Why is content marketing crucial for small businesses?
To help you appreciate the importance of content marketing for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), we asked content marketing professionals and business owners this question for their best insights. From offering longer life to your marketing to helping you develop expert status in your niche, there are several reasons why SMBs need to fully exploit content marketing to their best advantage in achieving their marketing goals.
Here are 12 reasons why content marketing is crucial for SMBs:
Content Marketing Offers Longer Life to Your Marketing
Content marketing has a longer life than many other forms of marketing. When you create content for your website – whether a blog post, a video, or a long-form piece like a white paper or ebook – you are investing now in something that can continue to have an impact in the future. When you create evergreen content, you are answering a question or solving a problem that customers will keep having. The piece of content you create can show up in front of customers searching for answers and solutions years from now.
Jennifer Klemmetson, Klemmetson Consulting
Market Your Uniqueness Through High-Quality Content
We focus on SEO, website support, and website design and we feel content marketing is crucial because Google (and frankly other media like social media) value content – high quality and unique content. It’s important not just to do content marketing but to strategize with content marketing. The reason it’s so important is that at the heart of SEO is search. While it’s often attributed to search engines and rightfully so, I believe search is psychology revolving around how people search to find you. It’s an exercise and often at the end of that search is some piece of content. So, think about content as being more like sticky paper to communicate and increase your visibility around ideal clients.
Gresham Harkless Jr., Blue 16 Media
Reach Massive Audiences at an Affordable Cost
You can’t ignore the benefits of content marketing for small businesses. First, content marketing is affordable. By seamlessly weaving into your content that help will be more effective when readers buy your products or pay for your services, marketing is affordable and effective. Pay for an accurate SEO keyword tool and optimize your content with the keyword so your SEO efforts generate eyeballs on your content. After publication, you can take the content that has the link to purchase and promote it on social media. In this way, you get yours without needing an advertising budget. If you do decide to pay for ads, make sure you advertise where your target audience hangs out online.
Janice Wald, Mostly Blogging
Engage With Current and Potential Customers
Content marketing is crucial for small businesses because it is a way to reach out to potential customers and provide them with information about your products or services. By creating informative and engaging content, you can attract new customers and build a loyal following. Additionally, content marketing can help you to establish yourself as an expert in your industry, which can make customers more likely to do business with you.
Matthew Ramirez, Paraphrase Tool
Build Your Brand by Specifically Targeting Your Audience
Find and reach your ideal audience. Simply, content marketing is valuable and relevant content targeted at a specific audience in a way that engages and builds familiarity. For example, it can be everything from a podcast or book to online video content designed to promote your brand. Some of our most effective videos showcase our behind-the-scenes, which attracts both clients and potential employees who want to see how we do what we do. Content marketing done right builds your brand.
Michael Ayjian, 7 Wonders
It’s the Most Efficient Way Small Businesses Can Compete
When you run a marketing department in a small company, you usually don’t get a huge budget to spend. That’s why, sooner or later, you come to the topic of organic traffic and start to pay attention to good quality content. However, it is tough to compete with large companies, which spend hundreds of dollars on SEO positioning, paid guest posts, paid ads, social media campaigns, etc.
A well-designed content marketing campaign can help you stand out from the sea of bland, non-descriptive posts or graphics. If your idea is unique and an article compelling, people will get hooked on it. When you read a good text or watch a creative video, you don’t think about how many keywords or long tail phrases it contains. It is a pleasure, and you enjoy and savor that moment because the content is engaging and keeps you on tenterhooks. The power of engrossing content is undeniable – and it is the best and most efficient way a small business can compete with larger rivals.
Anna Starkey, Prodio
Show Your Expertise and Personal Side With Content Marketing
Content marketing allows small businesses to truly position themselves as the expert in their field while also showing the personal side of their business. By sharing content regularly, they can display their knowledge thereby building trust, providing value to grow loyalty, and connecting with their audience by sharing authentic content. These small touches, when done well, can set them apart from big box businesses. People want to know that you care about what you do and ultimately care about them as a customer. Simon Sinek summed it up well when he said “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it…”
Content marketing allows small businesses to showcase not just what they do, but the passion behind why they do it. Audiences love that!
Beth Gillem, Dogwood Media Solutions
It Helps You Grow Links to Your Website
Content marketing is the vehicle that supports your SEO efforts, and inbound links are important in SEO. So when you create, publish, and promote useful content on your website, people are more likely to link to it from other websites. These inbound links create authority for your website, improving the chances it will show up in search results. Without content, you will have fewer opportunities for links, and SEO is much harder to do.
Lisa Banks, SaaSpirin
Improve your Ad Results With Engaging and Unique Content
As a digital marketing agency owner for the past 10 years with over $31 million of paid ads managed, I know how to take small businesses to big companies. Initially, entrepreneurs are forced to wear a lot of hats, and unfortunately, most waste a lot of money on services that don’t grow their company. We see this time and time again how companies spend so much time and money on the design of their website with cool functions but it is not user-friendly or more importantly, search engine friendly.
It is crucial to get a solid foundation of unique content not only on your home page but on all the inner pages of your site. After all of your pages have engaging content, images, and call to actions, then you can create a blog. We always recommend creating a blog on your website instead of solely on other sites like Medium.com for SEO purposes. Writing content that people choose to share will not only help grow your organic rankings but will also help improve advertising results.
Jeremy Katz, Advertising For Surgeons
Create a Personalized Way to Captivate Audiences Across Multiple Platforms
Many companies come up with new ideas on how to choose the best way to promote their businesses. The goal of Content marketing is to increase engagement on digital and social channels and to educate the audience. For instance, well-made promo videos usually get more exposure, provide a more personalized way to captivate the audience, growing popularity across different platforms, and improve the understanding of a product or a service as a sales tool that is visible on social feeds. Video content platforms are one of the most effective advertising tools that help businesses just make a profit.
Daria Globchak, Elai.io
High-Quality SEO Optimized Content Helps You Rank Up in Searches
You need to make the best out of SEO strategies with organic content. To rank web pages on SERPs, Google and Bing employ a variety of algorithms (search engine result pages). Quality content is one of the aspects that contribute to a company’s ranking in SERPs. Google, for example, scans your website thoroughly to identify the types of user searches that should be directed to your page. You won’t locate your website in the search results unless your material is high-quality and concise.
Lionel Mora, Neoplants
It Helps You Develop Expert Status in Your Niche
The obvious answer to why content marketing is crucial is for the SEO aspect. But what most small business owners don’t realize is that when you publish top-level content, I’m talking about your best stuff, it paints you as an expert in your niche. People want to work with experts because they want to know they are in good hands. The more great content you put out, the higher your status goes, which also helps your search rankings.
Adam White, SquidVision.com
