Reasons Why Kenyan Businesses Struggle with Content Marketing

Developing and distributing relevant and useful content such as podcasts, blogs, newsletters, social media posts, emails, and videos to your current potential customers is more of content marketing. This approach establishes expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business on top of the minds of your clients.

Content marketing can be overwhelming, a successful content marketing campaign should be manageable and sustainable. To get started, follow these steps;

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Identify your audience; to create content for a particular reader, you need to have a clear idea of their priorities, challenges, and preferences.

Determine the right formats; The right format corresponds with what stage of the sales cycle you are creating content for. Another important consideration includes what formats will best help you showcase value, a video, a checklist, or a suitable format.

Decide who will write, edit and proofread your copy; an audience will judge your content on its quality, and they should. Identify the right resource whether internal or external to be part of this work.

Determine how you’ll distribute your content; will you post content on your website, email it to people, or print it for an event.

Choose a sustainable schedule; once you are aware of your target market and your way about the campaign, choose a schedule that fits your resources and budget, plan a realistic number of contents you want to give out.

For many small businesses, it is not their content marketing that is failing it is the strategy they use or in most cases, they lack strategies. As you’re creating your strategy, look at which of your competitors have already been successful. You can learn a lot from someone else’s failures and successes.

 Top reasons why small businesses struggle with content marketing and how to solve them.

1. Not market research

Marketing research can involve many processes, but when it comes to a small business owner, you do not necessarily have the experience, budget, or time to conduct extensive market research. Market research can be conducted with a focus group of your top consumers, by sending an emailed survey to your customers, interviewing your best clientele on why they buy from you. Keeping up with trade journals that share industry statistics and trends is also another key component of market research.

2. There is no existing marketing plan

Developing and possessing a written marketing plan that has been formed from a SWOT analysis, as well as a review of your revenue channels and long-term statistics, is a necessary tool to keep you on track towards your goals. Most small business professionals get confused about what to do next, or why their marketing is performing poorly because they do not have a written marketing plan.

3. Ignoring analytics

Once you have set your goals, you have to measure your success, if you ignore the analytics, you will never know what works. The majority of the small businesses measure their content marketing success based on their website traffic. There are ways to measure your success, for example, SEO rankings, social media shares, and even increased customer satisfaction. If you know your end goal, you will be able to track your content efforts to ensure they lead to the conversions that you aim for. The ways you choose to define your success depends on your content marketing strategy, what channels you use to promote your content.

4. Creating but not promoting

Creating content and publishing it on your blog and calling it a day is almost the same as not creating the content. Promotion is the major component of content marketing. There are several ways of promoting your content, from social media to email marketing, links, and referrals to mention a few. Once you have identified where to share your content give all your efforts to let it reach people.

5. Unidentified target audience.

Not having a defined target audience is a big mistake small businesses can make in their content strategy. Defining your audience helps you focus on creating great content that your audience will enjoy. A mistake many make when they first start creating content is trying to please many people. Having a wide target audience, or not targeting anyone, in particular, means your content will not resonate with anyone. You will not build a connection between your business and your readers, viewers, or potential customers.

Also Read:

1.  Steps to guide you in your Manufacturing Business.
2.  Importance of Customer Survey to your Business.
3.  Ways to Sustain Employee engagement at your Workplace.

Creating a small business content marketing strategy that is successful requires more than just content. You also need to think about content quality, monitoring results, and audience research. Many small businesses fail with their content because they are not targeting the right people, at the right time and in the right place

Mombasa, Kenya.

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