Content marketing strategy is one of the most powerful and effective ways to build a genuine connection with your audience. It allows you to provide value while establishing yourself as an authority in your niche. This is why traffic generated by content marketing is so valuable, as it comes from an attentive and dedicated audience. Another thing that makes content marketing so powerful is the fact that it can be done on any kind of budget. To be able to make an impact, however, you’ll need to move strategically and have a plan. Here’s how you can create a content marketing strategy without spending a fortune.
Start with the Content You Already Have
The first thing you’ll have to do is check your online real estate and do a big spring cleaning. You want to see what you want to keep and remove, what needs to be updated, or content you might want to consolidate. You can use a crawling tool to get all the URLs on your website. This will not only allow you to retrieve pieces of content easily but also broken links or pages you may have completely forgotten about.
You should also consider working with a team that will be able to look over your content and help you come up with a strategy. Teams like Big Surf Digital have been offering SEO services London for years, and have a reputation for getting results fast. A team like this will be able to see exactly what’s wrong with your content, come up with a solution, and work within your budget. They could also make a few tweaks to make sure that your site’s visitors actually turn into paying customers.
Focus Your Efforts
If you want the best results with a limited output, you’ll have to concentrate your efforts on the channels that work the best for you. Beyond your blog and site, you don’t need to be all over the place. You should focus on the channels that get you the most immediate results, and those you actually have time to invest in.
In most cases, Facebook will be a given. Twitter is also important for blogs and for curation. Beyond that, you could look at platforms like Pinterest, Google+, or LinkedIn, but there’s rarely a need to be on all of them. If you don’t know which ones to pick, we suggest you take a look at what others are doing in your space and where they’re investing the most efforts.
Have a Light Posting Schedule and Stick to it
Since you’ll be dealing with a limited budget, you probably don’t have much to spend on content creation. The only solution here is to limit your posting schedule and make sure that every post counts. Once a week is more than enough at the beginning. It’s also important that you respect your schedule to allow your subscribers to get into a rhythm. Just going missing for a few weeks could be enough to put you all the way down their list of priorities.
Use Other People’s Work
There are also tons of ways that you can benefit from the hard research work others have done before you. You could curate content and start doing commentary on important studies in your industry, for instance. This is all perfectly fine, as long as you actually add something of value and give credit back to the source.
Another way that you could get others to work for you is to have guests write blogs on your site. This could be a situation where you offer to post on their blog as well. Many, however, will gladly do it for free if they feel like your audience is one that they’d like to reach.
Don’t Get Intimidated by Graphic and Video Content
Creating great graphic content is not as complicated as many imagine. You have tools like Canva and Infogram that allow you to create professional-looking graphics in minutes. Infogram is particularly great if you want to break down data, for instance.
Video content is also something a lot of people might be scared of, but it’s an incredibly powerful tool when used properly. While a professional camera can be expensive, many are able to create compelling content using nothing but a smartphone. As a matter of fact, the grainy look could actually help depending on what your brand and field is. Give it a try, and know that learning the fundamentals of videography can be done online as well. If you can’t get a professional camera, you can at least learn how to shoot like a professional. If you follow these few simple tips, you should be able to start building a content marketing strategy even on a limited budget. Always make sure to not bite off more than you can chew, and concentrate on what works best.