Want a strategy that build awareness about your brand, inspires confidence in your expertise, and wins over more customers? Content marketing fills all these buckets and then some. Let’s talk more about what you can expect from content marketing for small business and what you can do to win big with this strategy.
And stay tuned to the end of the article for small business content marketing examples that show us just how content marketing can help businesses of all sizes and industries.
Why Should You Invest in Content Marketing for Small Business
Content marketing for small business isn’t just about writing a blog. It’s about creating content that showcases your expertise. This content allows your audience to get to know your brand in a low-pressure environment until they’re ready to reach out to do business with you.
And the success of content marketing isn’t just a fluke. Content marketing has proved its bona fides, demonstrating that it drives results for businesses of all sizes. Consider that 90% of marketers who have been using content marketing plan to continue investing the same amount in the channel moving forward.
Exactly what benefits can you expect from small business content marketing?
One survey from Content Marketing Institute asked businesses what benefits they saw from their content marketing strategy. Their answers included…
- Increased brand awareness (80%)
- Building credibility and trust (75%)
- Educating audiences (70%)
These are goals that all small businesses strive for — and content marketing will help you achieve them!
So how do you start your own content strategy? Where do you begin? Let’s look at several ways you can create high-quality content that drives engagement and delivers results.
How to Win at Content Marketing for Small Business
✅ Know Your Audience
For your content to drive results, it must be written for your audience. Your content should answer their questions, fill their needs, and hold their interest.
This extends beyond what you write to include how you write. Depending on your audience’s age, gender, and professional background, you’ll want to adapt your writing style to fit them.
This is where an audience profile — sometimes called a buyer persona — comes into play. A good profile will reveal your audiencei interests, pain points, and demographics. Use these details to guide your content strategy.
✅ Be Visual
Content isn’t just about the written word. To truly create content that engages your audience, think about including images, charts, videos, and infographics. Something to enliven it. This is a priority across the board — no matter who your audience is — visuals are a vital part of your strategy.
✅ Break Up Your Content with Headings and Subheadings
Headings and subheadings are great for a number of reasons. They draw attention to the highlights of your content and prevent it from becoming monotonous.
Second, headings and subheadings are a great way to organize your content. It also helps you, as a content creator, stay on track and organize your thoughts into coherent sections.
✅ Use Lists
Bulleted and numbered lists are another great way to keep your content organized. It creates a natural order that your readers can understand and process easily. It also makes it easy for them to skim and find the points that are most important to them.
✅ Leverage Keywords
Keywords get your content ranked on search engines like Google or Bing. Not only do keywords act as a beacon for search engine bots, telling them what your content is about, but also keep you focused. You’re kept on topic as you write and your audience can quickly see if your content will help them
✅ Use Links
Links are another great way to win with search engines. Having links that connect both to other pages on your site as well as to other high-authority sites helps search engines like Google to detect patterns and gives your content more weight in ranking.
But links also help in another way. When you have internal links to other pages on your site, it encourages your audience to stay on your site. The longer they spend, the more they’re going to remember your brand and value your expertise.
✅ Focus on Storytelling
No matter what your industry is, storytelling should be your top priority. Why? Because stories connect with your audience and engage their emotions. When emotions are involved, people are inherently more invested in what you’re saying.
Consider using e a story to talk about the benefits of your product, how you started your business, or specific customers whom you have helped. It shouldn’t be a complicated novel — all you need is a small paragraph or two that drives your point home.
✅ Include Calls to Action
At the end of the day, you don’t create content simply for content’s sake. As a small business, you want your content to engage your audience and convert them into leads and customers. And calls to action are how you get this done.
A call to action essentially invites your audience to take the next step. It could take the form of a short paragraph, a sentence, a button, or even a clickable image. And there are several things you could invite your audience to do in your call to action, including…
- Download a checklist or infographic
- Schedule a free consultation with you
- Follow you on social media
- Join your newsletter list
- Buy your book
Whatever that next step is, use a strategic call to action to get your audience to take it.
✅ Edit Your Work
You might have a great content concept, but if your piece is riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, then your message will quickly lose steam with your audience.
Review your content with a fine-toothed comb, making sure that your work is completely error-free and your premise and arguments are solid. If it’s a really important piece of content that’s meant to make a splash, then ask one or two others on your team to eyeball it to catch anything you might have missed.
✅ Be Consistent
As in any budding relationship, consistency matters. If your audience only sees sporadic posts, they may draw the conclusion that they aren’t your priority and will look elsewhere for content that helps them. Don’t let this happen.
To help you stay consistent, create a content calendar that will remind you of upcoming deadlines and keep you on track. Eventually, if it becomes too much for you, you might ask others on your team to contribute content to round out your strategy.
Whatever you do, keep your audience’s attention engaged with your brand by being consistent with your content.
3 Small Business Content Marketing Examples That Are Crushing It
Policygenius
Consider Policygenius, a company that demystifies insurance, making it accessible to everyone. Content marketing helped give the company its start and put it on the map.
From the beginning, the service invested in content marketing to answer every imaginable customer question about insurance. Today, the site has a vast library of content, including blogs, guides, and other formats that help customers feel more comfortable about the process of buying insurance and more confident in using Policygenius to do it.
Canva
Canva is another big brand that started out small, competing with much larger, more experienced graphic design brands. Here too content is a major contributor to the service’s success. It site content covers the gamut of design issues, including marketing, branding, and photography.
Beyond that, Canva has a Design School, with articles and other content to help customers improve their graphic design skills.
Movoto
Movoto is a real estate company with roots that extend back to 2005. Even then, it didn’t take them long to get into the content game, with blogs, guides, white papers, and infographics.
The company’s blog is still running strong today, with articles on such hot topics as shipping container homes and a complete guide to closing on your first home. The content isn’t just informative, but also witty and engaging. It’s a great example of creating content that fits your audience’s needs and style.
Final Thoughts on Content Marketing for Small Business
There’s no doubt about it — content marketing has proven itself to be an effective strategy. Between content marketing’s history of results and real-life examples of businesses that have used content marketing to become what they are today, you can see the benefits of content marketing.
I hope these pointer and small business content marketing examples inspire your own content marketing strategy.
How are you using content marketing? Please share in the comments.
Photo by Mike Lewis HeadSmart Media on Unsplash
