If you’re a small company owner, you should think about using content marketing as a strategy to expand your customer base and improve brand awareness.
Online documents that increase visitors to your website are referred to as “content marketing.” Blogs, infographics, and whitepapers are all examples of content kinds that may be used to generate interest in your company’s goods or services.
As a result, we’re going to explain why and how company owners of all sizes should implement a content marketing plan.
Why Should Your Small Business Do Content Marketing?
By providing relevant and helpful content, your company may establish itself as a thought leader in its field, enhancing brand awareness and fostering customer trust, respect, and loyalty.
Additionally, by using content marketing, you’ll be able to pinpoint your customers’ most pressing concerns and explain how your solutions address those concerns. This may result in more sales.
Creating evergreen content has a long-term advantage of increasing your search engine rankings. Such assets include things like blogs about the history of your business or an infographic on how to execute a procedure that doesn’t change over time.
When you generate materials that can be utilized in many marketing campaigns and platforms, you may also find value in content marketing. Create a YouTube video on the needs of a certain community and include it in your blog post if you want to, for example. After that, you may share a link to the article or video on your social media profiles. This saves you both time and money, while also solidifying your position as an authority in your industry.
Small Business Content Marketing: 7 Steps for Success
The rest of this post will break down the seven steps every business owner should undertake to build a successful small business content marketing strategy.
1. Start a Blog
When you blog, you may sell your products and services for free while also establishing yourself as an industry authority.
In fact, if your website has 21-54 blogs, you should expect a 30 percent increase in visitors.
Blogs may do more than just increase visitors; they can also:
- boost your search engine optimization (SEO) rankings
- deliver increased value to your consumers
- increase exposure
- generate leads and increase conversion likelihood
2. Build a Social Media Presence on the Social Channels Your Audience Uses
If you’re in the business of selling anything, you’ve probably got a presence on social media.
Being present isn’t enough these days, unfortunately. Your audience utilizes platforms that you should be on.
How do you decide which of the several social media platforms is best for your company?
You must first select your intended audience before you can publish anyplace. Social media allows you to target a particular group of customers with specific interests rather than communicating to the general public. Finding out who and how to communicate with is the next step after figuring out who and when to speak with them.
Determine where your audience is most engaged by using a number of tactics.
Compile all of your audience’s online activity and analyze the results.
Look at the social media accounts of your rivals and discover where they have the most engaged users.
Analyze customer activity on the internet with the use of programs like Google Analytics.
These three techniques might assist you in determining where your target audience spends time online so you can start distributing information to them there.
3. Start an Email Newsletter
Small companies should use email newsletters to get their feet wet in the email marketing field. In addition, they let your readers know when there are new items or noteworthy business-adjacent events coming up.
The ROI on email marketing has traditionally been strong, averaging $42 for every dollar invested. Small companies may benefit greatly from email marketing. Email newsletters may benefit small companies in other ways as well, such as the following:
- build goodwill with your audience
- promote sales, deals, and coupons
- increase customer value
4. Create Content Corresponding to a Basic Customer Sales Funnel
You must find the correct consent for your customer’s demands if you want them to buy your product or service.
If you have a simple customer sales funnel and a content strategy to go along with it, you can figure out where your client is in the funnel and send them material that speaks to them at that point in the funnel’s progression.
A marketing funnel describes the steps customers must take to go from where they are now to where they want to be. The funnel covers the whole process of introducing your brand to potential customers and persuading them to make a purchase. There are typically four stages in a marketing funnel:
- Attention: a would-be consumer sees your ad, social media post, or learns about you through word-of-mouth
- Interest: consumer wants to learn more
- Desire: consumer wants to convert
- Action: consumer acts (buying your item, subscribing to your email newsletter, etc).
Ensure your content development follows this four-step approach by creating material that targets clients at different points in the funnel. It’s not a good idea to overwhelm a prospective customer with a lot of information during the attention period.
5. Build a Content Calendar
Developing your consumer personas and providing them with the material they need at each point of the buyer’s journey is critical, but so is delivering relevant content on a regular basis.
Plan ahead of time instead of hurrying to generate material on the spur of the moment. Publish monthly calendars that contain social media updates as well as blog entries, emails, and anything else you want to create that month.
As a bonus, this technique helps you stay organized while also giving your readers a sense of predictability about the kind of material you’ll be putting out.
6. Create a Variety of Content Types
It’s critical in a crowded market to find ways to distinguish yourself. Your content marketing approach may help your small company attain this goal.
Analyze your current content as well as the material of your rivals in depth. Find out what resonates and what doesn’t with your audience. It’s time to reproduce your previous content’s success now that you’ve proved efficacy.
It’s now time to unleash your inner artist. Don’t let yourself be constrained by what’s previously been done. Make an infographic out of your most recent blog article. Make a whitepaper out of your infographic. Make a sequence of social tiles out of your white paper’s quotes.
The options for creating new material are almost endless.
7. Mine Customer Reviews and Testimonials
Local customers rely on internet resources like reviews to find local businesses, with 97% of them doing so through social media. For small, local businesses, customer evaluations are the lifeblood of their success.
Utilize those testimonials on your website and blog in the same way that you would use social media.
Assigning a name and an image to each review personalizes it, turning it into a customer-generated advertisement that speaks for itself.
Fine-tune your buyer personas
You may better understand your target audiences and their problems by creating buyer personas. Finding out who your customers are can help you figure out what kind of material they want and when they need it.
Identify valuable consumer content
No one wants to buy anything just because it’s a freebie or a trial offer. Their goal is to find solutions to their issues in the stuff they consume. Once you’ve established your customer personas, you’ll be able to determine which content assets are most effective at meeting that specific demands.
Set business goals
First, it may seem daunting to set marketing-aligned corporate objectives. Make your standards acceptable and attainable by using the SMART goal-setting method.. objectives for small-scale content marketing
Solidify distribution channels
You’ve prepared your material and set your objectives for measurement. Your article is ready to be shared. As much as it would be ideal, not every piece of content works effectively across all platforms. Decide which pieces of content are most suited to whatever distribution channel in order to maximize your chances of being seen and heard.
Establish cadence
If you just have one piece of material to your name, you’re doing yourself a disservice. You must create a rhythm for delivering high-quality material to your customers on a regular basis.
Small Business Content Marketing Frequently Asked Questions
Why do small businesses need content marketing?
Even if your company is tiny, your competitors are no less formidable. As a company, you need a content marketing plan that will help you stand out from the competition and increase the size of your audience.
What are some examles of content marketing?
Examples of content marketing include articles on blogs, infographics, campaigns on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, podcasts, white papers, ebooks, downloadable PDFs and YouTube videos. Content marketing encompasses all forms of material that are both freely available and effective in bringing in new customers to your website.
What is the best content marketing strategy for a small business?
A solid content marketing strategy for small businesses requires well defined customer personas. In the absence of personalities, your material will lack focus and purpose, which will lead to poor engagement.
How should small businesses create content for their content marketing strategy?
Content marketing for small businesses is all about addressing a customer’s problem. Once you’ve defined your customer personas, all of your content creation should focus on the buyer’s specific pain areas and where they are in the sales process.
Small Business Content Marketing Conclusion
If you’re a small company, don’t let the size of your content marketing budget keep you from using at least some of the eight tactics listed above.
Having defined your buyer personas, you’re on your way to creating an effective content marketing plan that will help you expand your audience and boost sales.