How You Can Use Content Marketing to Boost Income During a Recession
During times of economic downturn, it can be tempting to reduce your outgoings and switch off your marketing campaigns, but doing so could have hugely adverse effects on your business’ success.
In fact, it could be the perfect time to review your existing marketing plans and reassess the different strategies that you’re going to harness to drive traffic, conversions and leads.
While there is an almost endless array of different marketing strategies that you could lean on, building out a well structured content marketing plan could be the key to helping you weather the storm and boost your business during a recession. In this article, I’m going to tell you why.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the creation of different forms of content used to promote a business. This could be blogs or articles on your website, social media posts, videos or even podcasts.
The aim of these different types of content are to capture your audience’s attention, provide them with useful and memorable content and lead them to take an action, for example visit your website or purchase an item.
Website content especially can be helpful for driving more traffic, gaining visitors that you may not have captured otherwise. Google recently released their ‘useful content’ update which has put even more focus on ensuring creators are providing their audiences with information that gives them a satisfying experience. The more content you can create which fulfils the goals of your audience, the higher up in Google’s search results you will rank.
Companies that use content marketing as part of their overall plan tend to have a detailed content marketing strategy that will incorporate details such as who their target audience are, their needs, wants and fears, the type of content they will be producing and on what timelines, as well as key KPIs to track their success.
How much does content marketing cost?
How much you choose to spend on your content marketing is entirely up to you, however for your strategy to work, it’s important that you update your content quite regularly. If you have the time to do this yourself, then your strategy can effectively be almost free - however you should note that you do need to have good skills in this department for it to be effective.
Research shows that companies spend an average of 26% of their total marketing budget on content marketing, with the most successful of those spending closer to 40%. The majority of this will be on outsourcing content creation with experts such as copywriters, graphic designers, video creators.
If you want to focus your content strategy on short or long-form text, a copywriter is what you’ll be looking for. Many offer different packages to suit the needs of your business (you can take a look at what I offer and my prices here).
How long does content marketing take to work?
This might be considered a bit of a downside, but content marketing can be a bit of a slow burner. Depending on your goals and the type of content you choose to use, it can take a while for search engines such as Google to rank your content and for people to organically find it, however there are ways you can improve this manually.
The best tactic for making sure that people see your content is to share it! Posting new content on your social media pages and explaining why it’s useful for them will be the quickest and easiest ways to get eyes on it, which can then potentially encourage more people to share it.
If you have a regular and well-structured content plan with information going out to your audience on a regular basis, you should start seeing the benefits of this within the first 6-months, and as long as you remain consistent, this will only improve over time as Google starts to see you as a trusted source of information.
How do I know what content is right for my audience?
Understanding the best type of content for your audience takes a bit of research. The best place to start is by creating personas for different people within your audience and getting to know as much about them as you can. Ask questions such like:
What are their wants and needs?
What are their fears?
How does your product or service answer these?
What are the key questions they might have about your offerings?
What is their purchase journey like?
At what stages might they need more support?
Which other brands do they respond well to?
What elements of these brands should you emulate in your content?
Once you have a good understanding of your audience personas, you can start building out a content plan that answers the most common questions they may have and gives insight into who you are as a business and how you can help them.
You will also find that over time, you’ll get a good knowledge of what kind of content works for your audience and what doesn’t, helping you mould the information you build in the future.
How do I build a content marketing plan?
There are a few different steps that you should carry out to build an effective and successful content marketing plan:
Outline your goals and KPIs
A plan is nothing without a goal. Work out what it is you need your content strategy to do for your business and outline the KPIs you need to track to measure the success.
Understand your target audience
As above, take the time to get to know your audience and the kind of content that will be most appealing and useful for them.
Identify the best channels
It’s no good creating amazing content if your ideal audience won’t be there to see it. Research where they spend their time and make sure you paste your content all over it.
Determine your budget and outsourcing needs
Whether you’re completing your content in-house or outsourcing it, work out what budget you have to spend and what’s possible within this.
Create a content schedule
Creating a calendar of the content that you want to create can be really helpful in making sure you’re covering off the right topics, not being repetitive and sticking to the content pillars that you outlined during your customer research stage. This will give your content the best chance of success.
Build out your content
And finally - it’s time to actually create something! Give yourself plenty of time to do this, your audience will be able to tell if the creative is rushed.
You should also schedule regular content reviews (I’d recommend every 6-months) to make sure that the information is up to date, and that any statistics or links are still relevant.
How do I know if my content is successful?
There are loads of different ways that you can track the success of your content. One is through Google Analytics, tracking how many people are visiting your website off the back of content that has been created. You can also track engagement through your social media platforms, or the number of conversions and leads that are coming off the back of your content strategy.
Whichever way you choose to track it - make sure you give it plenty of time to flourish and remember that not everything will work the first time. Content marketing is all about learning from your mistakes and using these learnings to create something better.
Working with a copywriter to build your content
I totally understand that not everyone has the time to create their own content strategies and write endless amounts of copy - that’s why I do what I do!
If you’re on the hunt for a copywriter to help you with any stage of the process, whether you just want them to execute an existing content plan, or build one from scratch, I’m always happy to help. Please get in touch for more details.