Achieve Big Content Wins (Even With a Small Team or Budget)

Content marketing is an extremely effective strategy for companies that want to build engaged audiences and achieve long-term marketing success. The problem is that content marketing is complex with lots of intricate steps, which can be difficult for small marketing teams to manage and execute.

How can a small or underbudget team achieve big wins?

Even one-person teams can garner big wins and successfully implement content marketing plans. How? By setting expectations, contracting outside help and staying the course.

1. Set Expectations

Content marketing is a long-term strategy. It can take 6-18 months to see results, and for small businesses with limited brand awareness and small audiences, it can take even longer. So, it’s important to set realistic expectations.

Start by assessing your current performance before you begin. This allows you to create a benchmark to compare your ongoing efforts against.

Use a tool like Google Analytics to collect metrics from your website in a spreadsheet. Some useful metrics are: web traffic, time on site, unique visitors, return visitors, conversions, social traffic, shares, comments, mentions, and other engagement metrics. Tracking and looking at your analytics will help you to determine what type of results you can realistically expect. It will also help you identify high-performing content once you start content marketing too.

Depending on whether your business is completely online like an ecommerce store or a brick-and-mortar store will determine how much you can measure and which metrics to track. Online stores will be able to track the entire process and even attribute conversions to specific marketing campaigns. Brick-and-mortar stores will have difficulty tracking sales because they take place offline. There are still some benefits to tracking, but offline stores won’t be able to know whether it was your promotion, location, sales staff or other marketing efforts that ultimately was the final push to result in a sale.

2. Contract Outside Help

For small teams, it’s important to stay focused on the larger content strategy. With all the tasks required and only so much time to accomplish them, outside resources may be required to maintain quality standards and deliver an effective program.

Two keys to getting the right freelancers and agencies to work with your team and contribute to your overall goals is: finding ones that align with your strategy and setting them up for success. This means clearly defining roles and tasks, and ensuring that timelines are adhered to. Remember without timely approvals from your team, they can’t deliver what you’ve asked for.

3. Stay the Course

Remember content marketing is a long-term strategy. It takes time to grow your audience, and build relationships. That’s why it’s important to be consistent and continue to post new content until the buyer is ready and needs your product or service.

Successful content marketing only comes with quality content that is consistently delivered – it’s the right content at the right time to the right people.