For many small business owners, trying to keep up with content marketing and social media as ways to grow business is a lesson in overwhelm that happens on a regular basis! It’s time for an intervention! There are a few simple steps you can take to break through the overwhelm and get content marketing working for you. Let’s look at a few (4) of those now:

Identify your goal

What are your goals for you content marketing? Having a goal of making more sales is way too broad and will lead to a sense of overwhelm. Instead, break that broad goal down into specific, measurable goals such as turning leads into customers or driving traffic to your website.

Get a strategy

It’s easy to fall into spending too many hours creating and posting content with no plan or strategy in place. For your content marketing to work well and to return the results you want and need, a solid strategy is required. Never create content for the sake of creating content – always have a strategy. Take the time to plan this important step.

Once you’ve identified who you are trying to reach, where they spend time online, what types of content they like and respond to and what you want them to do with it (like, share, join your mailing list, buy your product…) you’ll be able to design a strategy for meeting your marketing goals.

Make sure to gather leads

You’ve heard the one where social media has killed off email? Not so much. In fact, that’s simply not true.  Social media is great to build and strengthen relationships but aim to entice your followers to join your mailing list, as well. Not only does this make good business sense but it will also fight those feelings of overwhelm because your email list is an asset you own. Those frequent changes made by social media have no impact on your email list and nobody can take that away from you (as long as you regularly back up your data).

Outsource what you can

Before you think about outsourcing, it’s essential that you work out your strategy and goals beforehand. If you don’t you could end up paying someone to do work that has no benefit to your business. You can avoid this once you know exactly what needs to be done and how you’ll measure your results, you’ll find some tasks that would be better done by someone other than you. We know that overwhelm can be the result of too much work, but it can also come from trying to do work that isn’t using your strengths when you could be doing great work elsewhere.

Now take some time to look at your own content marketing – which areas could you work on to break through your sense of overwhelm?

 

Barbara Jemmott is the founder and business strategist at Your Entrepreneurial Spirit. Her 4-point YES to Customer Acquisition Program (C.A.P.) allows her to work her passion which is helping entrepreneurial women grow their audiences and income, online. She got here through her 20+ years of experience helping businesses understand and implement systems, strategies and procedures to increase productivity as well implement change and streamline operations. With experience and responsibilities to design, develop and deliver training for small to large technology training initiatives for Fortune 100 companies, she brings “Big Business” expertise to the small business space. Learn more about Your Entrepreneurial Spirit and the YES to Customer Acquisition Program at www.yourentrepreneurialspirit.com