How To Use Content Marketing For Small Businesses

As a business owner, you always looking for ways to save more money on advertising, while looking for ways to make more money on marketing.

Digital advertising can be cheap and also it can really get costly if you don’t know what you doing.

Over the years more people have been blocking ads on desktops making it difficult for small businesses to reach their audience without spending more on big campaigns.

How do you go around this problem?

Content marketing is the answer.

What is Content marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing approach that involves creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to your ideal audience in the hopes of driving consumer action, and it has numerous benefits for small businesses.

Content marketing can give you the opportunity to not only expand your business but also to build your reputation and establish a place as a trusted leader in the industry.

Content marketing for small businesses

If you think this sound like extra work for you, that’s because it is. This requires a lot of work and depends on the type of competitors you may have. Including content as part of your marketing may feel pointless.

But the benefits of content marketing far outweigh the money, time and effort that goes into it.

If you don’t have the time for implementing content marketing in your business and prefer to hire someone to do all the hard work. There are many options like hiring a small agency, freelancer or part-time employee.

Here are 5 reasons small businesses should invest in content marketing.

Content marketing benefits for small businesses

1. Building value for your business
2. Generate more traffic to your website
3. Increase leads and sales
4. Encourage more engagement
5. Cost less than traditional marketing 

Build value for your business

If you’re consistently publishing fresh and unique content on your website and promoting it on social media, you’re creating more opportunities for your target audience to see your name and content.

Creating ongoing value for your audience will make your audience more likely to spread the word about your business to their followers and friends, which helps you reach even more people.

Content marketing can also help build your link popularity. If what you’re producing is quality content, people will link back to you.

It can be difficult to rank against bigger companies as a small business, but building link popularity can help your online visibility, so your website and the content will rank higher on a search results page.

Generate traffic to your site

When potential customers have a problem or a particular need, they’ll search for a solution on google or social media.

Having that solution, whether it be information, a helpful guide or even entertainment, means customers are going to visit your site and possibly turn to it in the future for additional solutions.

Small business owners must understand that 70% of customers prefer learning about a business through an article.

And there’s always someone out there searching for content like that.

Increase leads and sales

The more people you have visiting your site and viewing your content, the more likely they are to convert into leads and eventually customers.

Even for small businesses, customers rely on blogs and website content when they’re making purchasing decisions.

People like to know as much as they can before they buy. Plus, creating content relevant to your company’s product or services helps your audience truly understand what they will gain by doing business with you.

Creating high performing landing pages with converting lead magnets on your website will help you generate quick and more leads and sales.

It encourages engagement

If you create interesting content, your audience is more likely to respond to it.

Which opens the door for you to engage with them directly.

This gives you the opportunity to further delight your readers by either continuing to entertain or educate them or answering a specific question they may have.

Beyond customers, though, it also gives you the opportunity to engage with other industry leaders to discuss topics you’ve also written about.

This can broaden your network and help build stronger connections with other leaders, which allows you to establish yourself as an authority in the industry as well.

Cost less than traditional marketing

Content marketing for small businesses can prove to be more cost-effective than more traditional forms of marketing, especially if you can generate the content yourself.

Lead generation through inbound content marketing tends to cost only half of what businesses usually spend on outbound marketing.

Spreading your content through social media and email marketing, posting it on your website or contributing to larger sites to get your name out there are all either low-cost or free strategies.

Inbound marketing means the customers are coming to you, so it’s more efficient than traditional outbound forms because the consumers are already aware and interested.

Conclusion

Content marketing has become one of the most profitable investments for many small businesses and now 73% of businesses hire agencies or someone to manage their content strategy.

This form of marketing takes time and should not be approached with an overnight success mindset.

Know you are investing in content marketing long term. If you can’t keep up with the workload, find someone to help with this part of your marketing.

The benefits of content marketing are worth the investment you will make.