Many small businesses have successfully grown using content marketing. Beardbrand, Luxy Hair, Lodge Cast Iron—the examples are endless.
Content marketing is a strategy that can be beneficial for small businesses. If you are a small-business owner, you may be wondering if content marketing would be beneficial for your business as well.
This post will provide reasons for why content marketing is beneficial, as well as 10 ideas that can be applied to small businesses.
Why should you do content marketing for your small business?
Here are three reasons why you should consider content marketing for your business.
1. Get more traffic
There is a limit to the number of people who are willing and able to buy your product at any time.
This means that if you are only targeting those who are specifically searching for your product, your traffic will be lower.
Take, for example, our own toolset. We have five main tools.
In total, these pages receive around 10,000 visits per month, which is only a small fraction of our total search traffic.
If we had just stuck to those five pages, we wouldn’t have gotten very far.
In lieu of creating a comprehensive website, we have instead crafted many individual pieces of content. These works rank on Google for a collective 140,000 keywords and generate 930,000 monthly search visits.
This is how we’ve managed to grow our company so that it now generates eight figures’ worth of recurring annual revenue.
2. Improve brand awareness
In other words, people usually don’t go looking for products and services on their own. Instead of looking for something to complain about, they look for solutions to problems or answers to questions.
If you want to attract potential customers, create content that addresses their problems or questions. This is a chance to introduce your brand to them. A potential customer recognizing your brand means you are already one step closer to converting them into a paying customer.
Here’s an example. Billy Blogger is frustrated because his blog traffic isn’t increasing. He types “how to increase my blog traffic” into the Google search bar and finds our article.
He eventually discovers that in order to get more traffic, he needs to write about topics that have potential to be searched. He also discovers that he can use our tools to do that for free.
After writing just one article, Billy Blogger is now aware of our brand and exists. If you repeat content marketing at a large scale, you can see how it improves brand awareness.
3. Reduce your marketing costs
Content marketing can be cheaper over the long term.
The Ahrefs blog gets approximately 260,000 search visits each month. If we were to acquire all that traffic from Google Ads, we would have to pay an estimated $355,000 per month, or $4.2 million per year.
Content marketing is cheaper over the long term than having a team of content marketers that are paid $4 million in annual salaries.
Recommended reading: Why Is Content Marketing Important? 5 Reasons
13 Content Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses
Convinced that you should be doing content marketing? Here are some ideas you can consider implementing.
1. Answer questions people are searching for
We already know that potential customers don’t search for your products specifically, but for answers to the questions they have.
The goal is to figure out the questions that people are asking and to create content that answers those questions.
How do you find these questions?
To generate questions from a keyword, enter the keyword into our free keyword generator tool and switch the tab to Questions.
If you’re looking for more questions, you can use a professional keyword tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.
- Enter a relevant keyword into Keywords Explorer
- Go to the Matching terms report
- Switch the tab to Questions
This means that there are over 260,000 potential topics you can create content for. If you want to make your list smaller, set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to 10 or less.
Look at the report and find the information that is most relevant to your business.
2. Create a statistics page
Journalists and bloggers are always looking for data to back up their stories. The reason businesses and websites publish data studies and original research is so that they can get mentions and links from authoritative websites.
It can be difficult for a small business to publish original research. One way to manage data is by curating it.
We published a post on SEO statistics. To date, it has accumulated a total of 2,700 backlinks from 1,300 unique websites:
It also ranks #1 for the keyword “SEO statistics”.
3. Write for other sites in your industry
You want to improve your ranking on Google for certain topics or questions. But some of these can be very competitive. It’s tough to compete as a small business when it feels like other sites have bottomless budgets.
There is a way to get around the difficulty of ranking on these sites; capitalize on the authority these sites have.
How? Many large websites are always searching for interesting content to publish. Use the opportunity to write a guest post for a site that ranks high for the keyword you’re targeting.
Here’s an example. com I wrote a guest post on SmartBlogger.com a few years back. Even though it’s been some time, that post still ranks #5 for the keyword “niche website” and generates around 250 monthly search visits:
The post promotes our tools, so it introduces our brand to more new people.
Here’s how to find sites that you can potentially “guest post” for:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
- Search for your topic
If we search for “keto diet” on Google, we will get approximately 3 million results.
But that’s too many pages to look through, so let’s set a few more filters to narrow down the results:
- Website traffic: 500+
- Words: 500+
- Language: English
- One page per domain – Checked
- Exclude homepages – Checked
- Exclude subdomains – Checked
- Live & Broken – Only live
- Filter explicit results – On
This reduces the number of pages to ~21,000. Checking the Domain Rating of a site can help you determine if it’s an authoritative site that you can “piggyback” on. A Domain Rating of greater than 60 is generally good.
Evidently, 4,000 pages is a much more manageable list. Look at the list and find the sites that will probably accept your offer to write a guest post.
You can contact the website owner or editor to pitch your ideas for topics. You should focus on keywords that you want to rank for.
Recommended reading: Guest Blogging for SEO: How to Build High-Quality Links at Scale
4. Case studies
If your small business has a B2B model, you may have difficulty explaining how your products or services work and how they can be beneficial to potential clients. If you have this issue, case studies would be a great way to show the results of your work.
Identify your most successful clients and contact them to inquire about conducting a case study on your site. They will be pleased to do this in most circumstances. Then, work with your point of contact to put together an exact narrative of how working with your business benefited them. This will help you create targeted content that speaks directly to your ideal clients.
Start with the issues the company faced prior to using your product, then discuss how, exactly, your company addressed them. A lot of people are talking about the new coffee shop that just opened up. Many people are discussing the new coffee shop that has recently opened. This text is about how important it is to have a strong online presence for businesses. A strong online presence will not only help attract potential customers, but also give them confidence that the business can deliver what it promises.
5. Offer interactive content
You can engage potential customers by asking them to do something. All content should have a call to action, but some pieces are effective because they necessitate action from the reader. Add interactive tools to your website to engage visitors and generate leads for your business.
A lot of small businesses depend on having a contact form on their landing page. Although these forms are useful, they don’t maintain people’s engagement for very long. These types of calculators get visitors to think about what they desire and require, what actions they need to take to acquire it, and how your company can assist them in achieving their objectives.
6. Upload podcasts and videos
When new content is published regularly, content marketing is most effective. However, it should also be available when and where the user wants to access it. Mobile devices are becoming increasingly popular, which allows users to interact with businesses no matter where they are. If you want your content to be as accessible as possible, you need to make sure it can be easily moved from one place to another. Podcasts and videos fit the bill nicely.
In order to receive new audio files as soon as they are available, loyal followers can subscribe to a podcast. As well as making the files available on on-demand sites, you can also allow anyone to download them. You can post videos on social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Both channels are useful for finding new customers, presenting your ideas, and remaining relevant to your existing customers.
7. Include timely news
This text is saying that blog posts about current events are a good way to get people to visit your website. If you see something related to your industry on the news or Twitter, see if you can add to the coverage.
Amazon’s “Prime Day” celebration in July 2015 and Walmart’s competing sale are two examples. We made an infographic comparing the two companies because our blog covers ecommerce.
We contacted news sites that wrote about the sales, and provided them with information about our graphic. Some bloggers added our link to their articles, and others shared it on social media, which caused our blog to get more traffic.
8. Content repurposing
Once your content marketing strategy starts to show results, you can think about recycling your most popular posts and articles into different formats. If you want to be successful on social media, create content based on topics that your visitors already like.
You have to come at it from a different perspective. You could turn a blog post about customer data into an infographic, or take a popular how-to guide and turn it into a video for more detail.
No matter how you choose to do it, reusing your content should always improve the experience for your readers. If your content is easy to understand or more fun to look at, you will be improving the overall quality of your content strategy.
9. Create gated content
As you create content for your site, you will notice that some pieces take longer to create than others. Some of your blog posts can be written from your personal experiences and only take an hour or so to write, while others will require more time for research.
Don’t give up on more complex topics just because they require more effort. Ask yourself if the extra work translates into extra value for your potential customers. If that is what is happening, it would be good content to require visitors to give you their email before accessing it.
If your content is interesting or useful, people may be more likely to subscribe to your email list. This provides you with an opportunity to add them to your email newsletter list, which makes it worth the effort.
10. Use Google Trends to find “out of the box” keyword ideas
You can use Google Trends to discover which topics are popular in your industry so that you can create content that appeals to your audience. You can cover these topics before other sites do. To find related queries, search for a relevant keyword and scroll to the Related queries section.
after scrolling though the list a few good ideas pop up such as “mike pompeo weight loss” and “alec baldwin weight loss.”
We can take the idea further. The vast majority of trending topics on social media platforms are related to a specific celebrity or famous individual.
This means that searchers are interested in the weight loss regimes of famous people beyond those currently seen on Google Trends.
So here’s what we’ll do:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Search for the same term (e.g., “weight loss”)
- Set a Word count filter to four words (the length of a person’s name in the Western world + weight loss. If you’re targeting other countries, such as South Korea, you may want to extend it to five words).
Lo and behold. You’ll see around 150,000 keywords, most of them about a particular celebrity’s weight loss regime. They’re not of crazy difficulty either. These are all great topics to target.
We can create a content marketing strategy for your small business
Content marketing is important for attracting new customers and growing successful businesses. If you want your small business to succeed, you need to have a well-executed content strategy. This can involve creating content yourself or hiring freelancers to do it for you.
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