking to the very people that you want to cater to. It should also meet your critical objectives through measurable ways to continually improve and refine your content strategy.

Most importantly, it should put your brand’s best foot forward not only to earn likes but also to retain customers for life.


AUTHOR BIO

Hisham Wyne is an award-winning copywriter, brand consultant, and content creator based in Dubai. He has over a decade’s expe­rience in helping brands get their messages right. From crisp web copy and zippy brochures to in-depth company profiles and analyt­ical annual reports, Hisham makes words work for you – so you can sell better, gain visibility, and give your brand a unique voice.

During his time in the Middle East, Hisham has collaborated extensively with blue-chip companies, including Twitter, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Harley-Davidson, and Aston Martin, and helped government concerns such as the Dubai Internet City, in5 and the Dubai Design District.

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