Content Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Digital content plays a huge role in the lives of each of us: on average, people spend about 7 hours a day on the Internet. Every minute of these seven hours they consume content: watch videos, read texts, look at photos, get inspired, make purchase decisions. 

If you are a manager or a small business owner, content marketing can be the engine that will help you gain decent momentum at the start and bring you hundreds and thousands of interested potential buyers. And all this is possible without gigantic budgets. Want to know how? Then continue reading this material. Here we will tell you what content marketing is for small businesses and how to correctly create and implement an effective advertising strategy in any niche.

What is content marketing?

Businesses can promote and sell their products in different ways. Some prefer to buy outdoor advertising – for example, banners along the road. Some order advertising on radio and television. Some (for example, small businesses that do not yet have a large budget) prefer to advertise their product on the Internet. 

Another strategy a small business can use is content marketing, which means promoting their brand and product through regular, useful, and engaging content. 

What could this content be?

 There are many options:

• photos and videos on social networks;
• blog articles;
• emails;
• newsletters;
• humorous videos;
• podcasts;
• e-books and much more.

Content marketing is a photo, video, text and other form of communication with the user. But unlike traditional advertising, its goal is not to make the audience instantly make a purchase. 

Instead, it focuses on getting valuable content into the consumer’s mind—appearing in their feed, earning a like or repost, inspiring trust and habit. Sooner or later, it will inspire trust and the user will want to make a purchase—perhaps more than once. 

Content Marketing for Business: Why Everyone Needs It

The content marketing strategy is used today by all kinds of businesses: from a home-based pastry chef to the largest online school (for example, you are now reading an article that we at Genius.Space have created for you, choosing a topic that is useful and interesting for our target audience – this is also an example of content marketing).

Let’s take a closer look at what content marketing is and why it can be useful for everyone. Its main advantages are…

Increased brand awareness . Quality content can create an influx of free traffic to your website or social media page, introducing your company to a wider audience. This is especially valuable for small businesses just starting out – those first customers are always hard to come by.

Build trust between you and your audience . If you consistently appear in your followers’ feeds with valuable content, they will see your brand as an expert in your field — and experts are always a pleasure to buy from. 

Effective SEO . This advantage is more relevant to businesses that want to attract traffic to their website, but it will also be useful for promoting social networks. Search engines prefer brands that constantly publish quality content – this is one of the key factors that promotes a website higher in search results. Social networks work on approximately the same principle.

Increased Sales : Content marketing helps generate leads by providing potential customers with all the information they need to make a purchasing decision.

Inexpensive, though not always easy, implementation . Content marketing requires much less investment than traditional advertising. And although you need to attract a cool team and constantly generate quality content, which requires a lot of creativity and effort, it still cannot be compared with the production of the same advertising on television.

Successful content marketing for small businesses involves regularly creating relevant content for your audience. The more popular and useful it is, the faster your business will grow.

Benefits for large and small businesses

Sometimes content marketing for an online store or other business can be more effective than classic campaigns with large budgets. And all because organic content brings more long-term benefits . This distinguishes it from classic advertising, which works only while it is active. 

In 2023, Semrush conducted a global study on content marketing. It turned out that 99% of online and offline businesses with 11 to 50 employees receive a long-term effect from content marketing. They constantly receive traffic that is generated in sales, even if they do not spend money on promotion – a content strategy always helps them in the background.

What about small businesses? Content marketing helps small companies overcome two big challenges that are familiar to newcomers:

• the desire to stand out from others;
• first growth.

When you’re just starting out, it’s hard to find your brand’s personality — the things that make your audience love it. With content marketing, you can start communicating with potential customers, step by step building your Tone-of-Voice, brand colors, product style, and many other characteristics that make a user choose this brand over another.

Preparing to Build a Smart Content Marketing Strategy

Developing a content marketing strategy is not an easy task. Depending on your goals and the size of your company, the preparation process can take weeks or months. If your business is small and you are just starting out, you will need less time, but it is still important to go through each stage without skipping a single step. Below, we will tell you what the process of building a strategy consists of – the steps are arranged in the order of the process.

Step 1: Define your mission and goals 

A good starting point for your strategy plan is to write a content marketing mission statement—a brief description of where you’re going and why you’re doing it. 

The mission can be formulated using the formula: “ We provide [such and such target audience] [such and such type of content] to help them with [this and that] . ”

In the future, having a clear mission will help you stay focused and avoid being distracted by secondary tasks.

While the mission statement allows you to define what you give to your client, it is important to define goals for another reason – to understand what benefit your business will receive for itself in the long term. Goals can be different, and here are the most common ones:

• increase in income and net profit;
• increase in the number of sales and average bill;
• attracting traffic to your website or social media page;
• improving the perception of your business by your target audience, increasing trust and loyalty;
• reduction of marketing costs;
• in-depth study of the target audience by communicating with them on social networks;
• increasing brand awareness.

Once you have defined your goals and mission, you can confidently move on to the next step.

Step 2: Set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

The best way to achieve your goals is to make them specific and measurable. In marketing, this is done using key performance indicators (KPIs) — clear metrics that need to be achieved by the end of the month/quarter/year. For example, a small business might set a KPI of 1,000 new Instagram followers.

It is possible and necessary to set several KPIs at the same time. They can be:

• achieving a certain revenue target within a month, quarter or year;
• getting a specific number of subscriptions, comments and likes;
• increase your site traffic and engagement with your content by so many percent;
• improving the positions of your key pages in search engine results;
• getting a certain number of reposts and likes for your content.

KPIs will help you understand that you have achieved your intermediate goals and it is time to set new ones. With clear metrics, you can also control expenses and see all processes at a glance.

Step 3: Research your target audience

For a content marketing strategy to work effectively, you need to offer users relevant content – the one that will be most interesting, engaging and useful to your target audience. To do this, you need to study it deeply and in detail.

To have a basic understanding of your target audience, a business needs to know three things about them:

Demographic data . Age, gender, education, income – all the basic information that is required for easy advertising setup on any platform. 

Interests . What your audience finds beautiful and what repels them, what brand style they would like more, what products they prefer and why. If you use Google Analytics, some information can be found there. You can also study your customers’ social media pages, calculating interests from observing user content.

Psychological aspects . Pain points, problems, hopes, behavioral motivators and objections inherent in your potential customers. To find out this information, companies usually conduct in-depth surveys or conduct market research. Small businesses can focus on basic information about consumer psychology, which is clearly presented in books on marketing.

Once you have collected data on your target audience across all three points, you will understand what content your audience will respond to best, how to make them want to take a target action, what will trigger this or that emotion. We are all different, so detailed research of your target audience is a key step for a business that wants to understand how content marketing works and get good results from it.

Step 4: Determine your starting point

Before you begin working on your new content marketing strategy, it’s important to identify where you are now so you don’t end up doing unnecessary work.

Review your previous content across all channels to see if it is helping you achieve your goals. You should:

• identify a few of the most successful types of content that get the best response – this is what you do best, which means you can continue to move in that direction;
• note what content is not receiving a response – it can be temporarily not implemented into the future strategy, focusing on new practices and what shows results;
• Identify gaps – the types and formats of content that you are missing – that is what needs to be added.

To make the analytics more objective, it is important to conduct competitor research at this stage. This will improve your observation skills and give you new ideas that you can adapt to your needs.

If you haven’t created any content before, your job is to slowly test out all the possible approaches. Your item on the list above is number three.

We create a content marketing strategy

Once the preparatory work is successfully completed, you will have everything you need to start creating your content strategy. There are no clear instructions here, because each business can find its own unique style and content format that will bring excellent results to it, but may turn out to be completely useless in the hands of a competitor. Some people are good at writing blog articles, some find themselves in branded video voiceovers, and some are loved for their minimalist photos.

Therefore, the key to developing an effective content strategy is to constantly test various hypotheses. Only by trying new things and checking how well they suit your audience can you eventually build the most effective strategy. Below we will tell you what you need to know to develop various hypotheses.

Identify promotion channels

There are many different channels through which a business can promote its content:

• Instagram;
• TikTok;
• Facebook;
• Threads;
• email marketing;
• blog articles on your website;
• messenger marketing (Telegram, Viber);
• partner articles and other collaborations.

Speaking of collaborations, influencer marketing has been gaining momentum in recent years and the popularity of this tool shows no signs of slowing down. In our article on this topic, we talked more about how brands can collaborate with influencers to effectively implement this strategy in their business.

Being everywhere at once is a bad idea. It is better to concentrate your efforts on 1-3 channels, choosing those that you like as a user or those in which you already have experience in promoting.

Choose the types of content you’ll start with

The next step is to choose the types of content you want to promote. This will be different for each channel:

• Instagram – photos in posts and Stories, videos in Reels, humorous and engaging content;
• TikTok – video sketches, humor, engaging content, stories;
• Facebook – high-quality photos and videos, informational content;
• Threads – short posts, humorous content;
• email marketing – news, promotions, activities;
• blog articles on your website – informational and expert content;
• messenger marketing (Telegram, Viber) – useful newsletters, humor, engaging content;
• partner articles and other collaborations – all types of content depending on the format and circumstances.

Most successful content marketing strategies rely on having a core of content that gets you the best results, and supporting content that can be used to hedge your bets and add variety.

Content marketing strategy can be transferred to different platforms, but it is important that the content is adapted to each of them. For example, a video can be posted on both Instagram Reels and TikTok, but in the first case the video can be long and more aesthetically pleasing, and in the second – shortened, dynamic, with a bit of humor.

Prepare resources

Now that you know what type of content you plan to create, who it’s for, and where you plan to share it, it’s important to make sure you have everything you need to execute your content marketing strategy. 

Please answer the following questions:

• Who will be responsible for producing and posting content?
• What human, material or digital resources are needed to create content?
• What will your workflow look like from planning to publishing?
• Will you partner with a content marketing agency or hire specialists on a case-by-case basis?

At this stage, it is also worth taking care of recruiting a team or defining individual tasks that you are going to delegate. This does not necessarily mean hiring employees – you can work with outsourced specialists, assigning them to perform specific tasks: filming, video editing, monitoring publication, and so on. The cost of content marketing varies depending on many factors – today you can find a specialist for almost any budget.

Create a content calendar

A special table will help you understand the flow of planned content – this can be either special planning tools for marketers like Later, or familiar services for many – Google Sheets or Excel.

The calendar should contain the following columns:

• the expected publication date of each post;
• topic or heading of the post;
• its contents are a media file and accompanying text;
• the subgroup of the target audience for which this post is intended;
• The purpose of the post is the key action expected from the user or the desired KPI.

When creating your calendar, make sure the topics you plan to publish are interesting and relevant to your target audience. In addition to a few core categories, consider seasonal trends, holidays, important events in your industry, and other contextual factors — sometimes these can be used to create effective content. 

Get started with implementation and analytics

Eventually, once you have some of your planned content for the month out, you can begin to do analytics, an important part of your content marketing strategy that helps you minimize failures and maximize successes.

To sum up each period, it’s worth going back to the KPIs you set when you started planning your content strategy. See what’s changed and whether you’re achieving your goals, and then adjust your strategy or KPIs based on the results.

If you are promoting your business on social media, you can use internal analytics tools for your content marketing strategy. They often provide a visual assessment of the following metrics:

• number of new subscribers for a certain period;
• reach and audience engagement with your content;
• advertising statistics;
• likes, comments, reposts, saves and other indicators.

If you are developing your website and other resources in addition to social networks, comprehensive services can help you, such as Google Analytics or OptinMonster . Auxiliary tools for tracking content marketing results include Google Alerts and Mention . Both will allow you to see whether your content is mentioned on the Internet and how actively it is perceived by the audience. 

And tools like SEMRush can help you measure KPIs for other types of activity, like email campaigns. By regularly tracking your progress, you can quickly adjust your content marketing strategy based on results and ensure it stays relevant.

To sum it up, Content marketing promotion is a popular strategy for business growth in various niches. Some use it for an online store of goods, and some promote their services. In the right hands, https://ivdigi.com/ becomes a real magic pill.