3 Mistakes You Might Be Making In Your Small Business Content Strategy
If you’re a business owner like me, you’re DIY’ing your content strategy or have a small team behind it, but are very hands-on in the planning process and execution. You’ve got your marketing plan, brand assets, keywords, and brand pillars, and are prepped to get the content planning underway.
But despite having these things in place — which are super effective and important in the process — there are still things that many of us overlook.
Here are the three most common mistakes I see in content strategy so that you can self-diagnose and determine how best to move forward.
Marketing your brand without having a solid brand strategy.
It’s very common to mistake a marketing strategy for a brand strategy, but I’m here to share the good news that they indeed are not the same.
Brand strategist Laura Bull said it best when she said: “Marketing is what you wanna say for the 20 days, branding is what you wanna say for the next 20 years.” Brands that lack a strong foundation of their brand will flail on the marketing side because there isn’t a bright North Star to guide the content and build brand authority through consistency in brand voice, messaging, and image.
With a brand strategy in place, your marketing strategy has a strong foundation to operate from. Without it, you’ll spend more money and time trying to launch things that don’t have a brand in place to back the offer up.
Do this instead:
Have a solid brand strategy in place. Know what your mission, values, pillars, stories, key messaging or phrases, voice, and identity is.
Get clear on what makes you unique. No two people are the same, so knowing your differentiator and strategizing how to translate that into your brand messaging is key.
2. Not sharing more about YOU, the person behind the brand.
Assuming there are some in your audience who know their problem, they know the solution, and they know you offer that solution, you need to offer them a reason for why should they choose YOU. Finding the differentiator in your brand can come in the form of a feature or benefit, but can always come from your own uniqueness.
Do this instead:
Give them more glimpses of what it’s like to work with you AND your personality.
Demonstrate what you value. This will attract more like-minded clients and weave out the ones who don’t share your views.
So, how do you find the thing that stands out about you?
When I work with clients, I discover their unique gifts and qualities by looking for themes and repetition through personal struggles, wins, and experiences. I gather as much information as possible through a Branding Questionnaire, have strategy sessions to discuss the questions deeper, and conduct research including customer interviews.
You have tons of stories that speak to your struggles, your wins, your experiences so knowing the purpose behind the story and why it’s being shared with your audience is key to revealing the face and mind and personality behind the brand in the way you’re comfortable (ie video content, podcast, photos, blogs, emails, etc.).
Remember as service providers, people want to work with people they like, people they have a rapport with, and people they feel comfortable sharing with. So humanize your brand by highlighting the amazing human behind the brand.
3. Creating content based on trends, not your truth.
Trends can be topics, platforms, content type or stye, and even imagery. But following every trend will not support your brand authority.
Knowing who your brand is and what it stands for should be the filter you use for every piece of content you create. It’s as important to know how you want to show up and share your personality as it is to know who it is you want to talk to.
Do this instead:
Know your core values deeply. These values are your anchors in life, the touch points that help guide you to make decisions that feel truly aligned with your desires and needs.
Understand that showing up authentically just means that you are not betraying who you are when you show up online. These anchors (core values) determine the content you produce so that you are showing up authentically and confidently.
Work your values into every part of the content — the messaging, imagery, sound, etc. If something isn’t aligning, it’s not on-brand.
Why You Should Use Storytelling To Set You Apart
A lot goes into creating meaningful and effective content for your brand. But something that helped me most is having clarity around my stories.
Often, when we hear the words brand and story in a sentence together, we often think of your origin story — the story about how your business came to be. But more than this origin story, your personal experiences and everyday occurrences can offer your audience a glimpse at your unique perspectives and help build relationships and rapport.
Brand Stories
These are stories that align your brand with with your values, show your personality, demonstrate what it’s like to work with you, and how your experiences tie in with your customer experience. Brand Stories can be shared in your content like social media, email, sales pages, and even your website. They are very impactful in weaving human connection into your brand and offers.
Build Your Story Bank
Starting with your values, personal interests, and passions, you can start to list the stories and experiences that depict why these matter and how they align with who you are. Knowing what your audience is also interested in, you can begin to find the overlapping subjects and topics that could be shared to highlight the human side of your brand.
Your key stories and themes can be compiled into a Story Bank that can be easily referred to as you create content. My content strategy leads my content while my stories elevate the message.
Story-led Marketing Strategy
The question I get the most is: “How do I weave my stories in with my offers, promotions, and launches?” Good question.
There are so many approaches to doing this. Some love using a story about something that happened to them over the weekend to hook in their readers and use the point of the story to lead into their offer. Others use stories of client's transformations and conversations to highlight their services.
The best thing to do is to try different approaches to telling your stories and see what feels good and authentic to you. Observe what other people are doing as well to get inspired. Learn some more approaches to using stories in email marketing here.
Wrap up
The fun thing about content strategy is that it’s always evolving and changing and it can be reevaluated and tweaked at any time. You can begin to replace strategies that aren’t serving your brand with new ones. If you’re looking for support with your storytelling, I am offering services to support you with creating your story bank, uncovering your differentiator, and even how to use your stories in your content creation.
View my brand strategy services here.
