Small business content marketing is still one of the most effective ways to increase the visibility of your website, products, services, and brand. You can strive to reach more customers monthly by outlining a digital content strategy.
To help you get started, we’ve gathered a collection of small business content marketing tips.
If you want my team at Sachs Marketing Group to help you with your content marketing, click here.
Overview
Small Business Content Marketing
Small business content marketing is about creating and sharing content online to attract and retain customers. This can include content development, social media updates, and paid advertising.
Content marketing is about casting a net and drawing potential customers to your business through helpful, valuable content. The more high-quality content you produce, share, and promote, the more leads and customers you will receive.
You’ve got your first few blog posts, your keyword research sorted, and figured out what kind of audience you want to target based on your traffic, user profiles, customer information, and some competitive sleuthing.
Is that all? Far from it! Content marketing is a rich subject with plenty of room for growth, especially if your business is just starting. Here’s what you can do to improve your content marketing strategy:
Here are seven small business content marketing tips to reach more customers.
1. Create an Incentivized Newsletter
We’ve mentioned it before, but it’s a stat that should get more play; every dollar spent on email marketing in the 2020s gets you an average ROI of over $40. That’s immense, and it’s only possible because:
- Email marketing is relatively cheap.
- It’s mostly based on the content you’ve already produced.
- Ideally, you should only be sending emails to people who willingly show an interest in your content and specifically signed on to receive them, meaning;
- Your recipient list consists mostly of self-proclaimed leads for your company.
Email marketing, and the power of a newsletter, shouldn’t be overlooked – especially if you’re a small business. That ROI is hard to beat, and it’s effective because you’re exclusively marketing to people who have actively made an impression of your content and website and are interested in more.
Here’s where incentives become useful. One way to keep people clicking on your emails is to use them primarily to announce deals, promotions, and collaborations.
Content newsletters are also useful to keep people coming back and increase your traffic from returning users. Still, they typically don’t garner quite as much interest as a sale or promotion unless it’s a topic your users are guaranteed to be interested in (like an exciting announcement for an improved version of your product). Another way to entice users to click through to your content? Promise them a special coupon at the end of the linked article or blog post.
Related: What is an Email Drip Campaign (And Will it Attract More Customers)?
2. Create a Manageable Content Schedule
Launching an effective content marketing strategy involves research, quality, and consistency.
One of the most common mistakes companies make with their content strategy involves low-quality content and low frequency. For the best results, strive to create and publish high-quality content regularly. The more you publish, the higher your chances of attracting potential customers to your website from search engines. This, of course, requires research and attention to detail.
If you only publish one blog post per month, that’s 12 opportunities to attract potential customers per year. If you publish eight blog posts per month, that’s 96 opportunities to attract potential customers per year. With that said, it’s still always about quality over quantity. The key is to create great content more often than your competitors.
As for social media content, it’s a delicate balance, and it’s a little different from platform to platform – for example, you can easily make a post a day on Facebook or up to ten Tweets a day on Twitter, but you can get away with a video a month on YouTube if you need the time and the budget to produce quality content.
Alternatively, you can post more frequently but keep it short through YouTube Shorts, TikTok, or Instagram reels. In this case, create a large quantity of content all at once, and post individual 10-second clips daily.
In addition to a content schedule, it pays to post your content at the right time of day, depending on where the majority of your target audience lives. There are different ideal posting times depending on what time zones you want to target, and on what platforms.
3. Hire Content Experts
Content management, content production, a proper editorialization process, social media optimization, a social media sharing strategy, identifying key topics, identifying lucrative keywords, finding and sourcing stock image material with the proper rights, video production and editing, video sharing – the list of activities and responsibilities that fall under the umbrella of content marketing is very, very long. It can be ludicrously difficult to manage, especially in the early stages of a business.
Money isn’t as much of an issue here as time is – it will be tough to complete these tasks while still running your company without splitting yourself into two. So, don’t. Delegate. Find someone you can work with – someone with a good reputation and long history in content marketing or a local team you can meet and brainstorm with.
Discover how our team at Sachs Marketing Group, an award-winning digital marketing company, can help you today. Click here!
4. Use Promoted Posts Intelligently
Promoted posts are where content marketing strategies and pay-per-click ads converge. These are paid ads not for your product or business but for your content. Think Twitter promoted tweets or Facebook’s promoted posts.
It works the same way as a paid ad on these platforms – you pick a budget and target your audience based on several factors, such as key demographics, people who like your page, people who like your page, friends, and so on.
You can also set a promoted post goal (such as a high click-through rate to your own page or higher engagement on this post), which you can then track to measure the promotion’s success.
There are good ways and bad ways to use promoted posts. Don’t use a promoted post to boost the type of content people don’t usually engage with anyway. Use it exclusively for posts that generally tend to get a lot of engagement, to begin with. Don’t use posts to engage with your existing audience. Use them to find new people and target an audience that most resembles the user profiles that already engage with your content.
5. Share Your Content (Often!)
Good content needs to be seen – and with the amount of content being generated nowadays, it’s fairly difficult to get seen. Organic traffic matters a lot, which is where good search engine optimization comes into play. But sharing content and promoting your content is also important. Be sure to share your content often and on all channels.
Don’t spam-share, though. There’s little point in providing disinterested friends and family with the same blog title three days in a row. Instead, focus on platforms where your audience spends the most time using business profiles and vary what you share daily.
6. Engage With Other Content on Social Media
It’s a shame to cultivate a following on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter, only never to do anything with that engagement.
Don’t let that be your fault! Customer engagement on social media – whether positive or negative on their end – is nearly always positive for you.
Respond to questions! Respond to memes (very carefully)! Address critical experiences or negative feedback! And most importantly, as your business grows and your engagement grows, hire a professional community manager or social media manager.
7. Your Content is Only as Strong as Your Page
Optimizing your website is the last and most important tip for a successful content marketing campaign. This means optimizing core functions and key ranking factors in your layout, design, and content. A lot of content marketing hinges on whether your content is enjoyable to read or consume – and a lot of that hinges on where it’s posted.
Websites like YouTube and Twitter are designed for user comfort, despite criticisms against redesigns and updates. But your website likely does not have a million-dollar UI design team behind it – and it doesn’t have to. Paying attention to critical things like Google’s Core Web Vitals, mobile compatibility, and basic readability can go a long way.
Conclusion
Small business content marketing is all about finding your audience, producing valuable content, and promoting it effectively. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box or ask for help when needed – but most importantly, always prioritize your audience above all else.
For the best results, consider creating a multichannel marketing strategy that involves SEO, social media, email marketing, and paid ads.
If you need help, contact the Sachs Marketing Group team for more information. We’re always up for a challenge and have the experience to take your marketing campaign above and beyond.
