Whether you are a lawnmower repair business, a boutique footwear company or a dog grooming enterprise you need to be thinking about and evolving ways to engage with your target market, through creating relevant content. For many SME business owners this can be a harrowing experience, as you are generally not in the business of content creation.

But fear not, as you don’t have to be a Pulitzer Prize winner to create great content. Great content is more about understanding your audience and a developing a strategy to ensure what you write is of use to them by enhancing their product experience.

Where to Begin?

1. Define Your Goals: Content needs to serve a purpose ie. educate customers on the benefits of a product that they may not be aware of. Or a novel or simple way to maintain a product once purchased.
2. Research your Audience:  Understand what they want and the adapt your content style to how they communicate.
3. Focus on Your Niche: The content you create should be tailored to your niche instead of the entire industry.
4. Measure Your Results: Run regular reports to see how you are are tracking in relation to your goals.
5. Listen to Your Customers: If they aren’t engaging in an aspect of your content, scrap it.
6. Amplify Your Content: What has worked well from an engagement/conversion perspective? Run with what works and adapt it to your other social media platforms.

Content Calendar

The best laid plans fall over pretty quick without a watertight schedule so it is important to create a Content Calendar to plan, track and decide where your content will be distributed

This should include:

1. An audit of your current social networks and content. Are you sharing content on the right platforms? Of the content created so far what is worth keeping, what is worth improving and what is worth scrapping.
2. Choose your social channels. Just because a particular social media platform might be the flavour of the month, it won’t be useful if your customers aren’t using it. So, there is no point investing time in it.
3. Decide what your calendar needs to track from an engagement perspective. Likes? Follows? Comments? Clicks to purchase? You decide.
4. Make a content library for your assets. File all the images, content, media and any other relevant assets, in a well-ordered filing system for ease of access
5. Establish a workflow.
6. Start crafting your posts. Try to incorporate a combination of text, images, video and/or infographics to make your content more varied and appealing.
7. Invite your team (or a friend if you are a one (wo)man band) to review and make suggestions on content. Don’t be precious if your “Gem of a content idea” is slated by your colleges.
8. Start publishing/scheduling.

When it comes to the content creation theres a few simple techniques you can consider to maximise engagement. Such as:

Share other people’s content. This seems counterintuitive but if you find a piece of content on another site that you think is beneficial to your customers then by sharing it is shows you genuinely care for your customers. Align yourself with complimentary brands and cross share content. By doing this you are able to tap into their following and engagement.

Everyone likes a competition and it’s a great opportunity to not only give away free stuff but to boost awareness and engagement too.