In today’s world, businesses have to be more creative when creating tactics to attract and convert customers. The internet is overwhelmingly filled with a never-ending supply of content on virtually any topic you can imagine. According to the Social Media Today Blog, every minute of every day there are 49k photos shared on Instagram, 4.3 million users watch YouTube videos, 3.8 million searches are conducted on Google, Amazon ships 1,111 packages, 120 professionals join LinkedIn, and 12.9 million text messages are exchanged (2018). That’s a whole lot of content both created and shared every single minute!

In case you haven’t realized it yet, this means your business has a lot of competition when it comes to winning people’s limited attention spans. Feeling like your small business doesn’t stand a chance? Don’t drop the towel just yet. This is where a carefully planned content marketing strategy can help you stand out from the crowd of average content creators and increase your business revenue.

What is Content Marketing?

Content markeitng or user generated content is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

The key takeaway here is to create valuable content for your audience. Valuable, relevant, and consistent content will help build trust and credibility for your brand. Some businesses think that content should simply be created to help brand awareness and revenue but that is a self-defeating way to think of content marketing. Content should be created to help prospects and customers solve their top challenges.

Types of Content To Consider

• Video – This can be video in both long-form and short-form. For example, on YouTube, you are more likely to find videos ranging between 5-10 minutes were on social platforms video restrictions can be around 50 seconds – 3 minutes.
• Blogs – an article-type format document discussing or explaining a specific topic.
• Website – a collection of web pages for a specific brand or company.
• Podcast –episodic series of spoken-word digital audio files that a user can download to a personal device for easy listening
• Email – The act of sending an organizational message to a specific audience promoting or showcasing a targeted content or information.
• Social Media – Interactive networks which allow users to generate, share, exchange content, information and ideas.

Common Tools to Create Content or User Generated Content Creation 

Here are a few commonly utilized tools when creating top-quality content.

• Creative/Design – Canva, Removebg, Piktochart, Giphy, Unsplash, Hubspot Infographic Templates
• Video- Bitable, Animoto, Videopeel, Vimeo, Social Media Channels
• Writing/Proofreading – Grammarly, Evernote, Vimeo, Content Mapping Hubspot Template 
• Content Research – Buzzsumo
• Email – Hubspot, Headliner Analyzer, Litmus
• Blog – Hubspot Blog Topic Generator

Where do I start?

To be able to translate your business ideas into high-performing, top-quality, and engaging content you must always keep in mind who your customers are or buyer personas, how they consume information, what type of channels they frequent, and the type of information that might be educational to aid them in solving their challenges.

• Craft Your Strategy.

One thing to consider as you being to brainstorm about potential themes of inspiration for your content is to keep in mind the different stages of The Buyer’s Journey. These are the different interactions or stages a prospect will go through before purchasing or converting with your brand.

The Awareness Stage should be catchy, interesting, and simple content that can leave the reader or viewing wanting more. Think about it you rarely wake up in the morning and decide I’m going to purchase something and immediately purchase a product. No, you take the time to conduct research and learn all about price, features, options, etc. As you do research online you might encounter a product you’d never heard of before and it made you aware that it existed by clearly and simply introducing the product and how it can help you solve your problems.

The Consideration Stage is the stage where the customer has express interest in your product or service and is conducting heavy and detailed research. In this stage, more often than not, customers compare and contrast pricing, brand, features, to see which option will add the most value in comparison to the purchase value.

Figure 1 . Hubspot –How to Create Content for Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey.

Lastly, the Decision Stage is the last phase before a consumer decides to make a purchase. Here, for the most part, is the stage where customers need reassurance that your services are indeed the solution they’ve been searching for. In this case, free trials, samples, test runs, are effective ways to reassure any hesitancy from buying your products.

Considering these stages can drastically change the effectiveness and engagement your content receives. Each of these stages requires a different level of information and communication. As you sit down to brainstorm your ideas consider utilizing this content mapping template from Hubspot to write down and organize all your content marketing ideas by the stage.

 Figure 2 . Contstant Content 

• Optimizing Copy

Writing powerful and compelling content is a skill that requires data and knowledge. Understanding what purchasing phase or buyers’ journey your prospects are while also understanding your buyer personas or ideal customers can help you draft meaningful content that resonates directly with your best customers. Utilize all the information you may have on your buyer personas and adapt the messaging to the stage of the buyers journey they are in. For examples:

• Awareness – Focus on highlighting how to solve a problem or propose a solution. Try something along the lines of “How to”, “Optimize”, “How can I”, “Understanding”, “The best way to”, “How Do I”, etc. Remember copy or messaging at this stage should focus on solving your best customers’ challenges.
• Consideration – In this stage, you want to focus your content on providing concise information, specifications, features, and other relevant information about your product and services. Remember, prospects in this stage are weighing their options whether their motivation and decision is driven by time, money, or convenience this is the time the perfect time to present the facts and focus on how your business offerings provide a solution.
• Decision- Where drafting copy for this stage you should focus on providing added proof or credibility on why your products or services are the best solutions to your prospect’s problems. Utilize “Free Trial”, “Customer Reviews”, “Return Policies”, “Demonstrations” as the validation customers need to entice them to convert and purchase from your organization.

• How/Where Should I Share My Content

You guessed it…..whatever channel or medium your top customers frequent the most. Focus on sharing content through a channel that will have the broadest audience of your top and most loyal customers. This will help with engagement and performance. If you manage multiple social channels, websites, blogs, podcasts, etc. Consider narrowing down where you put all your time and effort. After all, running your own business can be very demanding as you can be forced to wear multiple hats. Focus on the channels your you have a bigger audience but also the platform your customers prefer and frequent the most to obtain content.

• What Is The Best Content Format?

The answer here is, it depends. It depends on who your customers are and their preferences. All in all, organizations are seeing a drastic change to video marketing in the past 10 years or so. Video is preferred by a lot of consumers as it is easier to digest and convenient to consume while doing multiple things.

By 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic — 15 times higher than it was in 2017. – Biteable. Video Marketing Statistics 2021

While the trends and statistics show video is widely preferred don’t discounts, images, infographics, blogs, and other content formats but rather think about how you can repurpose content multiple ways by adapting it to different content types. You can do a short video based on a blog you wrote while also creating an infographic. Great content or user-generated content requires time and money to create so don’t think you have to reinvent the wheel all the time. Simply become a master at reporpusing.

Interested in learning more about content marketing or user-generated content? Check out the below resources.

Resources 

Steimle, J. (2014 ) What is Content Marketing. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2014/09/19/what-is-content-marketing/?sh=10b41b7210b9

Ahmad, I. (2018) How Much Data Is Generated Every Minute? [Infographic]. Social Media Today. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/how-much-data-is-generated-every-minute-infographic-1/525692/

Justesen, I (2017) Creating Content for All 4 Stages of The Buyer’s Journey. Constant Content. https://www.constant-content.com/content-writing-service/2017/11/creating-content-for-the-buyers-journey/

Anonymous, (2021) Video Marketing Statistics: The State of Video Marketing 2021. Biteable. https://biteable.com/blog/video-marketing-statistics/