Look at these stats.
- As per a recent content marketing survey 84% of small businesses report that they get good results for their business with consistent content marketing efforts.
- According to demandmetric stat, 70% of customers said that they prefer to know about a product or service through a blog or article.
- As per contentmarketing institute data, Content marketing costs 62% less than other traditional and outbound marketing.
These stats tell us the emerging power of content marketing. In this digital era, content marketing is key for businesses to succeed and build loyalty at minimal investments.
If you are a small business and getting started with content marketing, then you might feel overwhelmed with the entire process. To solve your worry, we are helping you out with this post.
Content marketing for small businesses and what are the kind of goals that should be set when starting out ? Read on to know more!
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is creating valuable, informative and useful content related to your niche or product for educating the audience. Blogs, newsletters, eBooks, and infographics are some of the popular options for content marketing. Content marketing works great as a long-term business strategy and offers many incredible benefits for your business, like bringing consistent organic traffic to your website and helping to attract new customers.
What should be the goals of small businesses that are starting out with content marketing?
Here are some practical and achievable goals for small businesses that are new to content marketing.
Develop a loyal base of the audience (who can turn into potential customers in future)
As a first step, small businesses should focus on building a loyal audience base, by creating useful and informative content consistently. We understand that it is easier said than done. For creating high-value content, it is important to perform thorough research and know the pain points of your target audience. By sharing the worthy information that your audience is really looking for, you can create a loyal base of the audience. This will be a set of people who can turn into a potential base of customers in the future.
Established yourself as an authority in your niche
As the next step, you can focus on establishing yourself as an authority in your niche. By creating informative and useful content consistently, you can establish yourself as a subject matter expert or an authority in your niche. Make sure to create content that aligns with your brand mission and value. Becoming a thought leader or expert in the industry can be a turning point for your business growth. When people already see you as an expert in your industry, they will trust your product or services without putting extra effort or pressure.
Increase brand awareness
As the next step, you can focus on creating a buzz around your brand with the help of content marketing. Of course, effective content marketing helps to increase brand awareness. However, it is important to avoid being too sale-sy or keeping a self-promotion approach while promoting your brand. Keeping an over-self-promoting approach may turn your audience off and you may lose the loyal base of an audience who had liked you because you generated value in their life by sharing informative content, rather than only believe in selling your own product or services.
Make a personalized connection with your audience
Gone are the days when people used to trust generalized recommendations. In this over-commercialized digital world, people believe in personalized offers whether it is related to any products or services. They want things that fulfill their personal requirements. Considering this aspect, content marketing can be a great tool for businesses to make a personalized connection with their customers. Newsletters or emailers can help a lot in building a personalized connection with your customers. Contextual webpages and personalized mailers or chats can help you serve better to your customers as per their personal experience, expectations and feedback.
Bring consistent organic traffic to your website
Yes, this one is another amazing benefit of content marketing. Content marketing helps in bringing consistent and organic traffic to your website. When your content resonates with your audience and solves their problems or pain point, they will remember you as a trustworthy resource and visit again and again to know what you are offering next. Though this result sounds incredible however, it is important to be consistent and maintain a high level of trust among your audience by sharing content that offers great value and provides trustworthy information.
Begin with niche but focused content
When you start, think niche, think focused and think local. By this what we mean is instead to targeting the whole world or the country for a certain keyword, focus either on a smaller location, a specific problem or a niche area that is relevant locally and create content around that. While the numbers for that particular keyword in local area might be less, it will help you come in front of a relevant audience faster and help you stay top of the mind.
SEO
Finally, quality content helps a lot in improving the SEO of your website. The benefits of search engine optimization for business growth are well-known. Ranking high and first page ranking on google search not only helps in bringing organic traffic but also helps in generating new business leads and driving sales for your business. Content marketing experts suggest SEO and content marketing work together hand in hand. When you create accurate, original and high-quality content and optimize it for search engine results, you build a strong foundation for the success of your business.
Conclusion
In conclusion, content marketing can be a helpful tool for small businesses to stand out in this over competitive digital world. By setting specific goals, small businesses can achieve desired results and can increase their business profitability despite having limited budgets and resources.