Ultimate Guide To Content Marketing For Small Businesses.

Are you a small business owner/entrepreneur who is still struggling with driving unlimited traffic or generating leads that convert to your small business? If so, continue reading this ultimate guide to content marketing for small businesses.

Many entrepreneurs think content marketing is hard, some think it doesn’t work for small businesses, but only few know it works and how to use it. No more worries, in this article, I will walk you through the step by step process, tricks and tips on how to get unlimited sales by creating simple contents for your business.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is much more than blogs, articles, or even social media content posts.

For small businesses, content marketing definition is more than just “content”, which is what many people thought it is.

Content marketing is a long-term marketing technique that uses valuable, relevant and consistent content creation and distribution to attract and build concrete relationships with a clearly defined audience.

As a small business owner, whether you’re famous or not, creating engaging content that resonates and helps build your brand has already made you a content creator.

What Are The Benefits Of Content Marketing For Small Businesses?

Content marketing benefits your business in several ways.

Here are some.

• It helps expose your business to a larger audience.
• Improves trust with customers through what is called Lead Nurturing.
• Boost organic traffic which converts to customers.
• Contents may become your primary source of lead generation.
• It offers a great return on investment (ROI) on a long run.

What Are Some Content Marketing Examples?

The following are some content marketing examples for small businesses.

• Blogs
• PDF/Ebooks
• Tweets
• Blog and social media comments
• Videos
• Photos
• Animations
• Infographics
• Comics
• Events
• Printing materials like T-shirts is also an example of content marketing.

Content Marketing Strategy For Small Business.

While talking about content marketing, there are many strategies and tips you can use to make your contents stand out even if you own a small business.

What are the strategies?

1. Understand Your Audience.

As a small business, you don’t want to waste your time, money and energy creating contents that don’t resonate with your audience. For instance, if your business is selling makeup and you’re producing contents on jewelries, you shouldn’t be surprised if you have no sale.

So before creating contents, be sure to conduct thorough research on your customers interests, preferences and buying habits. To make sure you do a good research, you must at first make sure you gather some significant data about your customers.

What Data To Collect, And How Do I Collect Them?

Well there is a lot of data you can gather from your customers, so as to improve your marketing strategy and also your business at large.

Here are some.

• Gender
• Average age
• Average income
• Geographical location
• Purchasing habit.

After knowing what type of data to collect, the question now is how do you collect them?

There are several ways you can go about collecting your audience’s data. But the most popular and effective method is to conduct questionnaires informed of surveys. First, ask them about their opinion on your business before requesting the above data.

Due to the fact that people have a short attention span, make sure your survey is unique, short, and relevant. This will make more people answer your questionnaire.

Share your surveys on social media or through email, so as to get more people to take your survey. You can also offer an incentive upon completion.

1. Find Out What Works.

Before jumping into content creation, make sure you research other relevant sites for inspiration and be sure to check and understand the characteristics of their most viral contents. This can be done by using tools like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, or Ubersuggest. These tools will help you check the top-ranking pages, most relevant keywords, and also content ideas that will attract a more targeted audience to your content.

You can also look into social media to gather more significant data about your competitor’s content. This will also help know more about what type of audience you need to target with your content.

Finding out what works is one of the most essential aspects of content marketing for small businesses, and does not only ends at competitors’ research but also includes knowing what is currently trending. Google trends is a very effective tool that can help you with this.

1. Create A Unique Easy To Find Website And Contents.

Before producing any content, you must have a website first. For me, I call the website content marketing blogs, because I only distribute content based on my audience’s needs through the website. While some people may list their products directly on their website instead of a separate blog, you can do it the other way round by creating a professional content marketing blog and posting valuable contents only.

Regardless of what or why you’re creating your contents, the best way to accomplish your goals is to provide the best contents which will have a positive impact on your customer’s lives. This simply means you should provide valuable contents and avoid overdoing self-promotion. Though you might be wondering that the main purpose of creating your content is to promote your business. That is right, but if done in the wrong way, customers may likely turn off.

One of the most important areas to focus on especially in content marketing for small businesses is simply to incorporate relevant words and phrases (keywords and keyphrases) that serve as a point of connection between what the audience you’re targeting are searching for, to what type of information you’re providing. Use Google Keywords Planner Or Ubersuggest to carry out effective keywords research to use in your content, as these are one of the best SEO tools.

Another thing while creating your content is to make it lengthy. Remember that you are not only writing contents for your audience, but also for search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. One common thing with those search engines is that they like lengthy contents. Later in this article, I will go in-depth about the relationship between content marketing and SEO.

More so, make sure your contents are well branded, by making it a priority to provide value, and emphasizing on the pain points of your audience. This is where the magic happens. Be sure you have the product that will solve their problems before laying emphasis on their pain points. By doing this, you will be able to tell them more about your product/business, then if they find it useful, they will surely make a purchase. I personally do, so it is a proven strategy.

1. Promote Your Contents

Well done!

You’ve successfully created your first content right? Then what next?

The next step after creating your contents is promotion. While talking about promotion, what comes to your mind is paid advertisement.

Well paid ads are the fastest and easiest way to drive traffic to your content. Of course, there are also some free methods. Below, I will list some paid and free methods of driving traffic to your website and contents.

Free Traffic Methods.

• Facebook groups
• Answering relevant questions on Quora
• Adding Presentation to slideshare
• Pinterest Pins
• Mix
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Medium
• Tumblr

Paid Traffic Methods.

• Social media ads: Such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube.
• PPC: Such as Google Ads, Native ads and Push ads.
• Forum ads: Such as Quora and Reddit.

If you’re also able to have a huge Email list or social followers, then you can cut the long journey short by adding Email Marketing to boost your content marketing strategy.

Content Marketing And SEO.

Above in this article, I told you I will go in-depth on the relationship between content marketing and SEO. This will cover how to use SEO to compliment your content marketing strategy.

For most people familiar with content marketing, you should know there can’t be successful content marketing without SEO. Because the main goal of creating content is to promote your business, so if you have a basic knowledge of SEO, then you’re just a few steps away from getting unlimited free leads and conversions.

What Is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of site traffic to a website or a web page from search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

The good thing is that SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic.

This process may take time before seeing results, but once the results start coming, they will be unstoppable.

To accomplish this goal, you need to optimize your site.

How Do You Optimize Your Contents And Website For Search Engines.

To effectively optimize your website for search engines, you must do the following.

1. Improve your title tag
2. Master keyword research
3. Improve your meta description
4. Produce consistent, valuable and new contents
5. Build Links
6. Share your contents on social media.

These are some SEO tricks for small businesses. You can read more on websites like Neilpatel.

Final Thoughts.

Content marketing for small businesses is one of the most profitable ways of generating leads that convert to your business.

This article is all about the comprehensive guide to content marketing. And we’re able to talk about content marketing definition, the benefits of content marketing, content marketing examples and content marketing strategy. We also get to know the relationship between content marketing and SEO, more so, some content marketing tips are also shared along the line.

So if you’re a beginner or a small business owner, I hope this ultimate guide to content marketing will help you move closer to building a successful business.