COVID-19 has crippled a lot of businesses. A Washington Post article confirmed that more than 100,000 small businesses are closed forever. Pre-pandemic, people had great personal and in-person contacts — thereby creating the optimal ease to market your product to people.
Currently, we are advised to stay at home, so no more contacts — and only companies with experienced content marketing team can reach their audience through websites and social media.
It’s best to know that for small businesses to stay relevant, they need to re-strategize their marketing strategy and update those strategies often.
You need to be thoughtful in your content ideas and content marketing strategy in any business arena.
Providing steps that will guide you to create efficient content marketing strategies without spending too much is the goal of your content marketing strategy.
Review Your Buyer Persona
Hubspot defines the buyer persona as a semi-fictional representation of your prospective customer based on the market research and real data of existing customers. A buyer persona is just as important as every other thing to a business. It helps determine your target audience. It reveals their pain points and also reflects their priorities.
The first step you need to consider when creating a content marketing strategy is to create a buyer persona or review your existing one (if you already have one).
Your buyer persona stage is where you determine the behavior of your prospective customer — their pain points. You want to know what their, priorities are, demography, identifier, background, and goals.
Here is the basic overview of how to create an efficient buyer persona.
1. Carry Out a Thorough Market Analysis
A buyer persona is the real-life representation of your existing customers. Have your data based on real data — not just your gut instinct. Carry out extensive market research on your customers. Study your competitors, compile data of existing customers and your social audience, and learn the social channel they use.
2. Identify Their Pain
What’s the problem your customers are trying to solve? What’s hindering them from reaching their goal? These questions can determine your customers’ pain points. Ask your customer service department for help. You can also set up search streams to engage in learning about the trends in your niche on social media.
3. Learn About Their Goals
To have a balanced data, you also need to learn about your customers’ goal. What’s their motivation; what are the things that make them happy. Learn about their end game. This gives you a unique perspective of the most appropriate solution for them.
4. Understand How to Solve Their Problem
After knowing your customer’s problem, it is important to design a solution. What can you do to solve their problem? Make a concrete plan here.
How do demolish the barriers hindering your product from reaching prospective customers? Where are your customers in their buyers’ journey? All these questions can help design a viable solution and connect the dots between your product and the customers’ need.
Rebrand Your Business and Build Authority
Branding is critical to the success of businesses. Apart from setting you apart from the competition, branding reflects everything about your business. It’s important to the success of your small company.
From your logo, to how your customer relates and interacts, to the color of your uniform, branding defines who you are. So you should know that branding is essential to every aspect of your business.
However, developing a strong brand requires in-depth market research, and analysis of your customer needs is essential.
For example, pre-COVID, businesses were growing with the old strategies they developed. Four months into the crises, most brick-and-mortar companies without an online presence are finding it difficult to survive. People are online now — all the time. Be online for them — and note the data on how people’s tastes are changing.
It’s essential to review your brand and build authority where your customers frequent. Let’s check out some of the steps you need to re-evaluate your brand
1. Re-evaluate Your Uniqueness
What’s different between you and your competitors? Which problem is your product solving? Why should customers buy your product? These are some of the questions that you need to answer when developing your brand. Review the product and services you offer and provide a viable reason for your answers.
2. Think of Your Brand as a Person
The purpose of branding for your businesses is to develop unique systems that guide you and differentiate you from competitors. Build your brand forward to have something in common with every person.
For example, every individual is guided by their value, purpose, and belief system. Every person’s value and purpose reflect what they wear, how they talk, and every aspect of their lives.
When developing your brand, think of that brand as a person. Develop your business value, the purpose of starting the business, and craft out your belief system that would serve as a guardrail.
3. Have a Long-term Relationship Goal with Your Customers
It is better to under-promise and over-deliver than to disappoint your customers. Aim to build a long-term relationship with your customers. It is only through this can you stay longer in business. Create trust by being honest with your offerings.
4. Be Unique and Authentic
Your brand should reflect your voice, value, and personality. Be honest about what your business is all about.
Checking out your competition doesn’t mean you should copy what they do. Take care when developing your brand. It’s a giant put-off for your customers to deal with inconsistency.
Move with the Trend
What’s the marketing trend in your niche? What does the latest research say? Where do your prospective customers congregate online? What do they discuss? These questions are valuable for creating an effective content marketing strategy.
Develop the right marketing strategy based on your customer research. Find out what your competitors are doing, connect the dots between your product, trends, and what your customers want.
If your final decision is to change your business model and marketing strategy, don’t just make the change, have a backup plan in place in case things don’t move as you predict.
Apart from this, people are not robots; you need to appeal to their emotions. One way to build authority and make your business more relevant is by developing content around your niche. Build posts that show you know what you’re doing. Develop a new marketing strategy.
People spend more time online nowadays, so:
- So develop blog posts, articles, podcasts, charts, and other content to show you know what you are doing.
- Don’t just create online contents; develop articles that your customers want and search engine like (SEO is essential)
- Find out what people want and develop contents around it
- Originality is essential
[Related: 7 Small business Tax Deductions You’ve Probably Overlooked]
Top Image Credit: The Lazy Artist Gallery; Pexels
