The basics of planning your small business marketing
Marketing is an essential component of any successful business strategy. Without effective marketing, it’s difficult to attract and retain customers, and consequently, grow your business. Yet many businesses shy away from creating marketing plans because it feels too complicated or overwhelming. The truth is that while marketing may seem daunting, it doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, a simple marketing plan can be just as effective–or even more effective– than a complex one.
In this blog post, we’ll explore two critical aspects of a marketing plan: what you should be talking about and when you should be talking about it. We’ll also delve into the difference between evergreen content and seasonal content and explain why it’s essential to understand this difference.
What should you be talking about?
Before you can start creating content, you need to identify the topics that will resonate with your target audience. To do this, you need to understand your customers' pain points, interests, and needs. You should also research your competition to see what they’re talking about and how they’re engaging with their audience.
Once you have a good understanding of your target audience and competition, you can start creating content pillars or buckets. Content pillars are the main themes or topics that your content will focus on. For example, if you’re a fitness business, your content pillars might include creating an exercise routine, strength training, and how mental wellness is impacted by movement.
Creating content pillars is an effective way to ensure that your content is focused and relevant to your target audience. It also makes it easier to plan and create content, as you’ll have a clear idea of the topics you should be covering. No more asking, “what should I be talking about in my marketing?” With content pillars, you’ll already know.
When should you be talking about it?
Creating a content calendar is an essential part of your marketing plan. A content calendar is a schedule that outlines the content you’ll be creating and when you’ll be publishing it. A content calendar helps ensure that you’re consistently publishing high-quality content that’s relevant to your target audience.
When creating a content calendar, it’s important to consider the different types of content you’ll be publishing. As we mentioned earlier, there are two main types of content: evergreen content and seasonal content.
Evergreen content is content that’s relevant to your audience all year round. It’s not tied to any specific time frame or event and can be published at any time. Examples of evergreen content include how-to guides, client testimonials, and educational content.
Seasonal content, on the other hand, is content that’s important during specific time frames. It’s tied to events or seasons, and its relevance may decline after the event or season has passed. Examples of seasonal content include holiday gift guides, back-to-school content, and event promotion.
It’s important to identify where in the year you need to focus on seasonal content. For example, if you’re a retail business, you might want to focus on winter holiday gift suggestions in October-December, fresh-start items for the New Year, and things for summer fun-in-the-sun between May and September. By focusing on seasonal content, you can tap into the interests and needs of your target audience during specific time frames and create content that’s highly relevant to them.
The importance of evergreen content
While seasonal content is essential, especially for businesses that rely on seasonal sales cycles, it’s also important to have evergreen content as part of your marketing plan. Evergreen content provides long-term value to your target audience and can help attract new customers to your business, and build a deep loyalty with your existing audience.
Evergreen content is also valuable for search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines like Google prioritize high-quality, informative content that’s relevant to a user’s search query. By creating evergreen content that’s optimized for specific keywords, you can improve your search engine rankings and attract more organic traffic to your website.
Examples of evergreen content include:
How-to guides: How-to guides provide step-by-step instructions on how to do something. They’re valuable for your target audience because they provide practical advice and help them
Educational content that teaches your audience about a topic relevant to their interests or industry
Client testimonials that show off your happy customers
Basic information about the goods or services your business provides
Next up: content planning
Once you know what you’re talking about, and when you’ll be creating or publishing that content, you’re ready to dive into regular content planning, which is something you’ll continue doing on a regular basis as long as you have a business to market. This is where folks can get overwhelmed– and why we created the Minimal Marketing Plan to help you stay focused on a realistic level of content creation.
Ready to plan your marketing with this simple approach? Download our Minimal Marketing Plan for FREE to explore how to make your marketing do more with less.