As a small business owner with limited time and resources, it can be tough to decide whether you should focus your attention on social media marketing, producing long-form content for a blog or a podcast, or even email marketing. 

The solution to knowing where to point your attention lies in looking at your overall business goals and objectives, and how your marketing metrics correspond. 

Showing up on every social media platform or launching your own podcast, just for the sake of doing it should never be on your agenda.  It doesn’t matter if everyone else is doing it – there should always be a strategy and a plan behind the content you’re creating. 

If you’re not sure where to begin when it comes to building a content strategy that aligns with your business goals, let’s take a step back and revisit this blog post about cascading metrics. By using this technique, you can logically break down what actions need to be performed in order to achieve your business goals. 

For example, let’s say that you’re in a period of growth. 

You know your audience is small and in order to achieve the financial goals you’ve set for yourself, expanding your reach and your audience pool is going to be a top priority. (More eyeballs, more chances of conversions) 

But here’s where most business owners get stuck. Expanding your reach could mean so many different things and could be done in so many different ways.  So how do we figure out what to do?

We look at our current marketing metrics in order to know which direction is going to be the most effective.

Think about where you’re already showing up online and then analyze your analytics for each marketing channel to see what’s working and how your current audience is responding to your content. 

Think about social media first. What types of content pieces tend to get the most engagement? For our current example we’re looking for shares and comments from your audience. Take note of this so you can make more engaging, shareable content like the ones already producing results.

When looking at your long-form content, are your blog posts bringing in traffic via organic search or is most of your traffic funneled in through your social and email marketing efforts?  If organic search is the clear winner here, make sure you have a relevant lead magnet attached to those blog posts to collect new leads and optimize your web traffic. 

When looking at your email marketing efforts, look at whether or not your lead magnets are consistently bringing in new subscribers and if your automations are nurturing them effectively. Then look at your nurtured email subscribers and how they’re interacting to your content. Are they opening your emails, clicking on your links, engaging with your CTAs?  If yes, keep nurturing them on a consistent basis with content topics they’ve already shown interest in. Whether that’s linking out to blog posts, podcast episodes, social media posts or completely original email content is up to you.

Then once you’ve looked at all your marketing metrics it’s time to make some decisions based on your desired outcome. 

In this case, which content route is going to be the most effective in attracting a new audience?

So for example, if you’re currently producing a weekly podcast series but your average monthly listeners are relatively low and you’re not getting much organic traffic to the show notes, your first guess may be to stop spending a lot of time here as this doesn’t seem to be effective in expanding your reach. 

But we’re savvy business owners who look at things from all different angles before making decisions, so let’s take a closer look at the situation.

For sake of example, let’s say you love creating these podcast episodes and because of that, this type of content is going to be much easier for you to crank out versus slaving away with a different content format that drains you to create. 

But we also have to take into account that you frequently repurpose your podcast episodes into TikTok videos, Youtube Shorts, and Instagram Reels. And surprise! These podcast snippets actually get a lot of reach and engagement on social media. Which directly aligns with your overall business objective – woohoo!

So now we’re going to use this information to make a more informed decision.

Instead of producing bite-sized weekly podcast episodes, we can change the cadence to bi-weekly or even monthly episodes that are a bit longer in length. This will save time on post-production efforts while also providing you with more material per episode to pull social snippets from.

See why we have to look at all our marketing metrics across the board in order to come to that conclusion?

If we just looked at social media metrics, you’d probably think, “I have to create more podcast episodes because these snippets are what attract the most eyeballs, but ugh that’s so much work!” 

While if we just looked at your podcast metrics, you’d probably think, “Dang. This is a bust. These numbers are low and it takes so much time to produce and record these shows that it’s not worth it in the end.” 

But after we take everything into account, we’re able to come up with a strategic content plan that’s both aligned with your overall business goals and enjoyable for you to execute.

It may seem tricky at first, but the key to deciding where to focus your attention in marketing, will always reveal itself once you take a step back and look at your overall objectives and how your metrics correspond to them.

This featured article is brought to you by Marissa Pané, Online Marketing Strategist.

Marissa Pané is the founder of Pané Marketing, a boutique marketing agency dedicated to supporting female service providers and small business owners.

With a decade of corporate marketing experience, paired with her formal education in communication design and psychology, you can count on each marketing strategy produced by the Pané Marketing team to be data-driven and built based on the principles of human behavior.

She’s committed to helping small business owners unlock the full potential of their brands with strategic, psychology-driven marketing.

You can connect with Marissa on Instagram, LinkedIn, or directly on her website.

Marissa has also provided a go-to FREE blueprint resource for Service Providers and Small Business Owners who are looking to use content marketing to grow their client base. Download the Content Marketing Blueprint for Small Business Owners here: https://marissapane.com/content-creation-kit