Content marketing is a marketing approach that involves creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to your prospective audience in the hopes of driving a 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.

Builds brand awareness.

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. Plus, if you’re pleasing your audience, they’ll be more likely to spread the word about your business to their followers and friends, which helps you reach even more people.

But, 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.

Generates traffic to your site.

When potential customers have a problem or a particular need, they’ll search for a solution. 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. Content marketing drives inbound traffic to your site.

Can 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

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 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 you build stronger connections with other leaders, which allows you to establish yourself as an authority in the industry as well.

Costs 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, posting it on your website or contributing to larger sites to get your name out there are all either low-cost or free.

Inbound content 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.