Regardless of the general strategies you employ, content has always been a staple of modern marketing. In a 2020 SEMrush survey of over 1500+ marketers, 94% reported that they use content marketing.
So, if you want to spread the word about your small business, how can you get in on this practice? With the right tools and know-how—plus a little innovation—you can make a big impact with content marketing on a limited budget. The internet has plenty of resources out there, including this one, that will help you get the most out of your small business content marketing efforts and compete with the big leagues.
In this blog post, you’ll learn:
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as a tactic that involves making and sharing content to attract and retain an audience with the goal of driving customer action. In other words, you create content that attracts customers or builds their trust with your brand to drive more sales.
This definition brings us to the question—what is content? By now you've probably heard the word thrown around quite a bit in marketing spaces.
Blogging is one of the most well-known examples of marketing content, but content doesn’t have to be a blog. Ebooks, white papers, educational resources, and newsletters also count as content.
Content can also go beyond the written word. You’ll see plenty of content strategies that use multimedia and dynamic media like interactive tools, quizzes, and videos.
The Content Marketing Institute discovered that half of small B2B businesses didn’t have a dedicated person for content marketing in 2020, meaning that many small business marketers have to wear multiple hats. So, you’re not alone if you find yourself trying to handle multiple aspects of your content marketing strategy. This stat also means that plenty of small business marketers can teach themselves the skills that they need to create and execute a strategy—including you.
Here are some vital content marketing skills and where you can start learning them:
To market content, you have to know how to create it or foster that creation. Content includes a wide spectrum of media, but for this blog post, we’ll look at the skills needed to make the two most popular forms of content: writing and video.
Writing takes dedication and practice to master, but you can get started with writing content by following basic principles for writing for the internet. Usability.gov has a great starter guide to help you write more approachable content. If you don’t feel comfortable writing your own content, you can also consider hiring a writer if you have the budget.
Video creation is another craft that requires time to learn. TechSmith has a comprehensive guide for making YouTube videos that you can apply to other video types. Just as you can with writing, you can also outsource video production for a cost.
If you plan on making your own content, you’ll need to know how to support it with quality sources, whether those sources are from the internet or original content.
In content marketing, you’ll need to learn how to research for online content specifically and how to follow basic research principles. Content-specific research often requires looking at your competition and finding ways to stand out, as NP Digital explains. When you need to back up your arguments, use the (ironically named) CRAAP test to evaluate your sources.
Interviews can make for great original sources, so consider these interview tips from the Columbia Journalism Review when you want to talk to a customer, coworker, or subject matter expert for your content.
Search engines drive a large part of traffic to online content. Sites like Ahrefs and Moz have introductory and more specific guides to optimizing your content and website for Google’s algorithm.
Good content marketers use data and analytics to inform their strategies and decisions. This Databox guide offers plenty of methods for analyzing content marketing data and taking action on your takeaways.
High-quality content marketing requires careful planning and strategy to reach the right audience and inspire action. You’ll get an overview of the content strategy process after learning about small business-friendly content marketing tools.
Many of the platforms needed for fundamental content marketing tasks come at an affordable price. You can create and execute a content marketing strategy with plenty of free and low-cost tools for:
A solid strategy is the foundation of effective small business content marketing, and you can craft one with dedicated research and careful execution.
Buffer and Hubspot have in-depth guides to creating a strategy from the ground up that boils down to these five steps:
Just like with other types of marketing, every piece of content you create should be made with a goal in mind. What do you want your content to accomplish? Broadly speaking, common content marketing goals include:
However, if you want to track your results, your small business content marketing strategy should have measurable goals. For example, if you want to increase brand awareness, how will you quantify it? CoSchedule offers ideas like tracking your website traffic, net promoter scores, social media engagement, and customer reviews.
Once you have a grasp on the goals you want to meet and their benchmarks, you can organize your goal by its broader mission (such as brand awareness) and break it down into smaller, more quantifiable goals (such as "reach X number of Facebook followers" and "X number monthly visitors").
Start with small and simple goals, then work toward more ambitious goals as you become more familiar with content strategy and its role in marketing.
Your content should speak to your audience, and you can only know what your customers want through research. To understand your audience’s demographics and needs, try conducting some basic market research. According to Hubspot, you can perform two types of market research:
With the information you can find, you’ll then create a customer persona—an imaginary person that represents your audience. Optinmonster has tons of templates and examples to help you understand what a buyer persona is and how to use it for your marketing efforts. A customer persona often conceptualizes your typical customer’s:
Many businesses create multiple personas to represent different segments (distinct groups) in their audience. You can get ambitious and make more than one persona, or start with one and adjust as needed while you get more familiar with your audience.
Now, it’s time to figure out where your content will stand out against the rest by looking into the current content available in your industry and niche—including yours.
Start with an audit of your existing content. Collect all of your previous content pages in a spreadsheet that includes any performance data you have on them. Then, look for trends in the content that performs well and think about how those trends relate to your content marketing goals.
(If you don’t have any content yet, no worries. Go ahead and focus on researching competitor content).
Once you have an overview of your current content, you need to research what your competitors are doing. Search for keywords or concepts related to your business and see which content ranks high on Google and social media. Pay attention to each piece of content’s:
Having this competitor information on hand can make it tempting to mimic what they’re doing, but this approach will make content marketing more difficult, especially if you’re a small business.
Instead, you want to ask, “What can we do well that our competitors haven’t done yet?”
The answers to that question will give you spaces where you can make a name for yourself.
With your goals and research set in place, you can start thinking forward. Keeping your goals, audience, industry landscape, and resources in mind, what types of content will work best for your strategy? Examples include:
As you choose the content types for your strategy, consider what’ll be realistic for your team. If you’re a team of one, it might be hard to commit to multiple content types without outsourcing some work. Or, if you want to make interactive content, you’ll need to find a good tool or developer who can help you create it.
Time to bring everything together with a detailed small business content marketing plan. Use all of the information and plans you’ve collected so far to establish these aspects of a content strategy:
Go into as much detail as you can when writing up these plans or adding them to your project management platform. You’ll want to have a clear picture of how much work your strategy will take and how it relates to your content marketing goals.
Now that you have the basics down pat, get started with your company’s content marketing by:
Now, go forth and make content that converts.
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