Want to know the Benefits of Content Marketing for Small Businesses?
Imagine you have invented a product, you know the product has huge demand in the market. But how would people know about your product and its benefits?
These products require marketing, they will have to get into the business to make revenue. As you start up a small business, content marketing is the strategy to be considered.
Your brand and business need recognition. It needs a voice and a brand tonality consistent with your ethics. Content marketing gives your brand an identity, defines its USPs, and then helps your audience to discover and interact with your brand.
Content Strategy forms an integral part of your Content Marketing which identifies best audiences for your brand and leverages the best channel to reach out to them.
A business without Content Marketing is a car with no wheels. Because there is simply no moving forward for your business without a sound and solid Content Marketing Strategy.
Content marketing is the creation of content that grows traffic to your website. It can be blogs, whitepapers, or infographics that drag the attention towards the products.
Whether small or large, every business needs content marketing today. Let us break down why businesses should deploy content marketing.
What is Marketing for small businesses?
Marketing for small businesses requires attracting and retaining customers. It all depends on how the company promotes, sells, or distributes a product and its services.
You know marketing and communication have a sense of humor. You can’t take this marketing too seriously.
Well, now we are all quite aware of the Giant companies like Google, Youtube, Apple, and Amazon that started their business?
It started from the garage, cubicle, Apartments, etc….etc. The successful stories are endless. It is not the investment or a lavish office space that made these giants but rather their flawless content marketing strategy.
They say, “Running a business without marketing will kill it”. It is indeed very true. Also without marketing, we would not have had Apple phones. Oh, wait, why just the gadgets? Our popular eat-outs like McDonald's and KFC chicken wouldn't have been located on almost every street without marketing.
This is the power of Marketing. You can build an entire empire for your brand by choosing the right strategy, right words and the right approach to communicate with your audience. Case in point, the campaign story of the aerated beverage brand Coca -Cola, “Share a Coke” with a friend resonating with an enormous audience. Not only does the campaign have a nice ring of word play to it, the campaign also banks on User Generated Content.
But success stories are not limited to only the heavyweights or Fortune 500 companies. When implemented properly and strategically, Content marketing can do wonders for start-ups and small businesses.
So then, how does content marketing help small businesses? Let us break it down.
Content Marketing and small business
Marketing strategy for small businesses comes with several questions, isn't it? You don't know where the river starts and takes its flow?
Should I hire the best Digital Marketing Agency? Or Should I invest in modern advertising? Or just spend time creating content for it?
It is more like a missing piece of a puzzle, But chill. We will help you sort this out.
The long-term goal of digital marketing strategies is to grow small businesses sustainably. Though advertising might bring quick attention to acquire customers, content marketing is much more effective in setting up a loyal customer base.
This type of marketing shall help you save money. Also, customers will be able to share the content through many platforms online and the reach is more comparatively as it has a larger audience.
Content marketing can be of any form, like blogs, articles, and social media. These are very low-cost ways to start a business. It is said that about 82% of the marketers have seen great ROI from the customer who had discovered the product from a blog. Initially, this might require an ample amount of time to be invested but it is worth considering in the long run.
How Does Content Marketing Benefit Small businesses?
Before we start you must know how the businesses benefit from small businesses? Suppose you write a blog post for a business. Now how would you link it on different platforms?
While you decide to work on a blog, make a video of the content and post it on youtube, link the video to your blog. This is how you must hold firm in your business strategy.
By this, you will now have saved huge money in your bank as well gaining market share for your business.
Now, let us study the Content Marketing Strategy for small businesses:
You can start a blog
FREE FREE FREE, how all humans love this term. No matter how big you grow in life, we still love the free stuff, Right?
Blogging is also completely free. It helps to establish yourself independently. With about 25 blogs on your website, you would be able to bring 30% of the traffic to your website.
Blogs will help you increase your ranking in google search, increase value among the consumers, more exposure, and generate leads
Be conscious enough in choosing the platform for your blog and should be popular enough to voice out for your business.
Build Online presence
Social media is the new google, the more people the more business. So for online business, we get the maximum number of customers from social media.
If you are actively involved in selling the product or any other services. Just showing an online presence is not sufficient, you have to communicate with the audience.
Content Marketing is like a date, so if you keep boosting up about yourself there won't be a second date.
So, here is the strategy to know your active audience:
- Get to know where your target audience is spending most of their time online
- At regular intervals of time, keep visiting your competitor's social media profile to know about the active users
- You can also use google analytics to determine the online presence of your customer
Email Newsletter
One of the excellent ways for small business marketing is through the email newsletter. Keep alerting your readers about the new launch, upcoming events, or any other industry-related news.
A related example would be the offers from beauty brands. Do you want to know how they reach you? If they are open to sale, they would highlight the term sale and the off percentage, which would drag your attention to open the website.
Email Newsletter works on the same principle. You put your customers in the first place.
This method builds goodwill with the audience. It promotes the product's sales and increases customer value.
How about building a content calendar!
It is not just important to build the products based on the buyer's persona but to deliver the right content during the purchase journey because it is very important to deliver relevant content as per the trend.
To build a monthly calendar that includes blogs, social media posts, emails, and any other forms of creative content for that month.
If March is the month of mango, so does November have “No shave November”. Connect your content to the audience.
There must be a variety of content
The world is very competitive, so you must stand out to survive. Small businesses can achieve success only through content marketing strategies. You must know how much your content varies from the competitors' content.
Once you have established your efficacy, replicate that with upcoming content. Here comes the chain. Convert your latest blog to a post, turn the post to infographics, turn the infographic into white paper, and turn your white paper into a series of social media quotes.
Remember content creation is nothing but infinity, it is limitless. You can create content for everything and anything.
Customer Reviews
Did you know that most consumers check social media for any sort of services and reviews? Work hard to get those positive reviews. It should reflect your audience on social media and your website.
Reviews are the boon and curse to the small business, but customer satisfaction is the ultimate here.
How to succeed in the new era of Digital Marketing?
As every aspect that is bound with us as a part of our day-to-day routine is defined by mobile.
From your morning toilet routine to set up the alarm for the next day we have our mobile in hand. Mobile phones deal with entertainment to “everything”, the device is not a choice but mandatory.
So, it is very necessary to create content for mobile media. This is possible by creating content for the web and app for your business. It not only includes social media posts but visual podcasts, videos, emails, etc.
Content marketing is growing vastly from the past two years. Industry is enhancing its own strategy. Get to know the stats from the Content Marketing Global Report, About 90% of the marketers are planning to invest in the content marketing channel in 2022. Also about 60% of the marketers are already measuring their success from content marketing sales.
When it comes to content marketing success factor, about 78% of the brand were successful that used content marketing strategy. About 73% of marketers have spent about 10%-60% of their total budgeting over content marketing which inturn has increased paid content promotional budget of about 46%.
These are bigger gains for the companies that are relying on content marketing. Companies are now realizing that it takes time to make the content resonate. The results show the success of content marketing strategy.
Let’s Wrap
The Strategy for content marketing can be easily updated because content marketing is all about stimulating a sort of interest in the product.
Content marketing is like the atom of the digital marketing universe. Every other aspect revolves around it.
Content marketing strategy is the organic way to reach your target audience. Rather than pushing an ad in their face, leave them with a positive first impression as this will add value to the product.
Small business might not be feasible, but with the right content strategy, it is possible to strike a chord.