Content marketing is a powerful tool for small businesses just like yours to reach out to potential customers and get them interested in your product/service.
It’s also a great way to position yourself as an expert in your industry and build trust with consumers. Although it might seem intimidating at first, content marketing can be done on a budget if you’re willing to put in the time and effort.
So what exactly does it mean when we say that content marketing is beneficial? We’ll explore some of the benefits of content marketing for small businesses and why you should consider a content strategy to grow your brand and your sales.
11 benefits of content marketing for small businesses
Not sure if content marketing is the right fit for your small business? At Isca Brands, content marketing has revolutionized our business and helped us grow our traffic month over month.
With that in mind, we wanted to share how we felt content marketing benefits our brands and why you should consider some form of content strategy for your business.
A scalable, measurable process to build your business
In the world of marketing and small business, it’s a real challenge to know where and how to invest your marketing budget (time based or financial) for the best results.
When deployed correctly content marketing can be developed into a repeatable system that can be scaled. You publish content, you get traffic, and you sell more products and services.
Understanding and leveraging this process has helped businesses grow and thrive while competitors come and go. Take HubSpot as an example, they used Content Marketing in a busy SaaS industry to position themselves as a global player in the market. Click here to find out how they used a mixture of clever content strategies to grow their traffic to 5.7 million sure per month!
Earns links from other websites
External links often referred to as backlinks (links from another website to yours) are the currency of the internet, and they can help your website rank higher in search engines for different search terms.
Buying links is an expensive exercise, so if you’re a small business on a budget that wants to earn quality backlinks (and isn’t willing to pay for them), creating helpful content is your best bet.
Try to create content that’s helpful to your target audience and contains facts and statistics. Creating your own data is time-consuming and requires an effort that many others just don’t have time for but the benefits can be staggering.
Rather than create their own data and studies you’ll find that many other sites (including your competitors) will link to you if it provides value to their readers.
This benefit is two-fold, you get engaged traffic relevant to your brand and you get a boost in the search engines for keywords (search terms) that relate to the content on your website. Rinse and repeat and you’ll start to build an internet powerhouse being fed traffic from a combination of search engines and external websites.
Increases your sales
Content marketing is a great way to increase your sales. Your content can introduce people to your brand, help them become familiar with your products and services, and position yourself as a solution to their problems.
Your potential customers will all have different issues, concerns, and pain points and your goal is to create content that helps all of them.
Build trust with your audience
Content marketing is a great way to build trust with consumers. In today’s market, many consumers are looking for information that helps them make decisions about the products and services they buy.
They want to know what you can do for them and what your business values are. The more valuable content you provide, the more likely it will be that customers will trust you enough to do business with you.
Content marketing also builds trust by giving your audience a sense of security. Consumers like knowing that the information they’re reading or hearing is accurate, timely, and comes from an expert source, so when they see updated blog posts on topics they’re interested in, it makes them feel like they have access to new ideas and resources.
This type of reassurance not only lends credibility but also gives people confidence when making purchases at a later stage and positions you as a helpful, knowledgeable source.
Helps retain your existing customers
There’s nothing worse than buying a product and never hearing anything about the brand or business again. Even if it’s the best product in the world people will quickly lose interest if they don’t feel they’re having value added to their life.
This is more of a psychological factor than anything else but trust me it works. By creating a mixture of helpful and transactional content you create a buzz around your product ensuring that early customers feel they’ve made the right choice and even placing them as ambassadors for potential new customers.
Improves your traffic, SEO, and rankings on search engines
The more content you create the more possible search terms (keywords) you can be found for. Let’s look at a simple example:
- Website A has 25 pages and ranks for approximately 300 different keywords
- Website B has 250 pages (thanks to an active content strategy) and ranks for over 3000 keywords
Just simply by creating more pieces of helpful content, your websites will receive more traffic. As long as your content is relevant to your products and services some of that traffic will convert and become your customers.
Content marketing is evergreen
Lots of marketing strategies involve paying for qualified leads via PPC campaigns, lead acquisition services, and physical advertising. While these all have their place and can be fantastic tools to grow your business they all have one major downfall.
They’re not evergreen! Once you’ve paid for your click that’s it, you convert or you’ve lost a lead. Content marketing on the other hand creates assets that will stay there as long as your website is live, accessible via search engines until the end of time.
While there are some best practices like updating aged content over time, every page you create will become another arm of your marketing efforts moving forward until you choose otherwise.
You can do it in-house or outsource your content marketing
Lots of small business owners immediately think that content marketing is reserved for big brands and global businesses. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Your position as the leader of your business puts you in a perfect spot to create or delegate a content strategy. As a small business you can use content marketing simply by leveraging:
- Your website’s blog
- Your email list
- Your social channels
You don’t even need to invest in a camera. For many industries, it can be as simple as creating a new page/s on your website every week and sharing them with your email list and social followers. It’s really that easy.
But what if you can’t spare any time? Freelancers are a great way to deploy a content strategy without using any of your own time and effort (just money). You can head to platforms like Fiverr and PeoplePerHour to find fantastic writers and editors to assist you in your efforts.
Don’t miss our helpful guide on outsourced marketing for small businesses for tips on how to find the right freelancer for your brand.
Creates new ways to monetize your website
A growing user base on your website can open your business up to a myriad of new ways to monetize. Depending on your level of traffic and your audience you can consider:
- Adding display adds to your informational content
- Affiliating ancillary products and services provided by other brands
- Offering consultancy services based on the wealth of knowledge provided by your content
Whether each of these routes is a fit for your website will be based on your own intuition and industry knowledge but never underestimate the value of an engaged audience.
It doesn’t require digital marketing experience
Thanks to the advent of CMS technology like WordPress creating pages on your website has become as simple as creating a word document. With approximately an hour’s training, most members of staff will be able to create simple articles and blog posts for your site.
As you can see in the image above you can simply type your title, craft your heading and paragraphs, save it as a draft for later, publish with the click of a button, and repeat. This makes creating web-based content a speedy repeatable process, you can even create your blog post in a word doc and copy and paste it if you find it easier.
Provides valuable information to consumers at all stages of the buying decision
The challenge of content marketing is that it’s not just about the initial sale; it’s also about building relationships with customers before they even know they want to buy your offering and after they’ve purchased it.
This means that you’re providing valuable information for consumers as they research their options while still creating content to help your current customers at the same time.
Any conscientious buyer will see the effort you put into existing customers and will only strengthen their resolve to do business with you as opposed to a competitor who only focuses on the initial sale and considers aftercare an afterthought!
Conclusion
Content marketing could be the most effective way to reach your target audience, build your brand or business, and grow as a small business owner. Until you start creating content and putting it out there you’ll never know the true power and benefits of content marketing for small businesses.
It’s important to remember that while it might take some time and effort, you don’t need expensive equipment or software. You also don’t need to hire an agency, just start with what you have and begin to create content that’s helpful for your audience.
Looking for more great ways to level up your digital marketing? Don’t miss more of our helpful guides below packed with helpful lessons we’ve learned on our brand journey.
