By Jessica Davis
According to a study, 89% of small business owners work through holidays, that’s how hard pressed for time they are.
If your team manages multiple roles in your organization and you don’t have the time or resources to for dedicated content marketing, that’s alright.
You can still make a substantial impact with the right strategy and tools to support it.
1. Keep your audience engaged with top-notch curated content
People seek informative content, but content is dense on the internet, there’s more than anyone can handle.
Every minute, Facebook has 293,000 status updates and 136,000 image uploads. 
If you discover and share exactly what your audience is seeking, that content will bring your audience to your social media accounts when they “search” for it on the internet.
You can’t consistently create content for the internet, but you don’t have to. Content curation can cover for when you can’t create content. It can fill the engagement gap, help build your brand image and earn favor with your audience.
To discover fresh content you could use reliable apps like DrumUp for theme based social media content recommendations or Feedly for news aggregation.
DrumUp also lets you create and store a “content library” online, so you create your own online resource and quickly schedule some articles out when required.
2. Create content that is compelling and visually appealing
You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but that’s precisely what happens on social media where you have but a few seconds to catch someone’s attention.
To make the best of that short window of time, you must ensure that your content is exciting, promises value, and looks great.
Visuals, statistics and other such value adding elements help. Visuals break the static flow of content and makes it appear more appealing, while statistics add credibility to the content you share.
If you struggle with design, you could use intuitive visual tools like Canva or PicMonkey.
Bear in mind your ultimate aim in creating content. The content you create must catch the attention of your audience and guide them towards some conclusive call to action that can be measured.
3. Invest equally in distributing your content
The differentiating factor between content writing and content marketing is that content marketing involves a substantial amount of content distribution.
Unless you make your content available on the right channels and in multiple instances, it won’t reach your audience.
Consider Twitter for instance. If you post your content once, you’re likely to reach only a fraction of your audience and get noticed by even fewer of them.
Most social media marketers share multiple times, but how you share matters.
Identify four windows of time when your audience is most active and schedule your content to go out during them on different days.
Also, share on communities built around their interest in your niche’ and use @mentions, tags and hashtags to pull people into your conversation.
Definitely @mentions sources and resources you have used.
4. Leverage question hubs and keyword alerts to identify trends
Identifying trends allows you to ride the wave and keep your audience engaged. But how do you identify a trend?
It is what everyone is talking about on social. Twitter trends and Facebook’s “talking about this” are references to the content that is trending on social media.
You could employ information from social media platforms themselves to help choose your trending topics.
A more interesting way to do it is by looking at “question hubs” like Quora, Reddit or HowStuffWorks.
Go where people go to ask questions and you will know what they’re seeking – powerful information to have in marketing.
You could also set keyword alerts on Social Mention or Google Alerts to monitor the activity on any given keyword.
5. Observe, analyze and restructure your plan
For a plan to continually improve and provide better results it is vital for you to monitor it and alter methods for optimum efficiency.
Every piece of content that is shared for content marketing purposes must be monitored for the engagement it receives and the referrals it generates.
You could pick your favorite analytics tool to help monitor your content marketing efforts. SumAll and Quintly are some popular tools.
Google Analytics is free and provides useful audience and traffic insights.
Efficient content marketing comes with the reliance on the right tools to drive results while saving time. Explore the resources available and create for yourself the perfect content marketing cycle. What does yours look like?
Jessica Davis represents Godot Media, a leading E-Book writing service firm. Her areas of interest include social media technology, science and fashion.
