Using Content to Grow Your Business

By Lindsey Miller, Owner of Content Journey

I’m guessing you want to grow your business. Most of us business owners do. It’s why a lot of us throw increasingly more money into advertising. But what if I told you that you could decrease your ad spend, reallocate those dollars into content marketing, and it would continue helping grow your business now and in the future? Sound too good to be true? It’s not!

Currently, 90% of organizations use content marketing, and 66% of business owners are increasing their content marketing spend this year. They’ve seen how content marketing can help them build organic audiences who keep coming back for more, and they’re using content to grow their businesses.

What is Content Marketing?

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let me explain what I mean by “content marketing.”

Content marketing is creating and publishing content for a target market. The content engages your potential customers to get them to buy a product or service.

Content marketing comes in various forms, including:

• Blog posts

• Service pages

• Videos

• E-books

• Infographics

• Case studies

• Webinars

• Podcasts

• Social media posts

Content marketing allows your audience to find helpful information from your brand when they need it. It’s only effective if it attracts your audience’s attention and they find it valuable. That’s how content marketing works for your business — now and in the future. It establishes your authority and keeps people returning to your website for more.

Growing Your Business with Content Marketing

Now you understand what content marketing is. Let me explain, generally, how to use it to grow your business.

Start With Strategy

You don’t start publishing content and cross your fingers that it’ll work. You need data-backed reasons for what you’re doing, which means you need a marketing plan. Define your audience and outline the type of content you’ll use to reach them. Don’t forget to determine how to best distribute the content, so your target audience sees it.

Set Goals

You have to set goals to measure success. Your goals depend on what you want to accomplish for your brand with content marketing. You can base goals on increasing traffic on your website, newsletter sign-ups, engagement, brand awareness, etc. You have to know what you want to achieve and why. Determine a way to measure your goal, then monitor progress.

Allocate Resources

You can’t get something for nothing. It takes time and expertise to grow your business with content marketing. You have to know how to do it right. So whether you’re outsourcing content marketing or investing in your team to do it, you will need to allocate some resources. As with everything in business, ensure you’re realistic about the goals you want to achieve and the resources it will take to do so.

Focus on SEO

Search engine optimization helps people find your blog posts when they search for information about a topic, product, or service. You need SEO to make your content marketing work long-term for your business. SEO is all about thinking about your audience, what they need, and what words will get them to your site. If you do SEO correctly, a single blog post can send people to your website for years to come.

Organize Your Content Efforts

Creating a content calendar to organize your content marketing efforts is essential. But you don't have to use a fancy system. A simple Google sheet will work. And resources are available, like this one from CoSchedule, to help you plan your content efforts.

Track Results

If you set goals, you have to be able to track them. Goal tracking helps you review your efforts, so you can do more of what your audience wants and less of what they don’t.

You should track Key Performance Indicators over time. A lot of content, especially blog posts, increases in value over time, so it’s vital to watch how KPIs evolve long-term.

Adjust as Necessary

Content marketing isn’t a one and done. You can adjust your strategy at any time if you recognize that your efforts aren’t progressing you toward your goals. That’s why goals, measurement, and monitoring are critical. You can do more of what’s working and less of what isn’t.

Let Content Journey Help

Using content to grow your business requires time and expertise. At Content Journey, we understand that it may be too much to do while running your business. Book a call to talk about using content to grow your business and how Content Journey can help.

About Lindsey Miller

After spending a decade in politics and almost the same amount of time in the WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem, Lindsey Miller created Content Journey. Her passion for making a difference led her to build a business around the success of others. 

Lindsey’s goal when working with clients is to take the mystery out of SEO and marketing. She knows Content Journey clients win when we understand and follow the rules. Lindsey doesn’t take shortcuts. She does the work to help clients grow their businesses the right way. 

She stays knowledgeable about marketing strategies to ensure Content Journey clients always follow best practices. One of her favorite things is talking to clients about creative strategies. It is why she always keeps available time for free strategy calls. If you want to talk strategy, feel free to book a call. You also can connect with Lindsey on LinkedIn or Twitter.