For businesses of every size, content marketing is becoming an increasingly integral piece of customer engagement and growth strategy. Still, it can be tough to know where to get started. In our last blog, we covered some of the fundamental questions you should answer to design a content marketing program—one that offers your customers practical utility in understanding and addressing their challenges through your products and services. In this blog, we’ll help illustrate how you can get started through some indispensable tools and resources for your content marketing journey.
Strategy: Blueprint to Jump-Start Your Content Marketing Strategy
Looking for an end-to-end guide to help you make sure you’ve got all the important pieces accounted for? This guide from the Content Marketing Institute has you covered! From ideating on your goals to measuring content performance, this resource offers several some tried-and-true approaches and best practices to help your define a content marketing approach that drives your business strategy forward.
Inspiration: 47 Ways to Come Up with Better Content Ideas
Once you have the general focus of your content marketing program defined, you may need some inspiration for how to generate topics that will hook your audience. This practical guide offers (realistic) suggestions on coming up with topics that will resonate—from asking your customers for input, to sharing “behind-the-scenes” details about your business that familiarize customers with your brand.
Topics: Blog Topic Generator and Blog post Outline Template
Struggling with blank-page syndrome? This fun and handy blog topic generator tool allows you to type in any subject and the website instantly produces a new and unique angle for your next blog. For example, type in “Landscaping,” and the topic, “Why Our World Would End if Landscaping Disappeared,” pops up. Once you have your topic, the blog post outline template offers tangible guidance on how to best structure and organize your background research, core insights, and calls-to-action for maximum impact.
Headlines: Power Words for Headlines
In today’s always-on world of instant communication and connectivity, it’s easy to be distracted. As a result, customer attention spans are at a premium, and it’s critical that you make an immediate impression on your audience. This handy sheet outlines some “power words” that you can infuse into content headlines and email subject lines to hook your customers and urge them to read on.
Cadence: Editorial Calendar Templates
As a small business owner, you’re invariably juggling countless tasks to keep your small business running, thriving, and growing. A simple editorial calendar can be a helpful way to keep content marketing efforts organized. This resource offers several different downloadable calendar template options to suit a range of needs—whether you’re looking to keep track of release timing, calls-to-
action, keywords, and more.
Creating an effective content marketing program is an ongoing journey towards engaging, building trust, and bolstering loyalty with customers. In taking your first steps, consider building from resources that embody learnings from those who have already started down the path.
