You may want to reconsider your business plan if you don’t know who your target market is. If you aren’t sure whose problem you are trying to solve, it is much, much difficult to make money off of a concept.

All leads are valuable with regards to the second part of this query. Anyone who engages with your brand has the potential to give you something of value, whether it is information, feedback, engagement, money, or money itself, regardless of whether they are going to purchase something from you or not.

Even if you don’t think someone would offer you money or if you believe they are wrong, you cannot ignore someone’s viewpoint as a young firm. You can use any and every information to improve your marketing, as well as your products or services. Knowing how to learn from those who don’t immediately generate money may help you become a better business owner. Examples include defining negative personas, negative keywords, and gaining experience dealing with angry customers.

What add-ons or tools would you suggest using to improve the performance and quality of content? Why does it work so well?

I use Grammarly as an extension when writing material. It helps you spell check and makes it simple to see mistakes so you don’t come out like a primary school dropout.

I combine Google search, Google suggest, Google trends, the Moz bar, and Google Adwords Keyword Planner for performance and idea generating. These tools can provide insightful information on what is being searched for, what keywords are being bid on, what pages are ranking for particular keywords, and how challenging it would be to outrank websites for target keywords on Google’s first page.

Which do you believe is more crucial for content positioning: highly trafficked keywords or specific consumer needs and expertly crafted articles?

You can’t limit your content strategy to merely considering keywords. For a content strategy to be effective, you must fully comprehend the buyer’s journey and their thinking at each point of the funnel.

You need to find out the answers to a few important questions before you decide to write a tonne of articles or make a tonne of videos.

What troubles your customers the most?

How does your offering address these issues?

What concerns your prospective customers have at each point in the sales cycle?

What can you provide them that they genuinely desire, will cherish, and will want to recommend to others in comparable circumstances?
You can start developing a keyword strategy once you have a firm grasp of the answers.

How do you find free shares or influencers if you’re just getting started with content marketing?

Unfortunately, influencer marketing has largely evolved into a pay-to-play strategy if you want to take advantage of someone else’s sizable audience for your own gain. If you’re just starting out, this can be a wise investment, but you must be very careful about who you pay for these kinds of placements.

What do you find to be your largest content marketing difficulty, and how do you overcome it?

The biggest challenge for me in content marketing is finding the time to get buy-in for all of the different strategies I want to explore while also continuing to produce “bread and butter” content like blog and social posts, and aligning all of the team members’ goals with the KPIs I’m directly responsible for.

As a team of one, managing the entire inbound marketing funnel in terms of content can be overwhelming (including email, social media, blogs, and external channels like guest posting). As a result, I need to keep everything very organised and make sure that all of my content initiatives are clearly defined with deadlines that are always communicated to the rest of the department and organisation as a whole.

Strategic planning and team building are two things that Shana Haynie is passionate about as a creative marketing leader. She previously served as the Co-Founder and COO of the San Diego-based company Vulpine Interactive: a Social Media Marketing Agency for Exciting Brands. Currently, she is the Senior Inbound Marketing Manager for enterprise innovation consultancy, Moves The Needle, where she is in charge of B2B content initiatives.