Tag Archives: Small Business

How to grow your small business with content marketing

Grow your business with content marketing

Grow your business with content marketing

How do you plan to promote your small business (I’m assuming you have a website and you need to promote it)?

Google AdWords?

Pay an SEO company to improve your search engine rankings?

Spend hours on social media posting random messages and replying to people?

All these activities are important and I’m not going to discourage you from using a judicious mix of them to promote your small business.

The problem (here we go!) with these activities is that they’re becoming less and less effective.

Conventional advertising has become boring

Conventional advertising has become boring

If you can use AdWords, so can your competitors. If you outbid them, they can outbid you.

And anyway, people on search engines pay less attention to paid links when they’re searching for useful information. The nature of paid links is that people don’t expect these links to contain helpful information.

Even if people do click your paid links, you can easily imagine how much you will end up spending on just a single campaign – businesses run multiple campaigns to cover multiple search terms.

Advertising has been exploited so much that people no longer trust it. In fact, they are constantly looking for ways to skip advertising. Many users have add-ons in their browsers to block advertisements. This is because most of the advertising is always about selling, selling, and selling. People get put off.

Read: Want to know how content marketing is better than advertising?

More than 650 million devices use some form of ad blocking.

Increasing number of people are using ad blockers

Increasing number of people are using ad blockers

The problem with SEO is multi-faceted. Much of SEO these days has to do with good quality content and if you don’t recognize this and want to improve your SEO without investing in high-quality content, you will just spend money and effort without any results. There is no SEO these days without content marketing. You can acknowledge this today, or after a few months, after spending a ton of money and effort.

Moreover, without quality content, SEO is very easy. You can create “optimized” content in great quantity and go on publishing it. Since, low quality content is very cheap, you can use brute force to improve your SEO and sometimes, it actually works (it depends on how much effort your competition is putting).

Read: How content marketing actually improves your SEO

Since it is very easy, and also egotistically gratifying, many people do it. If you can get cheap content, so can your competitors.

Social media is full of noise. Timelines move very fast. There, unless you are paying to highlight your updates, most of your followers are going to miss your messages. You will be constantly catching up.

Since you will be spending most of your effort (and even money) maintaining a presence on social media, you won’t have any intellectual wealth to show for yourself.

Content marketing is the answer.

Here is a nice infographic of how you can use content marketing for making every part of your sales funnel effective.

Using content marketing to make every part of your sales funnel effective

Using content marketing to make every part of your sales funnel effective

Source

Why content marketing is the answer to all your small business growth troubles as far as promotion goes?

First, let us understand what content marketing actually means.

I won’t go into esoteric definitions of content marketing as many blogs have it. I will use very simple language to explain what content marketing to you is, and how you can use content marketing to grow your business.

Isn’t this the ultimate goal, growing your business?

So, what is content marketing? Especially in the context of a small business like yours?

Everything that you publish online is content.

All your web pages on your small business website, are content.

The images accompanying those web pages are content.

The publicly accessible PDFs that you have, are content.

If you are publishing blog posts, they are content.

If you constantly publish FAQs and answers to questions from your customers and clients, they are content.

When you send out an email campaign, that’s content.

When you post updates on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you are publishing content.

So, whatever you publish online for the consumption of people, you are publishing content and in a crude manner, you are also indulging in content marketing. You just don’t know it.

Content marketing means using a strategy to regularly publish content in such a manner that people not only want to get more of your content, they go out of their way to make sure that they don’t miss your content.

Remember that the ultimate aim of content marketing (your content marketing) should be the growth of your small business.

So, when you publish content, when you attract people to your content, they should be your prospective customers and clients, and not all-and-sundry.

If you try to attract all-and-sundry, you will simply waste money and time, which you don’t want.

In the context of your small business, content marketing means publishing useful content using your preferred channel, on an ongoing basis, so that your business name or your brand becomes familiar to people, and since you are publishing useful content, your target audience is not annoyed.

Not being familiar with you is one of the biggest reasons why people on the Internet don’t want to do business with you.

In bulleted form, your small business content marketing would include:

  • Publishing high-quality content regularly.
  • Providing answers to people’s problems and questions.
  • Highlighting the benefits of your product or service from different angles, in different ways.
  • Promoting your content using multiple channels like your blog and social media platforms.
  • Using analytics to note down what sort of traffic your content is attracting.
  • Tweaking and adjusting your new as well as existing content according to the feedback that you got from your analytics tools.

Things you need to know in advance if you want to grow your small business with content marketing

Content marketing is way more effective than the other promotional methods listed and not listed above, but don’t opt for content marketing as a tool for your small business growth thinking that it is cheap.

The key is “content marketing is more effective”.

Sure, you can go for cheap content and then like a hamster you can go on running inside a spinning wheel thinking that you’re doing something very important.

Hamster-like conditions with cheap content

Hamster-like conditions with cheap content

Image credit

Your choice.

I’m not saying that you’re not going to succeed with content marketing unless you go bankrupt. I just mean to say that just like any other advertising and marketing cost, or any other business-related cost, content marketing is going to cost you.

Another thing that you need to keep in mind is that content marketing doesn’t stop at a few blog posts and articles. It is an ongoing process. You can take it as an operational cost.

This is because just like you are using content marketing, so are many more businesses.

You may say that the same thing happens with conventional advertising and SEO, again, I want you to pay attention to “content marketing is more effective”.

Just like SEO, you are constantly going to face competition for your small business in content marketing.

Just like advertising, you may have to spend money getting quality content for your website or blog or social media updates.

Yes, it comes with all the existing attributes like costing money, needing effort, and having to compete with the others.

What makes it different from other forms of marketing is, it is more effective, and if implemented properly, it will certainly help you grow your small business.

So, what makes content marketing so effective for growing your small business?

Don’t roll your eyes, but to benefit from content marketing, you must understand that you are providing something unique.

Unless you yourself recognize the potential of your business – your product or service – how are you going to convince the others? If you are half-hearted about your proposition, so will be the reaction to your proposition.

Once you become a big fan of your business, you have a lot to say.

Compare this with an interesting topic. How easy it is to have a conversation on a topic you find interesting.

Anyway, the biggest benefit of content marketing is that it gives you a unique identity.

A big problem with the Internet is – despite the fact that its potential for your small business is almost infinite – that there is too much noise. The noise doesn’t just come from your competitors. There are millions of distractions on the Internet.

How do you distinguish yourself?

How do people recognize you in the crowd?

Why should they do business with you if scores of other people are prompting them to do business with them?

You give them something to like about you. Something to respect you. Something to hold you in awe.

When they like you, when they respect you, when they hold you in awe, naturally they want to buy from you.

But how do you do that?

One way is to provide them exceptional service once they have bought something from you. But, this can only be done when they have become your customers or clients. What do you do when they haven’t yet become your customer or client?

You can offer them something free.

If it is something digital, although the cost might not be a problem, zillions of digital products on the Internet are free, so, again, people won’t be able to distinguish your small business from others. Heck, even Google provides free Gmail and a stack of other services free of cost. You will be just another service doing the same.

Giving physical products for free will be very expensive. Even giving services for free will be very expensive for a small business.

Providing helpful, good quality content, on the other hand, isn’t very expensive, and people don’t take good quality content for granted because there is so much lousy content available.

What do I mean by good content?

The definition of “goodness” changes from context to context. Some people may find amusing content good – for example creating and distributing funny GIFs. Some people may find fashion tips good. Some people may find recipes good. Some people may find web design and SEO tips good. Some people may find Internet marketing tips good.

Visited boredpanda.com? As the name suggests, it’s a website for people who are bored. So the content over there that unbores them is good content for them.

“Good” here means something that is useful, something that entertains, something that is relevant, and something that is topical, and last but not the least, something that is written well that shows that you respect your readers.

We live in a screwed-up world but fortunately, people still appreciate help, and are grateful for it.

Suppose, you sell scented candles from your website. If you search for the phrase “buy scented candles online” on Google you will see that most of the listings are from famous online retailers. It will be very difficult to get your link featured with these mega-million retail stores. I’m not saying it is impossible, but it is difficult.

What do you do?

You first create a very unique line of scented candles, and then build a community around your business through content marketing.

You have to offer people something that is not available on all these retail shops.

Fine, even if you come up with something very unique, how do you promote your small business with very limited budget?

Through content marketing.

Start posting high-quality pictures of your scented candles on Facebook and Instagram. Invite people to share their experiences of using scented candles from various sources.

Create a video of how you typically create scented candles.

Write blog posts on the process of making scented candles.

Find references of scented candles in classical books and create a blog post on this theme.

Send regular email updates to people on how they can use scented candles for different occasions.

Educate people about the therapeutic benefits of scented candles.

Once you start using content marketing to promote your small business of scented candles, you will keep on coming up with different ideas.

But, no matter how appreciative and grateful we are, we easily forget. We need to be reminded regularly. So, good quality content needs to be published regularly.

For that, create a content publishing and content marketing calendar for your small business.

Remember that there is a reason why it is not called “content publishing” but “content marketing”.

It takes strategy to use content to market your small business.

Once you have released your content into the World Wide Web, you need to make sure that the right people get access to that content. No matter how great your content is, unless your target audience is able to find it, it is not going to achieve the desired results.

Use all the available channels to promote your content. Promote your blog on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Build a mailing list and broadcast your links whenever you publish them. Encourage people to subscribe to your mailing list.

Here are some nice statistics published in an infographic on Demand Metric:

  • 70% people prefer to learn about a company or a product through articles and blog posts rather than an advertisement.
  • 82% customers and clients have a positive outlook about a company after reading content from the company.
  • On an average, marketers are spending over 25% of their marketing budget on content marketing.
  • 91% B2B marketers use content marketing.
  • 86% B2C marketers use content marketing.
  • Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing.
  • Per dollar spent, content marketing generates approximately three times as many leads as traditional marketing.
  • 86% people skip TV advertisements when given the means.
  • 90% consumers find custom and informative content useful.

What makes content marketing cheaper and more effective compared to traditional marketing, especially for small business?

Social sharing. Search engine traffic. Direct referrals.

For every non-content marketing promotion, you pay for every benefit that you derive.

When you advertise on Google AdWords, you pay for every click. If you’re paying one dollar per click and if you get 200 clicks in a day, you are spending $ 200 per day for those 200 clicks.

But when you publish high-quality content after adopting content marketing, if your content is good and valuable, people promote that content on their own. You don’t have to pay them to promote your content. It is so valuable that people want to share it with their colleagues, friends and relatives.

The quality of your content, coupled with social sharing, improves your search engine rankings. Whether you get 200 clicks from Google or 2 million clicks, you don’t have to pay even a single cent to Google (or any other search engine). After your initial investment in getting high quality content, the cascading effect is totally free.

The benefits of content marketing for your small business

As you do content marketing for your small business, just in a couple of months you will begin to see the following positive changes:

  • Improved search engine rankings (of course, better search engine rankings are needed)
  • More targeted traffic to your website
  • Increased referral traffic to your small business website, because more websites and blogs will be linking to you and more people will be sharing your links on their social media profiles
  • People pay more attention to what you have to say
  • More leads are generated from your website and other sources
  • Your sales increase

Conclusion

Although, as a small business, you may want to try out many marketing methods, content marketing for small business is not only cost-effective but also result-oriented.

With little creativity, you can gain a competitive edge over businesses that are not using content marketing to promote themselves, or who are using content marketing wrongly.

You can place yourself as an expert or an authority figure if intellectual branding matters in your field. When people respect you for your wisdom, it’s easier for them to do business with you because they trust your intelligence.

You also become familiar to people. When you continuously publish content, people become used to your presence, and not in a negative sense. They associate you with high quality content and timely help.

The overall visibility of your small business increases with consistent and strategic content marketing. More people link to your website. More people share your links. Search engines begin to rank you higher.

Clarity of purpose is very important if you want to promote your small business with content marketing. The entire strength of content marketing lies in strategy and execution. You must know what you want to publish, why you want to publish and what should be the end result. Once you have figured that out, there should be nothing holding you back.

Simple content marketing for a small business

simple-content-marketing-for-small-businessContent marketing isn’t just for big businesses having deep pockets. In fact, small businesses are in a better position to leverage content marketing due to the flexibility and abundance of creativity small business owners enjoy compared to highly bureaucratic and red-tape-tangled big businesses.

Yes, it takes efforts. I’m not saying content marketing is a quick-reward tactic. It’s a mistake to call it a tactic, it’s a prolonged strategy with long lasting results. You have to build it brick by brick. You will even have to pay content writers and content creators if you cannot create content on your own. It’s just like any other business asset that requires investment and effort.

Need to know what’s content marketing? You may like to read What is content marketing? Explained in detail.

Why a small business should embrace content marketing?

Here are some reasons why content marketing benefits your small business:

  • Conventional advertising is expensive and unscientific
  • PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns can totally blow up your budget
  • Content marketing makes people trust you
  • Content marketing helps you build your own media platform
  • Content marketing increases your visibility on search engines as well as social networking websites
  • You don’t have to pay for every click
  • The visibility that you create with content marketing is long-lasting
  • Once you have created a presence for yourself through content marketing, you no longer have to depend on search engines
  • Frankly, there is no other way, whether you realize it now, or later

Simple content marketing for a small business

The entry barrier to content marketing is very low. It is not as formidable as it may initially seem. In fact, you can formulate a content marketing strategy right now and start implementing it within the next one hour (first complete reading this). Here are a few simple things you can do to start your own content marketing campaign for your small business:

  1. Define your purpose: Content marketing is very precise and it is advisable that you clearly define your purpose right in the beginning of launching your content marketing strategy.What do you intend to achieve with content marketing?

    Of course, every business wants to get more customers and clients and this goes without saying, but what should be your key performance indicators (KPIs)? Are you looking for brand visibility on social networking websites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook? Do you want more subscribers for your business newsletter? Do you want more customers (duh!)? Read 12 most important KPIs of content marketing.

  2. Do keyword research: Keyword research is not as simple as it may seem in the beginning. You have to think how your typical customer or client would think when he or she needs to find your business. Don’t assume what keywords and search terms they should be using. There are many good keywords tools available (you can begin with this Google keyword tool).Keyword research isn’t just for better search engine rankings, it also helps you keep yourself focused and create the most appropriate content using the most appropriate language that your prospective customers and clients use. Keyword research gives you a direction.
  3. Create content topics: These are the blog posts and webpages that you are going to write or create content for. Remember that you need to create your topics keeping in mind what sort of traffic you want to get to your website or blog.If I want to get more clients for my content writing and content marketing services I write content that shows how much I know as well as how interested I am in getting your business.

    If you provide a consulting service than you want to tell people how much you know and how you help your clients. If you sell a product you would like to describe what are the benefits of those products in every possible way.

  4. Set up a domain account in Google Analytics and Google’s Webmasters Tools: These will help you monitor what sort of traffic your content is attracting. You will have to combine both of them to get a better insight.These tools will tell you what keywords people use to find your content. They will also tell you from where you get your traffic the most. Here is a good blog post on how to use Google Search Analytics to enhance your content marketing. If you find it difficult to understand, stay tuned, one of these days I will create a simplified version of how to use these tools to improve your content marketing efforts.
  5. Start publishing blog posts: Publishing blog posts is the easiest form of content marketing. Although, I repeatedly say that simply publishing blog posts on your blog isn’t exactly content marketing, it is your base. Without having quality content, there is nothing to market. So, everything starts with quality content that you publish under your domain name. Publish posts based on the topics you have created, based on the keywords you have researched.
  6. Use social channels to share your content: If you have a LinkedIn account (better for B2B businesses) start sharing the links of the blog posts you have started publishing. Use Twitter, use Facebook, use whatever social networking channel you prefer and where you would like to build your audience. This will bring visibility to your newly-created content.
  7. Monitor performance using Google Analytics and Google’s Webmasters Tools: You will need to be patient. These tools won’t get data initially. Google won’t even index your new content in the beginning if your domain is new. It may take a couple of months before you begin to see some data in Google Analytics and Google’s Webmasters Tools. Be persistent without worrying – every small business or big business goes through this process.
  8. Curate content from other sources: You don’t always have to create content from scratch. Awesome content is being created every minute on other websites and blogs. You can curate content from these sources from time to time and share it on your social networking timelines. You can also create smaller blog posts with your unique point of view with the help of curated content. Read Can you use content curation as a viable content marketing tool?
  9. Repurpose your popular content: If you observe that particular blog posts are getting more attention you can re-purpose their content. You can pick up the main points and create slides and then share the slides on a platform like Slideshare.com. If your blog post contains data, you can create an infographic and share it again on social networking platforms. If possible, you can create a small YouTube video, upload it on YouTube, and then share it again. There are many ways you can re-purpose your existing content. You may like to read How to repurpose old content.

These are a few simple ways a small business can use content marketing. As I mentioned in the beginning, just like any other business activity, it takes effort, consistency, a bit of creativity, and persistence. It’s not a shortcut. It’s an alternative, a way better alternative to conventional advertising and promotion. Revisit the above point: Why a small business should embrace content marketing.

Why a blog is important for your small business

Business blogging

Do you publish a small business blog? As a small business if you don’t have a blog you are losing out on many aspects of online marketing, SEO and social engagement.

Having a small business blog has many advantages. Small businesses normally don’t have big marketing budgets and they have to depend on individual effort in order to survive and thrive. Blogging kills multiple birds (I don’t endorse killing of birds for entertainment and leisure purposes, in fact I loathe such acts) with a single stone. Once you have set up a small business blog and accumulated some high-quality blog posts

  • Your website begins to rank higher on various search engines
  • Search engines index and rank greater number of pages and blog posts from your website
  • Your overall keyword density improves
  • You have useful content to share on your social media and social networking profiles
  • Your followers and friends get more opportunities to promote your links as you publish fresh content regularly
  • You establish yourself as an authority due to the expertise you constantly share through your small business blog
  • Search engines and social media websites begin to regard you as an authority and hence attach more importance to your content
  • You engage your visitors in meaningful conversations and hence improve your recognition and identity and consequently, strengthen your brand

Having a small business blog is easy

You can either set up a business blog under your existing domain name (something like http://yourwebsite.com/blog) or you can have a separate domain name for your blog and put your main website link there. Although there are many free blog hosting services that you can use; I recommend using WordPress for your small business blog because it gives you full control over your blog in terms of layout and content. Besides, you can freely download it and install it on your server. This is more important especially now when online services are randomly shut down by even reputed companies like Google..

Provided you already have a website and you want to host a small business blog under your existing domain name, it doesn’t cost you much. You can either do it on your own, or you can hire somebody who is comfortable installing WordPress blogs. The benefit of hiring someone experienced is that within a couple of hours you are ready to go.

Maintaining a small business blog demands some time and investment

Of course as a business tool a small business blog cannot be 100% free. Either you yourself will have to create content or you’ll need to hire a content writer for that. Initially, in the fit of enthusiasm you can create a few well-written blog posts but eventually you will need to look out for an experienced content writer who can take over your blog and make sure it always has fresh, relevant and useful content.

Rather than quantity focus on quality

For your small business blog it is very important you don’t get swayed by the keyword hoopla and focus on the broad quality of your content. Getting 100s of keyword-centric blog posts may get you lots of traffic, but if that traffic doesn’t convert into business, you are simply wasting your money and effort. Instead, invest on high-quality content that not only ranks higher on search engines and performs better on social media and social networking websites, but also improves your conversion rate.

Besides, these days you can be penalized by search engines like Google for over-using your keywords. So use your keywords whenever they are necessary and don’t needlessly stuff them. Even your content writer must know that. Sometimes people indulge in keyword stuffing unknowingly and if your content writer is doing that, you will need to remind him or her not to do it.

Does having a small business blog actually help you?

It depends on what you’re looking for. If you think your small business blog will immediately increase your business, it may not happen. It is a publishing platform. It helps you build a communication tool that can help you in whichever way you want. There is traffic, and then there is targeted traffic. Targeted traffic to your small business blog will always have a greater conversion rate compared to non-targeted traffic.

The success of your small business blog also hinges upon your clarity of purpose. Do you want to build an audience that will eventually turn into your customers, or do you want to straightaway sell your products and services via your blog posts? To be frank, whether it makes sense or not, on the Internet people are turned off if you are directly trying to sell them. Of course everybody understands that eventually you need to make a living, and nobody resents that. But if you are providing quality content, just provide quality content through your small business blog. Don’t try to trick people into buying your product or service just because they have come to your blog to read your blog posts.

Yes, your small business blog can increase your business. Use it to increase the level of credibility. Use it to develop a strong readership base. Encourage people to subscribe to your e-mail updates and try to engage them as much as possible. Remember that it is the level of engagement and recognition that will eventually encourages them to do business with you, and this you can be easily achieve by publishing a regular small business blog.