Content marketing can be a very very strong marketing tactic for smaller businesses. It does require time and effort, but not necessarily that much cold hard cash – sometimes no cash at all. What it does require however is that you have already laid a solid foundation.

If you don’t know who you want to appeal to and if you don’t know your viewers or readers, how are you going to make content that appeals to them? How will you know where best to share it with them? How will you know what kind of content they want to see? – do they like text, video, images etc?

Also, you don’t want to only talk about what it is you do, you need to have room to talk about other things that your target group is interested in – otherwise you are just like that annoying guy at the party who can never talk about anything but himself and what he is interested in.

Therefore it is extremely important that you know your target group or groups and know and understand them very well. Oh, and if you have a number of target groups, you need to know what different things appeal to each of them, and how best to deliver the content so that it is effective, but also to make sure that content meant for one group does not negatively affect another group should they come across it. You need to be clear on all of these things for your content to be effective.

You also need to know who you want to be, what you want them to think of you, what feelings you want to evoke with them through your content. Your content is an extremely strong brand builder – but if you don’t know what you want your brand to be then your content can not be effective in building that brand. It can even do more harm than good by muddling your image and causing people to be confused about who you are and what you do. That will never work.

If your content is not consistent, if it does not convey the same overall message and brand, it will never be very effective – and we don’t have the time or the resources to be doing things that are not working as hard for us as we are doing ourselves.

We also need to realise how our content works within the marketing process. Content has a different purpose based on where in the marketing process we are using it. Do you want it to grab people’s attention? Arouse their interest? Get them to like you? Trust you? Give them a taste of what it is you have to offer? Clinch the sale? Get repeat business? Or help referrals?

That’s why I keep hammering on about the foundations, the strategy, because if your strategy is well thought out and planned, that will be your rock to build on and everything else you do in your marketing will be so so much more effective. If you build your actions on sand they will just blow away in the wind ;)