A common narrative amongst small business folks seems to be rooted in the response that people don’t have the money to be spending on content marketing tactics or content marketing strategy.
But here’s the issue: if you try to blindly execute these tactics without understanding a higher level context of how they apply to your business, you’re going to be spending a lot of money for little return.
The first step is to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. At the end of the day, everything you’ve done on that day for your business should lead back to a greater objective.
Understand your Objectives
So what are your objectives in business? Is it to get more reach? Is it to convert customers? To further develop the process of your sales funnel? Run more effective ads? Or more effectively distribute your content?
Whatever your objectives are, you have to divide them amongst three horizons…
Horizon 1: Ground Level
This is what’s happening now. It’s essentially what’s right in front of you, the more immediate things.
For my business, this means creating and distributing content, posting on social media, and taking care of my clients’ needs. That’s what’s immediately on my plate.
Horizon 2: Higher Level
These objectives are ones that can’t necessarily be accomplished on a day to day basis, or even a week to week basis. You want to have an awareness of what these objectives are, keep them in mind, but the nature of these objectives is that they will take longer to accomplish than your ground level objectives.
A Horizon 2 kind of objective for me is to work with influencers in industries of interest— marketers, master networkers, startups, and activists. I don’t want to work with just any business in those industries, I want to work with thought leaders.
It’s not going to take just a few days or even a few weeks for me to be able to develop the relationships with the influencers I’m interested in working with, and subsequently, land them as brand advocates or clients. It’s an objective that will be accomplished in a slightly wider scope of my business.
Horizon 3: Best Case Scenario
These are your overall goals in business. These are the objectives that you must plan for to work and, the best case scenario will ultimately lead you to the level you want to be at in business.
Without these objectives in place and actively working towards them, your business remains stagnant. These are very much long-term and higher level ideas.
My content creation business has a Horizon 3 level objective to level up my blog in a way that not only attracts more attention but retains attention. To me, retaining attention is a very high-level objective.
Retention is a process. It requires us to really understand our primary and secondary audiences and the buyer personas behind each. Those are some very high-level ideas that take a lot of shifting strategy and effort over a long period to accomplish.
Now knowing what your objectives are and where they fall within these categories helps you to determine how exactly how you should be spending your time and energy, as well as your money.
These objectives should direct your daily behaviors. They should inform how you approach tasks on a tactical level.
For example, if you’re in the music business and are trying to get people excited about your music, you need to not only have music out there for people to binge on but also collaborations to match. People won’t get excited unless you can show that you’ve created a lot of music and also worked with other people to get your music out there.
In any business, you need a home base of content for people to binge on. That’s the only way you can keep that attention. But if you’re just creating content for your own sake rather than within the context of your objectives, people aren’t going to care.
This is the whole definition of inbound marketing: having people qualify themselves into your brand by earning their attention and interest.
Pour your Heart into your Content
If you’re going to make any cuts in your budget, your content needs to be the last thing that you cut. Everything you do in marketing is based on your content because it’s your home base. It’s your foundation.
If you don’t create content but decide to throw money at Facebook ads, or at optimizing your SEO, or paying influencers to promote your brand, it’s like you’re continuously building a sandcastle while the bottom is being washed away.
I mean, seriously. It makes no sense to build something with an unstable foundation, so why would you throw money at your business if you’re not making any effort to build up your content?
And when I say “build up” your content, I’m not just talking about creating and publishing content on a consistent basis. Because honestly, every time you create a really solid and valuable piece of content, you’re putting a piece of yourself into it. People need to see it for it to truly be valuable.
If people aren’t seeing your content, you’re not building a foundation. You’re just exhausting yourself.
Use what you have in front of you. Building that foundation is not just about the creation of content, it’s about distribution. You have to get that content out there in as many ways as you possibly can. Get creative with your distribution!
I’m optimizing distribution by making sure my content is cross-posted, repurposed, upcycled, and atomized. Right now I’m using not only my blog, but Instagram, Instagram Stories, my Facebook page, my personal Facebook account, Twitter, LinkedIn, and contributing guest posts (like this one!).
One piece of content can be broken down and repurposed and transformed in so many different ways to ensure that it gets in front of as many eyes as possible. Never create a piece of content and distribute it in only one format or on one platform.
A great (higher level) objective for your content is to not only make it binge-worthy but worthy enough of your pride in sharing it.
Your content is the cornerstone of your voice. You have to ensure that the effort that you put into it is strong enough to build your business upon, or else you’ll be throwing money and time on a crumbling sandcastle.
All of your Marketing Efforts Need to Complement your Sales Funnel
So knowing that the foundation of your business needs to be your content, and knowing that the objectives are what need to guide how you build that foundation, how do you ensure everything you’re doing, no matter how small, will actually yield results?
By ensuring that everything you do leads back to the sales funnel you’ve set yourself up for success.
When you’re spending money and not accomplishing what you want, you’re overcompensating for your lack of a foundation or misguided objectives. If you take care of the foundation and allow your objectives to guide you in building that foundation and building from it, everything you do will lead back to your funnel.
Don’t get it twisted: everything you’re doing should either be to acquire, convert, or engage people in your business.
For example, one of my former clients uses Facebook Messenger to talk one on one with people in a live responsive environment. This actually allows him to minimize his ad spend because he’s hitting several objectives at once.
If everything you’re doing in marketing truly complements your funnel, you won’t have to worry about not having enough money to accomplish your goals.
Conclusion
Don’t execute content marketing tactics without understanding the bigger picture. Visualizing your business in terms of your objectives, your foundation, and your sales funnel will help guide you in how you spend your time and money on a day to day basis. Even that higher level stuff should guide your everyday actions
Create and distribute content to build that base, use your objectives to guide you as you build off that base, and think on a tactical level in terms of the sales funnel. As long as you have the bigger vision in mind, the rest will fall into place.
