This guide outlines five great content marketing tips for those trying to market on a limited budget. Content marketing gives you a fantastic way to reach targeted audiences without spending a lot. In fact, content that has both value and relevance can dramatically increase the return on the money you invest in your digital strategy.
Although content marketing attracts traffic and provides a good format for SEO, many firms discover that it requires a lot of time and effort. For this reason, many give up on content as a strategy, hoping to find an easier solution. Still, the amount of qualified traffic that content marketing can attract to your site makes it indispensable. As time passes, the number of visitors can result in substantially higher sales and profitability than you could otherwise enjoy. Best of all, the organic nature of your high-quality content means that it can deliver results for a long time.
Content marketing tips for a small budget
However, before that can happen, you need to get your campaign off to a good start. To get results as quickly and inexpensively as possible, use the following five content marketing tips.
Content marketing tips 1. Have a content marketing strategy
Without proper planning, you could waste a lot of time and effort. While doing that, you may also damage your reputation and hurt your brand. So, do yourself a favor and create a strategy using the following basic activities:
- Set goals – decide what you want to accomplish with your content marketing. Make sure you choose realistic and achievable goals that are consistent with your long-term business plans
- Research – find out everything you can about your customers. This includes their desires and needs as well as the challenges they face. Take a look at what type of content your competitors produce.
- Measure – define what performance indicators (e.g. views, traffic, conversions, shares, likes, click-through-rates, etc.) you want to track to evaluate the performance of your content.
- Promote – You need to promote the content that you create. Find out what social networks and content formats that your customers prefer and publish it there.
- Schedule – Keep your content marketing on track by creating a schedule for publishing to your various digital channels. Make your brand consistent and predictable.
Content marketing tips 2. Start a blog
Perhaps the most vital element of your content marketing strategy is your blog. Fortunately, you can create a blog without spending very much money at all. Many web hosting services have built-in scripts they can automatically install WordPress. Within just a few seconds you could be ready to blog.
You might not have the time or the skills to write compelling content for your blog. Meanwhile, you might not have enough money to hire professional copywriting services. To get around these obstacles, enlist the help of your team. Being a small business, your employees may think that they are already busy enough. To give them an incentive to join the effort, consider giving them the option to work remotely. If they accept your offer, you will likely see their productivity increase and your overhead decrease.
You can also consider hiring a freelancer to create website copy. Generally speaking, you can expect to spend between $20 or $30 at a time. Even if you have to hire a remote worker, you can still save money over a regular employee to have guest blogging done for you.
Content marketing tips 3. Focus on quality over quantity
At first, you might think that you need to feed your blog with an avalanche of content. As a matter fact, the opposite is true. Rushing to publish content often results in poor quality which turns off your readers. Search engines can also detect low-quality content and bury your blog in search results. A better strategy from the content marketing tips angle is to focus on quality. In most cases, a few high-quality blog posts create and better results than a large number of poorly written pieces. When you have high-quality content, you can also extend its benefit by repurposing it in different formats.
When you optimize the use of your content, you can pay for a small number of exceptionally written articles and get more benefit that you would get from many poorly written ones. Moreover, if you decide to try to save money by using an online content provider, you should prepare yourself and your team to invest time editing the material that you receive.
Content marketing tips 4. Repurpose existing content
You can improve efficiency by taking old material and refreshing it with new details. Additionally, you can repurpose content in one form for another. Similarly, you can often create videos, slideshows or even podcasts from old content.
Because you have already researched the topic, you can create lots of new material without much effort. Not everyone enjoys reading. Some people prefer watching videos. So, when you make your content available in multiple formats, you substantially increase the number of people that you can reach.
Content marketing tips 5. Promote your content
As part of your strategy, you should have decided how you plan on promoting your content. Again, if you take the right approach, you can do this without spending a lot of money. To turbocharge sure content promotion, you need to take further action. To begin with, you can try the following low-cost content marketing tips:
- Promote your content with dedicated and authoritative landing pages.
- Distribute a monthly newsletter to engage your audience.
- Comment and share related material on social media while referencing your own.
Include links to your content on other channels such as your e-commerce website.
Although quality usually comes at a premium, you can still profitably engage in content marketing. As you produce and promote your content, you can find ways to minimize the cost while maximizing efficiency. Be sure to join the discussion to share your experiences and learn content marketing tips from other content marketers. Now, get started with these content marketing tips. Remember, help is always nearby.
