How to Attract and Convert Using Small Business Content Marketing

You know that marketing your small business online is essential to your success. Digital marketing is like an umbrella for all your marketing activities online, including your website, email marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing. While all of them are important to your online marketing efforts, small business content marketing is particularly beneficial in building relationships with your potential customers.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is creating informational content that is valuable to your audience and helps draws them to you. Marketing efforts that pull your audience to you like this are called inbound marketing.

Most businesses recognize the importance and use content marketing in their digital marketing efforts. Also according to to a to to o able, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action."

Why Do Small Businesses Need Content Marketing?

Content marketing is just one of tools in the digital marketing tool belt, and it is a mighty one. For small businesses, content marketing is a way to cultivate awareness with your target audience and build trust in your brand. Furthermore, your content is often the gatekeeper of buyers initiating the purchase process.

How Many Businesses Use Content Marketing?

Most businesses recognize the importance and use content marketing in their digital marketing efforts. According to Content Marketing Institute, "the number of b2b respondents who use content marketing is 91%."

Why is content marketing important for businesses?

Most small businesses have limited resources, including time and budget. Content marketing is a great way to nurture customer relationships by building trust and delivering valuable information. It is also a compelling way to meet your customers where they are in the buyer's journey.

For example, one customer may be learning about your product or service and finds content that helps them. Meanwhile, another might be further along and consider your product or service and finds other content that answers the questions they are seeking before purchase. Additionally, as consumers become savvier, content is crucial to the buying process.

According to the 2019 Content Preferences Survey Report from DemandGen, "A majority of respondents (41%) consume three to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep."

How Does a Small Business Build a Content Marketing Strategy?

As with everything else, have a strategy. Your content marketing strategy will help guide the way, so you know where you are going, how you'll get there, how you'll define success, and what you'll adjust if needed. Think of it as a map, giving you a high-level view of what, why, and how of your content plan.

Steps to Building Your Small Business Content Marketing Strategy

Step 1: Set A Goal

Every content campaign starts with a goal. Identify what you want to accomplish through your content marketing campaign. Why is this step so important?

According to CoSchedule, "Marketers who set goals are 376% more likely to report success than those who don't. And 70% of those successful, goal-setting marketers achieve them."

Even better than writing down your goal and getting specific about it. Skip unclear goals and get precise using the S.M.A.R.T. method:

S- Specific

M- Measurable

A- Attainable

R- Relevant

T- Time-based

Example:

Instead of a goal like "increase sales," SMART goals go deeper to define where you want to go and how you want to get there:

Specific – I want to increase conversions by increasing views of our lead generation landing page.

Measurable - I want to Increase lead generation landing page visits by 9%.

Attainable – Is what I want to do attainable? Last quarter, we were able to increase landing page visits by 5% in two months through a content marketing campaign focused on the features of our product and how it benefits our customers. The campaign incorporated website content, YouTube videos, and social media content with a robust posting schedule.

Relevant - By adopting our prior strategy for this content marketing campaign, we believe we can increase landing page views by 5%.

Time-based - Increase lead generation landing page visits by 5% over two months to increase conversion rate.

SMART goal: "Increase our conversion rate by increasing lead generation landing page visits by 5% over two months."

Step2: Research

Knowing and understanding your target audience is paramount to the success of your content marketing campaign. To be effective, you must understand WHO you are creating content for and WHERE that person is in their purchase process.

For example, are you creating content to introduce your product to a new customer, or are you creating content to educate a customer already considering your product?

Considering who you are trying to reach and the information you think they'd need to go to the next step.

Once you've researched your audience, you need to consider how to increase your chances of being found by them. To do this, research essential keywords and phrases to help improve your odds of being findable.

Thinking about what someone might type into a search bar when looking for your product or service information is a great place to start. From there, explore keyword research tools like Google Ad’s Keyword Planner or this one from Wordstream.

Another vital research step for small business content marketing is to analyze your competition. Note what your competition is doing and where. Consider if there are any gaps in their strategy that you might be able to implement on your own.

Step 4: Create a plan

Now that you know your direction, it's time to consider what content is needed and where you will distribute it and promote it. Create a calendar (or grab one like this one from Hubspot).

Your plan should account for the type of content, how often you need to post, where it will be distributed, who is responsible for producing it, and how you will measure the campaign's success.

Now that you have a plan, it's time to implement it. Keep your attention on the metrics you've identified as essential to help measure the effectiveness of your campaign and adjust as needed. Once you begin measuring results, you can change your strategy in the future.

Takeaway

Content marketing for small businesses is one of the most effective digital marketing tools available. Companies use content marketing to build relationships and guide customers through conversion by providing valuable information that serves their needs. Creating a strategy to reach your target customers is crucial to the success of your content marketing campaign and will make implementing your campaign easier.

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