Great content with small forces

Content marketing is interesting not only for large brands, but also for small businesses. It seems that this tool can be used without large budgets or by yourself. After all, many still succeed. But how do they do it?
How to do content marketing if the budget is limited? Let's try to figure it out.

Typically, content marketing, like advertising strategies, requires significant budgets, but sometimes you may find yourself in a situation where the market, competitors, and your own resources give a chance to try and succeed.
A bit of luck, creativity, good “arrogance” - and they talk about you at no extra cost.

Strategy and Analytics

Content marketing strategy is not something that can be abandoned, working with a small budget. But this is something that you can try to build their own. It takes time, perseverance, some analytical skills. How to make a strategy on your own? There are already many detailed tutorials in the series “Content Marketing Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide”.
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What are your short-term and long-term goals? What steps should you take to achieve these goals? How each channel will help you get there and what interaction of content will be at each stage for synergy? How do you measure the effectiveness of content on this path, and what decisions do you make in the event of a strategy correction, with certain metrics indicators?

Unlike big brands, you don’t have to keep track of all the metrics and indicators of content quality. You will immediately see which topics and tools work and which do not, if you select only the main indicators. For them, you adjust the strategy. Focus on the metrics of content effectiveness and interaction with it.

If you are placing content on your own site, this Analytics report template is useful to you. In addition to the overall picture of attendance, you will see the conversion by key queries, sources of visits, social networks and in time to adjust the subject of posts.



To analyze the interaction with the content, use this template .



Here are all the performance indicators of posts that you need: bounce rate, time spent on the page, the cost of conversion. These indicators measure your content interest and value.

Watch also for sources of conversions to your publications and conversions from them to the necessary forms or links. Just by analyzing sources and conversions, you already get feedback on the effectiveness of your content and see what happens in the sales funnel, thanks to content marketing.

Free tools

There are quite a lot of free or shareware tools for working with content, the functionality of which should be enough, at least to start work in content marketing, and sometimes for full-fledged work within a company - a representative of small and medium-sized businesses.

• Google for analytics, work automation, lead reception, multi-user document management, and more.
• MailChimp and other services for mailings, automated series of letters, layout templates. Starting tariffs, as a rule, are sufficient not only for tests, but also full-fledged work for the first time.
• Canva and its analogues are an excellent alternative to graphic programs and designer positions in your limited, I remind you, budget of a content marketing campaign.
• Hootsuite is a social media management combine.
• WordPress is a blogging platform with so many features and plugins that you can create anything if you want.

There are also solutions for teamwork, CRM systems and kanbans, spell checking, translations, searching and picking up illustrations, creating and editing videos , and much more.

All this is easily on the Internet, God bless all these people who give us the opportunity to create content for free!

As the budget increases, you can expand the use of platforms, switch to paid subscriptions, and integrate new tools.

Relevance

When you are limited in budgets, you should not be sprayed on all possible topics of publications and content formats. Thanks to analytics, you can select the most “working” formats, and the topics will be prompted by the strategy and analysis of the target audience.

However, there is universal advice about what to write to anyone who wants to bring benefit to their customers. Write the answers to their problems and questions. Highlight the "pains" of customers at different stages of interaction with your product or service and give a detailed guide. This is the first thing they expect from you. Analyze customer questions that they ask the support service in online chats, letters and calls to your company, study the search queries on the site and on the Internet. And just give a detailed, detailed, detailed answer. Such an answer, for which you want to buy everything from you!

When you are trying to compete with any other brand in your niche for the valuable time of your target audience, the content should be extremely useful.

Outsourcing

You will not believe it, but it is often much cheaper to hire an intelligent team on the side than to pay authors in the state. When you can't afford your own team, outsourcing is a great option. When you outsource video production, content writing, social networks, you do not just save. Outsourcing gives you access to a specialized team of professionals.

Unfortunately, we can not give advice - look for authors in your company. Too often they come to us after these attempts. Your marketer, PR manager, and even the secretary are busy with their main job (even if you think that they are not busy, they are convinced of this) and at no additional rate are simply not motivated to write any articles, much less track their effectiveness.

If you see the strength to do it all, once again go back to the block on strategy and analytics and ask only two questions:

1. Do I need it?
2. How much is enough for me?

Answers must be honest. Considering the fact that content marketing is a long story, at least several months, and ideally constant.

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Famous in wide marketing circles, Seth Godin once said, “Content marketing is the only marketing that we have left.” It is unlikely that he turned to those companies that do not have large budgets, but the phrase is well suited to the topic of publication.
If you are limited in resources, try working with content, test different channels, “write the way” to the client's heart.