5 Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

In a modern world where nearly every pixel of virtual real estate is occupied with advertising, content marketing for small businesses remains more powerful than ever. Encompassing blogs, newsletters, infographics and more, it involves distributing valuable content to a targeted audience. However, unlike those in-your-face ads all over your Facebook feed, the goal of content marketing isn’t to explicitly promote a product or services. Rather, it’s to educate, inform and entertain your audience and in doing so, covertly prove the value of your brand. This is a cost-effective strategy for attracting leads and converting prospects into paying customers. That said, not all content marketing strategies are created equal. Read on for 5 actionable content marketing tips for small businesses, to ensure you get the most bang for your buck (or time and effort).

1. Create a funnel

Content marketing tips for small businesses are quite different from most marketing strategies. Unlike PPC advertising, its main purpose isn’t to immediately drive sales. However, it can be a lucrative pursuit — so long as you have a funnel. You see, content marketing without a strategy is just words on a page. But if you have a funnel in place, you’re working towards a larger goal. By regularly providing your audience with free and valuable content, you’re slowly but surely building brand trust and rapport. The result? They’re far more likely to buy from you when you do hit them with a sales pitch.

For example, your funnel might start with your audience joining up to your mailing list in order to grab a free ebook about a topic within your industry. Once they’re on your list, you can build an email marketing sequence and send them weekly emails directing them to value-packed blogs that help solve a problem for them (more on that in the next section) Then, after a few weeks or months, you can finally mention your amazing product or service and know you’re selling to a warmed up audience.

2. Solve a problem

Content marketing is all about teaching your audience (in an non-salesy way) exactly how your product or service solves their problem. So, in order to do so, you need to understand what their biggest pain points are. What keeps them up at night? What do they vent to their friends about? Some great ways to collect this information is by holding market research groups, running surveys, polling your audience on Facebook or simply listening to what your customers are telling.

Once you’ve identified these problems, you can build a content strategy around providing solutions to them. For example, say you run a kids play centre. Your target audience might be busy mums and a common problem they face is keeping the kids busy during the school holidays. You could create blog content around the 10 best things to do in the school holidays in your local area. You can also use your content marketing efforts as a more engaging way to answer some of your FAQs.

3. Incorporate video

While many people associate content marketing for small businesses with written content like blogs and newsletters, it can also take a visual form. In fact, video can play an integral role in content marketing, with 97% of marketers saying that video has helped users gain a better understanding of their products and services. Whether it’s a webinar, explainer video or short-form social videos they’re the perfect way to showcase the benefits of your offering in an easily digestible way. Video is also the perfect supplement to blog posts, as it helps break up the content, illustrate your key points and boost your SEO.

4. Track your results

As with any type of advertising, especially for paid media channels such as Google ads, the data is essential for measuring your ROI (return on investment) — whether that’s your time, money or energy. Keeping track of how well your audience is engaging with your content can help determine what’s working and what’s not. Then, you can tweak your content strategy accordingly.

So, how do you track your results in content marketing? Consider installing Google Analytics on your website, so you can keep an eye on how many people are reading your blogs, how long they’re staying on the page (behaviour) and how they’re finding your content (acquisition) It’s also important to track your key email marketing metrics, such as open rate, click rate and unsubscribe rate. You can also collect insightful data for videos, often down to the very second your audience stopped watching.

5. Repurpose your content

You don’t have to be a content creation machine to create an effective content marketing strategy. By repurposing and cross-posting multiple platforms, you can make your content work smarter, not harder. For example, you could take snippets from one value-packed blog post and turn it into multiple posts for ads for your social media marketing campaign. You could also create a short video about the key points and post it on Instagram stories or YouTube, and extract the audio and put it on your podcast. Approaching your content marketing in this way allows you to focus on quality over quantity, which is always a good thing.

How Whitehat Agency does content marketing

By following these 5 simple content marketing tips for small businesses, you can ensure you’re getting the most out of your content marketing efforts. Don’t have time to create content yourself, or aren’t sure where to start? Whitehat Agency provides a suite of done-for-you content marketing services, to help you generate leads and build a lasting connection with your audience.

Our content marketing services include blog writing, email newsletter creation and implementation, video creation and more. We also provide content strategy services, along with SEO services to ensure your website is best-optimised to drive meaningful results. Contact us for more information and chat to a marketing specialist.