How Small Businesses Can Benefit from Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing discipline focused on consistently creating useful and relevant content. This way it is aimed to engage with a clearly defined target audience. Your business scale might be small, but nothing can stop you from achieving your goals. Your marketing budget may not be the same as the major brands, but that doesn’t mean that your marketing strategy can’t have similar aspects with big companies.

If you are a small business owner, you just need to think smarter and different. At this point, content marketing, which is very advantageous for all sizes of businesses, comes into play.

How to use content marketing effectively and in line with your budget? We have listed some ideas below.

Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

1) Know Your Target Audience

First of all, you should know the demographics, interests, and habits of your customer base (or target audience) well. What is your age range? Which social media channels do they follow? What websites, blogs or publications do they read? For example, statistics show that people aged 18–29 predominantly use social media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube. At the same time, the 30-49 age group actively uses LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Use the channels they are already spending time on.

2) Create a Story That Will Engage with Your Customers

We all know the role of stories in content marketing. A well-built story appeals to emotions. This way, your audience can empathize with you more easily. If you don’t know how and where to start telling your brand story, you can use the following tips:

• How did you start?
• What kind of background do you have?
• Why do you do this?
• What do you do with passion?
• How did you get there?

Also, use the language of your target audience. Don’t lose the charm of your story with a professional and authoritative tone of written language. Try to be natural and pretend like you are speaking to a friend.

3) Develop Strategies to Increase Brand Recognition

Sticking your brand name in the minds of your target audience should be one of your priorities. Take every opportunity to do this. For example, producing content consistently gives you a good opportunity to connect your audience to yourself. In addition to publishing your content on your own website, blog, social media accounts, you can contribute to leading websites in your industry with quality guest content. Another way to increase your brand recognition and drive traffic to your site is to follow the developments in your sector and be the first to explain them to your readers.

4) Decide What is Your Priority?

Increasing the customer experience and purchases made by existing customers is among the top priorities of small businesses (43%) according to an extensive research. 30% of these companies aim to reach new markets. What is your priority within the framework of your revenue growth strategy? It is important that you set your primary goal and shape your content marketing accordingly.

5) Use SEO Actively

SEO should always accompany your content marketing process. SEO is vital for all sizes of businesses and all industries in today’s world. A simple yet useful thing you can do yourself can be writing useful blog content with relevant keywords and publishing consistently. There are way more than 200 factors used by Google to generate search result rankings. The website content, website speed, indexability, crawlability, mobile-friendliness, quality backlinks are just a few things that should be taken account of. It can be complicated and time-consuming for small businesses to deal with all these. In this case, you can work with professionals to get the best out of SEO services.

6) Take Advantage of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has been the one of the most popular marketing trends in the last few years. It means cooperating with people who have a large audience, especially in social networks. Influencer marketing campaigns can create content that suits your expectations on boosting the engagements with your audience. If you have limited resources, working with micro-influencers relevant to your industry may be a good option for you. What is micro-influencer? People who don’t work as a social media influencer full-time. Like everyday people who have a considerable number of followers from your target audience. They may not have a huge fan base however if you identify and work with the ones who are relevant, it may pay off significantly.

7) Create Interesting and Different Content

You need to think smart and creative. It’s important that you try to find out what everyone in your industry doesn’t do. As you produce content, you will find out that some content requires more work, effort and sometimes budget. Here you have to do a good calculation of the value of such content. What will be the return on investment? And you should allocate your time and resources accordingly.

8) Video Content FTW

There are a number of advantages to using video content for businesses. First and foremost, it’s a cost-effective way to share your story with a large audience. Second, video is engaging. People will stay tuned in longer than they would otherwise if they don’t have anything to look at. Third, video is searchable, so you can easily find it on Google, Bing, and other search engines. Fourth, videos can be shared on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, which can help boost your reach even further. Finally, videos are more likely to be shared than written content, so they can help drive more traffic and sales.

Bottom Line

We know that your budget is limited, but what is more important is how you use your budget effectively. Content marketing is one of the most powerful digital marketing strategies to engage with your target audience cost-effectively. At this point, it is important to get advice and support from experts in the field.