7 Tips for Successful Small Business Content Marketing

A robust digital marketing strategy requires several components - from social media to email to search engines and much more. While each competent is equally important to advertise your business online, content is unarguably the most important part of these efforts.

Are you a small business owner wishing to increase your audience and boost your brand recognition? If yes, then you must try content marketing.

Content marketing involves the creation and dissemination of online materials such as blogs, videos, infographics, whitepapers, and social media posts with the purpose of stimulating interest in the services or products of a business. It helps grow traffic to your website.

In this blog, we will discuss why small business owners should build a powerful content marketing strategy and how to craft one.

The Importance of Content Marketing For Small Business

Content marketing enables you to create and share timely and useful content. It allows you to build loyalty and respect among consumers and become a thought leader in your industry.

You may wonder how. Content marketing offers your audience something that has value, developing trust among your prospects and customers.

Another way content marketing aids you is by recognizing the pain points of your customers. It also helps build a customer base you can engage with for the purpose of driving sales.

Additionally, another benefit of content marketing includes the evergreen content you produce. For instance, a blog post that talks about the history of your industry. Such an asset will not become outdated.

Businesses today have recognized the importance of content marketing. As per the latest marketing stats for 2022, 70% of marketers are active investors in content marketing.

All in all, with the help of content marketing, you gain a competitive advantage over your competitors who are not using content marketing. You also get a chance to grow your brand awareness and establish and maintain a successful brand identity.

Content Marketing For A Small Business: 7 Tips For Success

Let's discuss the tips every business owner should follow to build a successful content marketing strategy for their small business.

1) Start a Blog

Companies that consistently write blogs get 67% more leads per month on average.

Blogging is a free way of marketing your capabilities and services. So, if you want to know how to market a small business, blogging is a route that you can opt for. It also helps you become an industry expert.

Blogs help in different ways, such as:

• Boost your SEO rankings
• Drive traffic to your website
• Provide increased value to your consumers
• Add to your brand’s exposure
• Get leads and increase the likelihood of conversion

2) Stay Active on Social Platforms Your Audience Uses

You may have a social media presence if you are actively involved in selling a service or a product. However, simply being present on social channels is not enough. You are required to stay active on all the social media channels your audience spends their time on.

Now you may wonder how to select the right social media channels for your business. For this, you are required to identify your target audience. On social media platforms, you are speaking to a set of consumers who have specific interests and not everyone. After you learn about the individuals you are speaking to, figure out how to reach them.

Tip: To check where your audience is active, you can do the following:

• Use existing consumer data to determine where your audience hangs out online.
• Check out the social profiles of your competitors to know where their most active users are.

3) Deliver Content as per the Stage of Your Customer Within the Marketing Funnel

To reach the conversion phase, individuals go through a process called the marketing funnel. From learning about your business to conversion, this funnel includes everything. These are the four steps most marketing funnels have:

• Attention: Consumer views your social media post, ads, or learns about you via word-of-mouth
• Interest: Consumer is interested and wants to learn more
• Desire: Consumer is at a stage where they want to convert
• Action: Consumer takes action (for e.g.- subscribing to your email newsletter or purchasing your product)

To align this process with your creation, ensure you provide relevant content to the target customers present at the different stages of the funnel. For instance, an in-depth asset can overburden a potential customer who is currently at the attention stage of the funnel.

4) Conduct Keyword Research to Find Great Topics

An important step is to optimize your blog for SEO. You must conduct keyword research as a part of SEO. Keyword research is a crucial part of content marketing because:

• It helps identify trending topics individuals are interested to know more about.
• It helps improve your search engine rankings.

Watch this video to know how to do SEO keyword research -

Note: The keyword strategy for your business is the most critical part that determines your ranking on the Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP). However, you must also know that SEO-friendly websites rank higher on the SERPs, too. If you do not have an SEO-friendly website, it is time to build one for your business.

If you need an SEO-friendly, professional, niche-based website, you should know that it takes many days to build one. We recommend that you use DashClicks' Sites tool that helps you make an SEO-friendly, custom-branded agency website in just a few seconds.

5) Create a Content Calendar

Monthly content calendars include blog posts, emails, social posts, and any other content you wish to produce in that particular month. It helps you stay organized. Also, with the help of a content schedule, your readers get comfortable as it increases familiarity and trust for your business.

A content calendar is important because:

• It ensures that every content-related task is actually taking place
• It makes it convenient to collaborate with outside partners as well as your team
• It provides you a big picture of the upcoming stuff

Let’s discuss the steps that help you create your own content calendar:

• Decide the types of content you wish to publish, such as case studies, landing pages, e-books, opinion pieces, blog posts, etc.
• Discuss with your customer service and sales team to know the most asked questions by your potential customers. Then sit and brainstorm with your marketing team to determine different content strategies and more topics that you need to cover.
• Use the SEMRush Content Audit tool to analyze the current pages on your website and check what you should update, remove, or rewrite. Use this tool to analyze your competitors as well.
• Choose social media channels by checking the platforms your target audience uses. For instance, Facebook typically works great for B2C audiences.
• Before a type of content reaches production, define every step of the content process. Then, decide on a publishing schedule as per your content auditing and analytics data.
• Schedule evergreen content and publish them at a time when there are content delays.
• Don’t forget to add guest content to your content calendar.

6) Bring Your Reviews to Life

You may be surprised to know that 91% of people in the age group of 18-34 trust reviews published online as much as personal recommendations.

Also, a majority of consumers (58%) would pay more or travel farther to support a business that has positive reviews.

What's even more important is that 83% of consumers only trust relevant and recent reviews.

With these stats, you can definitely see the power of reviews. They help in driving a business, especially one that is both local and small.

Keeping this information in mind, we recommend you bring your reviews to life via social posts and testimonials that you can post on your website and blog.

Testimonials are considered one of the most effective content marketing tactics. Let's discuss how you can convert your blog post readers into buyers with the help of customer testimonials:

• Use screenshots of your client’s statements and place them within your blog posts.
• Use these statements as quotes in your blog posts.

Tip: To know how to get reviews and leverage them in your content marketing, read this blog.

7) Find a Unique Angle

Your competitors can indeed provide you with a lot of topic ideas, but avoid producing content that is too similar to the content created by others. The goal of content marketing is to provide information that is useful and adds value to your customers, not something that is already available to them on the web.

If you find a great idea, do not replicate it with tiny alterations. What you can do instead is to see it as a starting point and search for ways to incorporate your own unique angle. Doing so will only help you provide interesting content to your readers.

Bonus Tips:

• Start an email newsletter to let your readers know about an upcoming event, a new product, industry-related news, and much more.
• See what is resonating with your audience and create a variety of content types. Think about content repurposing as well.

How to Craft a Small Business Marketing Strategy?

Let's discuss what you need to do to craft a marketing strategy for your small business:

1. Build Your Buyer Personas and Fine - Tune Them

Create buyer personas to better understand your audience and their respective pain points. When you determine who is buying your products, you get to know the kind of content they need and when.

2. Solve a Problem

Consumers look for information that provides a solution to their problems. Identify the content assets that can fulfill the unique needs of your buyers. Do this after you have identified buyer personas.

3. Set Business Goals

Set business goals that align with the strategy. The principle of SMART goals makes your benchmarks attainable and reasonable, so do use the principle during this time.

4. Determine Distribution Channels

When it is time to share your content, determine which content piece is right for which channel. This is because not every content piece does well on every channel. Hence, to achieve success and reach, this step is important.

Check the image below to see how the three distribution channels - owned media channels, paid media channels, and earned media channels - overlap and the way in which you can combine them:

Image Source

Also, take a note of how you can distribute different content types:

• Distribute your interview content or podcasts through Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts.
• Distribute your infographic content through your blog and Pinterest.
• Distribute success stories and case studies through a dedicated website page.
• You can distribute your video content through YouTube.

Conclusion

Even though you run a small business, there is a high chance that you have huge competition. To grow your audience and help your business stand out, you require a content marketing strategy that will help you showcase your value to your current and future consumers.

When you build your buyer personas, you take a step forward towards building a winning content marketing strategy. After you do so, ensure you create content centered around your buyers' pain points and the stage they are at within the marketing funnel. Stay active on social platforms your audience uses and bring your reviews to life through testimonials and social posts.

Bottom line: Try implementing most of the above-mentioned tips for your business.

Now, it is our turn to ask you a question. Which of the above-mentioned tips do you think will be the most beneficial for your business?