You have heard it time and again – content marketing will help grow your small business.
It may sound redundant, but until companies focus on making relevant website content, it bears repeating. Content marketing is at the heart of many successful sales and marketing campaigns of small and large businesses alike.
Well-written content has many benefits
Well-written content is what convinces readers that you are worth their time. It is also the weapon to gain higher search engine rankings and increase traffic to your site.
If your marketing team uses linking strategies a lot, well-written content supports that strategy, too. It is a way to capture quality links from the outside and the best marketing tool to link to authority sites.
Content to use on your website
Use various content marketing strategies that Google and other search engines love.
Incorporate these strategies:
- Engaging, entertaining, and easy-to-read content – Be informative but inject fun as well. Avoid the boring stuff called text blocks and hard-to-read sentences. Use apps like Grammarly and Hemingway to make your content easy to read.
- Videos – Educational videos that clearly demonstrate how things are done and how people can benefit from your offering.
- E-books – Long-form content rules over short content. The comprehensiveness of long-form content and its ability to provide extensive coverage of topics signal Google that your site offers valuable and beneficial information.
- Educational posts – People have questions, and they need guidance. Your expertise is needed by people who want to know the best decision based on their situation. Be helpful with your content.
- Webinars and podcasts – Many people want to directly engage with you and seek answers and guidance from you in real-time. Make sure you have such content type specifically targeting this kind of people.
You can also use a pre-recorded webinar to boost your content and audience engagement anytime and from any mobile device.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing process that focuses on creating valuable and relevant content. With SEO strategies and social media advertising, making well-crafted content allows you to acquire and engage with more clients from your target audience.
Small business content marketing is also the best way to establish yourself as a thought leader in your niche. If you generate content that people cannot find elsewhere, you will achieve that status and authority in your industry.
Social content marketing
Building your brand online and on different social media platforms is also possible through content marketing. You can deliver and share informative, educational, and relevant content with your audience on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Target online communities and forums where you can also share your content. Scour several relevant forums, and be ready to answer questions or add value to the ongoing discussion.
Make sure that you lead different social media audiences to your website, where you are ready with more helpful information. The idea is to help people get the best solution to the pain points they are experiencing.
Traditional marketing vs. content marketing
In the past, marketers used to rent attention from other networks or people’s media. To a certain degree, many companies still use such methodology.
For instance, a large national brand may pay for an ad shown during the “Big Football Game.” That is an act of renting the attention that the football event has generated on the national tv network.
In contrast, content marketing allows businesses to act as their own publishers by generating their own content and spreading it on different platforms, including their websites.
That way, they singlehandedly build the audience for their content and attract their attention.
Cost-effective strategy
Content marketing is one of the best ways to market products and services without putting a lot of burden on the budget. It may be slow at the start, but you can reach a wider audience once your library of contents starts to grow.
Content marketing is also a perfect way to lower your costs while generating more conversions.
- It is 62% less costly to facelift website content and to maintain it than implementing traditional marketing campaigns.
- You can generate three times more conversions than you would with an advertising campaign.
- Content marketing also promotes brand loyalty. Through retention content marketing, you can build lasting relationships with your clients and increase client lifetime value.
Content marketing is also cost-effective due to the availability of multiple low-cost channels through which marketers can promote content, such as social media and forums. The suggestion is that content marketing strategy should come before social media marketing strategy.
Personalized content marketing
Nowadays, marketers try to personalize their content as much as possible. Thanks to cloud marketing solutions and predictive analysis, many organizations today can personalize their content through e-commerce channels, pay-per-click, and social media.
Those who realized the significance of personalization have been capitalizing on it and reaping the rewards. You know that when you put out an advertisement, parts of your audience may not show any interest in it. Thus, you can improve your ROIs by making your content and other marketing strategies highly targeted and personalized.
However, it does not just mean targeting by demographics or any other set of criteria. More importantly, it means producing content that is appropriate for every stage of the buyer’s journey.
It also means avoiding the traditional marketing approach of making the choice for your clients. In contrast, you take the time to walk your client through several paths that lead them towards decision-making. 85% of clients trust solutions and companies that make them feel that their interests are being considered.
Are you interested in learning more about using a CRM for personalizing content? Check out the knowledge base article from HubSpot.
Why Content Marketing Is Important to Small Businesses
The goal of all marketing efforts is to build a client base in order to drive sales and create brand loyalty with them. Content marketing works especially for this particular purpose.
Content marketing works for this purpose because it is the engine that attracts the right people to your site, converts those people into leads, then into paying clients and then into promoters of your brand. Also, it is the tool with which you provide value to your target audience.
Establish your authority through your content
Content is the material you make available to your users via images, audio, video, text, etc. You then deliver these materials to visitors, leads, and promoters of your brand through website pages, social media, emails, and blogs.
When creating content for your site and social media campaigns, focus on engaging with your audience, painting your brand in a friendly way, and building your authority in your niche.
For instance, many companies rarely use content marketing to drive sales. Sure, the underlying motivation is to spike revenues, but before anyone can get to the sales part of marketing, first they need to establish themselves as trustworthy companies.
Nowadays, it is not easy to establish one’s authority because of too much competition out there. If you only make banner ads and post them on websites, you cannot expect good results.
That strategy is already very redundant and one that many people avoid. Consider now that many web users are using ad blockers to remove intrusive advertisements from their browsing experience.
Content marketing is non-intrusive
In contrast, content marketing is not intrusive at all. It is all about distributing valuable and consistent content to a well-defined audience by educating people about a unique selling point.
You can provide comprehensive educational material about your services, explanations on how to use such services, and reasons why people should use these services.
Content marketing, being non-intrusive, means you are only sharing your content and not forcing people to buy your services. Such a non-intrusive strategy applies to forums and social media blogging, where you can show your authority on the topic at hand and provide valuable information participants may need.
While you show them your expertise as you engage with them, you can invite your audience to take a visit to your website where they can get more information and purchase from you the services or products they need.
When guest-blogging and participating in forums, always share a link to your site because you want to engage more with your target audience and help them make the right purchasing decision.
Educate your audience through content marketing
If you are looking for ways to educate people about your business, you can do it through content marketing.
The strategy works for most buyers who want to know a business first before engaging and buying. According to the latest reports, more than 70% of buyers read articles to learn about a business before deciding.
Article writing is just one content marketing strategy you can use. Video, blogging, Infographics, podcasting, emails, images, lead magnets, and EBooks are other forms of content you can use and spread across multiple channels.
Which of these types are most trusted by audiences?
The most trusted types are research and case studies. According to Statista, 60% of marketing professionals believe that research and case studies are the most trusted content types by their audiences. Results also showed that 34% of respondents said the same about Infographics and photos. 
Use these strategies to establish yourself as an expert in your field, raise your public profile, and obtain public exposure for your products and services. Content creation and optimization tick all the boxes in marketing.
How Content Marketing Builds Your Business
Content marketing can help build your business by improving brand awareness, generating leads, and accomplishing other marketing objectives. Thus, it requires strategic approaches that lead to the creation of effective content marketing strategies.
You can formulate strategic approaches in the following areas:
Audience identification
Your small business should create content based on the needs and preferences of the clients you need to target. The correct identification and segmentation of your audience is the foundation of your business.
Without identifying a niche to target, your business will never be able to survive and compete.
Keyword identification
You want your target audience to find you when they search services and service information through search engines. They use specific keywords to help them with their search.
You need to know those keywords through research and use these words in your content. There are keyword research tools for this purpose.
Content calendar
Consistency is essential in content marketing and one criterion that platforms like Google and Facebook find favorable. Be consistent in publishing content. You should post high-quality content once a day rather than posting several pieces of poor-quality content.
Post content where your audience engages – You can use omnichannel marketing strategies to promote published content across various platforms. That will increase your online visibility and improve audience engagement, which Google also loves.
Results monitoring
You want to know where your marketing efforts produce results. In the future, you can avoid spending resources on marketing platforms that fail to give desired results for your business.
Also, sort your content to know what resonates well with your audience, what requires further improvement, and adjust your content accordingly.
People who favor developing content marketing plans say they do so because it allows them to get clients from all over the world. They also assert that through content marketing:
- They can establish themselves as thought leaders in the industry.
- They can make their businesses a vital component of the community where they live and operate.
In contrast, some people do not believe in what content marketing can do, think it is a waste of money, and too time-consuming. They say that it is not worth it compared to other types of marketing, such as advertising. Others think that they do not have enough time for it.
True enough, content marketing requires time and research. That is because one of the goals of content marketing is to establish yourself as an authority in your field. If you can establish such a position for yourself and your business, people will naturally flock and ask questions and get your services.
There is a new trend in content marketing called blog marketing which you must take advantage of nowadays. That involves posting articles about your business on authority sites like Huffington Post, Business Insider, and Forbes.
This type of marketing requires extensive content planning and research, so every piece that you contribute offers valuable insights that benefit readers.
Social content marketing is also trendy nowadays. You can try it if you want to generate traffic from social media channels to your website.
If someone sees your article and thinks that their friends can benefit from it (losing weight, how to start a healthy lifestyle, retirement planning, investing in stocks, etc.), they will like and proceed to share it, so their friends can read it, too.
Make sure to take advantage of opportunities to link to your website when posting content on social media. Your content must take advantage of outbound linking, inbound linking, and SEO strategies in all your website, forums, and social content.
SEMRush has a great page on how to build an all-encompassing approach to content marketing.
Why Is Content Marketing Effective?
Content marketing is a dominant component in the present digital marketing world. It is accessible since anyone can write and post content on the web, but content marketing also demonstrates its inherent effectiveness.
However, practicing content marketing does not always guarantee traffic generation or increased brand reputation. The fact is marketers everywhere suffer from the appalling effects of harmful content.
Building consumer trust
What makes content good and effective? If your content marketing is primarily geared towards building trust, then the tendency is to generate high-quality content. High-quality content answers the questions that your audience is asking.
Here are ingredients for good content writing:
- Write compelling headlines – Strong headlines give information and share little details but stop short of telling the whole story.
- Write an intro that generates interest.
- Write with your audience in mind.
- Each post should have one clear idea covered from headline to conclusion.
- Be engaging – Content that does not immediately engage causes visitors to bounce.
- Write in a unique voice – Unique voice refers to the personality you attach to your brand.
- Provide the specific knowledge readers need – Be specific. Tell readers how to do things based on their situation.
- Write for building trust – Use authority sites and give readers well-researched content.
- Write actionable content – Show your readers how to do what you are talking about.
Bad content
If your content has been generated for its own sake, more typical than not, it does not serve a particular purpose. Content like this is only written for brand visibility or traffic generation. Instead, you should write to entertain a particular audience or inform the public in general.
It is not the intent that is problematic in the first place. It is that the writer cuts corners and adds no value to a given conversation. If it is not riddled with semantic errors, poor content is either:
- Not delivering helpful information.
- Not covering new ground.
- Not offering new research.
Falling consumer trust
Consumer trust in companies and brands is eroding. That is the reason why traditional advertising is met with such disdain. If the internet becomes more flooded with low-quality content, consumer trust will continue to fall. Consumers will continue to see brands as greedy manipulators without caring about quality.
Why is content marketing effective?
- It is the strategy that allows deep engagement with your audience.
- Content marketing pushes you to understand the needs of your audience before engaging them.
- It shows your credibility and trustworthiness related to the pain points of your audience.
Who Should Use Content Marketing Services?
Content marketing allows everyone to build their content based on the needs of their audience.
With your targeted content, you can cover your market’s pain points, inform people of the latest developments in your fields, showcase special offers, and more. It is also one of the most versatile strategies that you can use across other strategies.
Content marketing is ideal for the following:
- Influencers trying to make more money.
- Affiliate marketers looking to scale
- Website and blog owners looking to increase traffic
- Small businesses and brands looking for ways to grow
Content marketing services are available to organizations that need to understand the reasons for their failure to generate new leads and increase their revenue.
Consider getting such a service if you notice any of the following:
- Drops in sales
- The target audience is not aware of your new products and services
- Changes in market conditions that impact your business negatively
- Lagging behind the competition
When attaining your goals, be mindful that results are based on your focus and content output. Build a timeline based on the following factors:
- Your definition of success.
- Goals and strategies
- Market and industry
- Business model
Remember, it is a long-term technique that can deliver tangible results over time. You will need a lot of time to understand how it works and what strategies are most effective. Set realistic goals, work hard, and be patient.
Content marketing has proven itself to be more beneficial than other strategies:
- 86% of B2C marketers use content marketing.
- 90% of B2B marketers use content marketing.
- Content marketing is way cheaper than other marketing strategies.
- Content marketing is an effective lead generator for businesses. Businesses that use it for such a purpose produce 67% more leads than businesses that do not use it.
Benefits of Content Marketing
What happens when high-quality content meets clients?
You get to be more data-driven
You need the data that gives you an idea about how to reach out to a broader audience and be helpful to them. Study your competitors and use the data gathered to inspire your team to proceed in light of the gathered data.
For the same reason, keep track of your campaign results as well.
You can craft a goal and meaning to your content
By analyzing your content marketing campaign results, you can adjust your content and fulfill your business goals. Since this strategy results in the generation of branded content, you will have a better exposure in the online world while building your authority.
You can be more productive
Since you will get the idea that content marketing works, you will spend quality time on it and not waste time on other strategies that do not work. You and your team will be more productive that way.
You can understand how SEO and content can work together. With effective content marketing, you can understand how you can twist your content so that it works in conjunction with your SEO and social media efforts. Keep your content relevant and helpful, so it helps in generating organic traffic from these platforms.
For a one-and-done, content marketing platform, click here.
Conclusion
Delivering valuable and timely content allows your organization to become a thought leader in your field. It is also the best way to build trust among consumers and generate brand loyalty.
Yes, content marketing works and can deliver results fast. You will see effects after six to nine months of consistent and high-quality content.
Keep in mind that your goals may differ from other businesses, but you can get results more quickly if you put much effort into strategizing, production, and promotion.
Keep in mind that your goals may differ from other businesses, but you can get results more quickly if you put much effort into strategizing, production, and promotion.
Put a lot of effort into content promotion. Promote your content on various channels, such as emails, newsletters, social media, relevant forums, ads, etc.
Also, use influencers as part of your marketing team and allocate a budget for them. It will allow you to target a whole new audience using their own time and resources.
Does your business need help with content marketing? Get started by reaching out to us for a free consultation.
