Is your small business actively doing content marketing? If not, then you should really consider it. Of course there is more to small business marketing than content. But content marketing is a great tactic to help your business grow. Why? Content helps you build brand awareness at the top of the funnel as well as generate leads. It also helps you guide your prospects through the buying journey. This eventually converts them into customers. But one of the issue small businesses have with content marketing is not knowing what content to produce. But don’t worry! Below we discuss some ideas that you can use to effectively do content marketing for your small business. Let’s get started!

Content Marketing Tips For Small Businesses

First things first. In order to be successful at content marketing for your small business you need to have the foundations in place. Having a website is important because most campaigns end up with people visiting your website. Here’s some other content marketing foundational tips for your small biz.

Develop Your Small Business Content Marketing Strategy

It is a good idea to develop a content marketing strategy before diving in and going around in circles. The complexity of your strategy is up to you. With a realization that your small business has a lot going on you might not have the time to create a super complex one. But its good to put a strategy and tactical plan in place before starting. You can create a simple content marketing strategy to start.

For example, develop a simple strategy in place by doing the following:

• determine who your target audience is and what they are interested in
• select the channels you will produce content for (your blog, social channel A, etc.)
• determine what types of content you will produce (blog posts, videos, etc.)
• decide who will produce the content (either yourself, your team, or external content marketing services)
• solidify the frequency which you will produce and publish them
• set business goal and KPIs to track your content performance

Next, it’s a good idea to create a calendar for 1-2 months at a time. This will help you keep on track and make sure you have the resources dedicated to producing and publishing the content.

Set Up and Start Your Blog

If your business has a website you should create a blog and pump out high quality content. Setting up and starting your blog is easy to do if you already have a website. Most content management systems (CMSs), such as WordPress, Wix, Shopify, etc. have built in blog functionality. For instance, we love blogging for our clients and our agency on WordPress!

Having a blog on your site is also a great way to start building your email list, which we will discuss below.

Set Up Profiles on Relevant Social Channels and Start Building Your Presence

Besides those living under a rock most of the world is actively consuming content on social media. Determine which channels your target audience is active on and set up your business profiles on those. For small businesses with limited time and resources you can start by focusing only on those that your audience is most active on.

There are great tools out there to understand your target audience, including where they consume their information and what they are actually interested in. Using a tool like SparkToro (opens in a new window) is a great way to better understand your target audience.

Content Marketing Ideas For Your Small Business

Blogging: Consistently Write Blog Posts

We mentioned setting up your company blog above as a first step. Blogging (the written word) is so important to any business, including small businesses. Blog content helps you build brand awareness by providing prospects with valuable content. Prospects go to Google and Bing and Yahoo search to find answers to their questions. Blogging gives your business the chance to provide those answers to your target audience if your content is relevant, high-quality, and answers the questions well.

Knowing what to write about is often the biggest hurdle with small business blogs. We’ll cover ideas below to get you started. If you want to find more topics that are relevant to your business you can do keyword research. This will help you find low competition, high opportunity topics to write about.

Learn step-by-step how to do keyword research in our SEO Keyword Research Tutorial: Free Template and Video.

The key to producing blog posts is understanding what your prospects are looking for and producing high quality content that helps them. Provide significant value and they will be interested in your company and what you have to say. Will a blog post convert a prospect immediately? Not necessarily, but it is an effective tool for guiding prospects through the buying journey. That’s because you can create blog posts for every stage of that journey. But make sure you produce good content that serves the purpose.

Find out how: Learn What is Good Content? 4 Critical Factors For Creating Good Content

Email Content Your Audience Cares About

Blogging and other types of content marketing will start to drive traffic to your small business’s website. And you want to make sure you can keep in touch with those visitors. A great way to do this is to add a newsletter sign-up form to your site as well as getting email opt-ins on other channels. This will help you build your email list. And once you have an email list you can start emailing them high value, relevant content.

What do you put inside your emails? Well, there are a lot of options. For instance, you may have high quality blog posts you wrote. So you can do a monthly newsletter that highlights those blog posts and/or includes other news. You can create exclusive offers for your email list. Or you could invite your list to local events or online events you are participating in. The options are massive.

Make Simple Videos

Video consumption is steadily growing. In HubSpot’s State of Video Marketing for 2022 they stated “people are watching more video online than ever before.” They continued to say that the amount of online videos consumed has doubled since 2018.

And you don’t have to pay thousands of dollars to a video production company to produce them. If you have a recent mobile device with a good camera you are ready to go. Here’s a few video types that are in demand and easy to produce:

Tutorial & Educational Videos

Sometimes it is easier to teach and learn visually. Tutorial and educational videos are great for many things. Produce low-cost videos on your phone if you want to teach your audience how to do something relevant to your business and valuable to them. You can produce videos to teach your audience how to do something, whether it is installing a faucet, repairing their car, or using your SaaS platform.

Jump on the Live Event Bandwagon

Go live. Live events are a growing trend and carry a lot of benefits. Not only can you interact with your audience during the actual live events, but you can also record them and use them as videos after. First, pick your channel or channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. Then do some research to determine topics that are relevant and in demand. Create a calendar to ensure you set aside time to go live on a recurring basis. You can also plan some special, one-off live events.

Get Visual With Infographics

Infographics pack valuable information in a visually appealing, easy to consume graphic. You can get really creative with them.

What can you do with them? They are great are stand-alone pieces of content. They are also great to add to a blog post and other pieces of written content. Lastly, they do well with engagement on social media.

The key is to produce a visually appealing infographic that contains information that your audience finds valuable. You can produce great looking infographics. But if no one cares about the information it will fall flat.

Create Buzz Around Local Content

If you are a local business you most likely want to produce content that builds local awareness and brings in local traffic. If so, you can focus your small business content marketing around local content.

Promote local events and happenings. If you are participating or sponsoring the event that’s great. You can certainly let people know to visit you there. But you can generate awareness for these local events even if you are not a sponsor or actively participating. This will help you gain some local exposure. It can also establish local proximity with search engines, if done correctly.

Promotions and Special Offers

Use Google My Business posts, blog posts, and your social media channels to generate awareness of your active and upcoming promotions.

For example, your restaurant can promote special menu items and happy hour deals. Or your local service business can advertise a coupon or deal. The options for using content marketing to generate some buzz around your promotions are limitless.

Curate Helpful External News and Articles

Be a source of relevant, valuable news and information for your target audience. Curate and share relevant content from external sources and tie it to your brand or product. This allows you to add value to your audience without producing the end content. Just make sure you properly cite the works and give proper credit.

Bonus: Repurpose Your Content

A great way to produce fresh content from one single piece of content is to repurpose it. Different individuals prefer to consume content in different ways. This means you should be producing the same content in different mediums. This will increase the likelihood that someone consumes it. It will also increase the likelihood they enjoy consuming it.

The options here are endless. For instance, you can repurpose your blog posts by turning them into videos, presentations, infographics and e-books. You can do the same with your videos, infographics, etc.