Table of Contents
What is Content marketing?
Content marketing is a type of digital marketing strategy that uses the creation and distribution of online resources in forms of videos, audios, images, microcopies, blog posts, social media posts, infographics and other types of content to essentially drive interest in a product or service.
Why is content marketing important for small businesses in Nigeria?
Small businesses have a lot to benefit from content marketing, First, it’s a leading method to sell to their target audience while also fostering a relationship of trust between them and prospects.
Content marketing is an approach that works for grabbing attention especially when you’re caught up in a sea of competing players. You can leverage content marketing to indirectly promote your products and services organically, this is done by providing quality, well researched content that is both informative and rich to your prospective customers.
Prominent Organizations are increasingly harnessing the power of content to establish their brand presence, step up their authority, boost their search engine rankings, create a profit hub for their business, save cost on advertising and build a database of loyal customers.
Impressive Statistics on Content Marketing
- It’s no secret that content marketing is effective – in fact, websites that have a blog attract 55% more traffic (Quick Sprout).
- Blog titles containing 6-13 words generate the most traffic, according to HubSpot. This is likely because that range is long enough to be descriptive and also short enough to be catchy and easy to remember. When it comes to content marketing, it’s important to focus on creating titles that are both interesting and relevant to your target audience. Doing so will help you attract more readers, and ultimately generate more leads and conversions
- According to HubSpot, marketers who blog are 13 times more likely to see a positive ROI from their efforts.
- According to Orbit Media, the average blog post is 1269 words long.
- Bloggers that create long-form content report seeing positive content marketing results (Orbit Media)
Steps to Do Effective Content marketing in Nigeria
#1. Identify your marketing goals
The very first step to effective content marketing is to clearly spell out your marketing goals, you need to be crystal clear about what you’re hoping to achieve. This will help you to keep focus on the main as you set out on your content creation journey.
Approaching content making without first stating your objectives will lead to wasted effort and resources. You may be asking; but how do I identify my marketing goals? Well! It’s not something that difficult.
You just need to Set clear SMART goals. You can start from analyzing your business stats, for example, looking at how much revenue you generated in the previous months or year based on your current inbound marketing efforts, then you can set a new target to reach as you prepare to intensify your marketing efforts.
Your marketing goals may be about:
- Getting more leads
- Converting more leads to paying customers
- Making more sales
- Increasing your clientele
- Working on closing more sales in lesser time
- Increase your sales qualified leads rate (SQL)
- Identifying and nurturing your marketing qualified lead (MQL) to convert them to paying customers
- Increase the volume of leads generated per month
- Grow your social media footprint
- Boost your websites traffic
- Reduce your PPC
- Increase your ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)
- Launching a new product and more.
#2. Know your target Audience
Once the above has been observed, the next thing would be to identify in close knit your target audience. Having a well-defined audience of the target as you set out on your content marketing journey will help ensure you get the desired results from your content campaign.
A content marketing strategy that’s not well defined and driven towards a focused market will lead to futility. Reports have it that over $37 billion in ads spend is wasted yearly due to ads failing to engage the audience they were targeted at. You can tell this is a very serious issue especially for small business owners, so if you have been running ads or any form of content marketing campaign without first creating a tarte persona then it’s time to recourse.
A few questions that can help you to identify your demography of people/users you’re creating content includes;
- What kinds of things are they interested in?
- Are they men or women?
- Where do they live?
- What are their interests?
- What is their purchase intentions?
- What is their subcultures?
The more defined your persona is the better the result you’d get from your content strategy. Specifically, demographic data analysis such as age, gender, interest, location or residence, income, occupation can come in handy to help you identify your target audience.
#3. Find out What your competitors are doing right
Find out what your competitors are up to. This can be done by subscribing to their blog or email newsletters, following them on social media, and reading their website content.
Identify the topics they’re writing about and the keywords they’re targeting. Create similar content, but make sure it’s original and provides more value than your competitor’s content.
Promote your content using social media, email marketing, paid to advertise, and other marketing channels.
#4. Effective keyword research
Keyword research is the process of identifying and targeting keywords and key phrases that are relevant to your business, product, or service. It involves analyzing what people are searching for online and coming up with content ideas that align with those terms.
When done correctly, keyword research can help you create high-quality content that attracts more visitors to your website and helps you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Here are a few steps to get started:
1. Identify your target audience.
2. Conduct keyword research.
3. Brainstorm content ideas.
4. Write high-quality content optimized for your target keywords.”
There are a number of great free keyword research tools available, including Google AdWords Keyword Planner, H-supertools, Ubbersuggest, The Hoth Keyword Planner, some advanced tools to use are SEMrush and Ahref which are paid tools.
Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, so it’s important to choose the one that best fits your needs.
#5. Create a Content Strategy
To do content marketing effectively, you first need to develop a content strategy. This involves figuring out who your target audience is, what kinds of content they’re interested in, and how you can reach them. You also need to come up with a content calendar that outlines when you’ll be creating new content and how often you’ll be publishing it.
Once you have a strategy in place, the next step is to create high-quality content that will appeal to your target audience.
This can include blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, or anything else that’s relevant to your niche. You also need to make sure your website is optimized for SEO so that your content can be found by potential customers online.
#6. Create a Content schedule
It’s important to have a content calendar when you’re doing content marketing. This way, you can plan out when you’ll publish each piece of content, and make sure that everything is evenly spaced out. This will help you maintain a consistent publishing schedule, and ensures that your audience always has something new to look forward to.
#7. Start creating contents
Once you know your goals and audience, it’s time to start creating useful, interesting content. This could include blog posts, infographics, eBooks, videos, or anything else that’s relevant to your niche.
Your content should be high quality and offer value to your readers. It should also be optimized for SEO so that people can find it easily when they search for related keywords.
Use a voice that aligns with your target audience’s tastes if you already have a good idea of who they are. Incorporate new information and focus on effective storytelling to convey your message. There is a lot of data available in the environment around you.
Do not steal others’ ideas. focus on your own experiences and develop material that is exclusive to your company. The most essential thing to remember is to write fluently with simple words and clarity.
Make sure to add visuals (e.g., images or videos) to your posts, as they tend to get more engagement than text-only posts. You can also try using different types of content, such as quizzes or surveys, which can help you capture the attention of your audience.
#8. Promote your contents
Promote your content on social media channels as soon as you publish it. You can use scheduling tools like Hootsuite to queue up posts ahead of time, or post manually when you have a few minutes.
And most importantly, be sure to engage with your followers and other users in the community. Reply to comments, ask questions, and start discussions. This will help increase the visibility of your content and help
#9. Be consistent
To do content marketing well, you need to post consistently and cover more topics related to your business. You can also use keywords or phrases as part of your posts in order to attract potential customers who are interested in those topics.
Additionally, it’s important to make sure that your website is SEO-friendly so that potential customers can easily find your content online. Finally, always be sure to respond to comments and questions from readers so that you can build a community around your brand.
#10. Follow correct SEO Practices
The best way to do content marketing is to follow correct and widely accepted SEO practices. This means creating high-quality, keyword-rich content that is relevant to your audience and publishing it on a regular basis. You also want to avoid black SEO methods that can ruin your marketing efforts.
BONUS TIP: Grow a list
It is important to build a lead generation list in order to grow your business. By collecting the contact information of potential customers, you can keep them updated on your latest products or services, and even offer them exclusive deals and discounts.
There are a number of ways to collect leads, but the most common methods are through email sign-ups and opt-ins, or by gathering people’s contact information through forms on your website.
Whatever method you choose, make sure to be clear about what your potential customers will receive in return for their contact information. This could be regular email updates, access to special deals or discounts, or even an invitation to join your VIP customer group.
Conclusion
Nigeria is one of the most populous countries in Africa, and its digital landscape is rapidly growing. This means there are plenty of opportunities for content marketers to reach a large audience with their message.
However, there are also some unique challenges that come with marketing in Nigeria. In this post, we’ve explored how to do content marketing in Nigeria and given you a few tips to get started. We hope you find them useful.
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