Small Business Content Marketing Tips

There are way too many people out there trying to sell you an e-book or hack to exceptional growth for your Facebook page or to get you, 1,000 unique visitors, to your site overnight. Unfortunately, none of these work. Sure, some may work temporarily but none will work long term. The only thing to consistently grow your website traffic and Facebook page reach is quality content.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the practice of generating blog posts, articles, white papers, studies, videos, and any other form of content to build your brand’s profile online. As a small business owner, it is hard to find the time to invest in generating content or do not know where to start. Below is my list of the top 4 tips for small businesses getting started with content marketing and the top 4 pitfalls to avoid when creating a marketing content strategy.

Top 4 Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Stay in Your Lane – You Are The Expert for a Reason

This one may seem obvious but some people get this very wrong. You are the expert on your topic so own that topic. If you sell shoes create anything and everything in the Shoe and Shoe adjacent world as much as you want. Talk about running routes, the latest basketball player’s newest line of shoes, the new materials that make recycling shoes even more environmentally friendly – anything even vaguely related is 100% acceptable. What is not acceptable is content that you are not an expert in. If you sell shoes don’t create content about the latest iPhones – it’s confusing to readers and will decrease the credibility of your content stream. You are the expert so act as the go-to source for everything and anything to do with your industry.

Use Proprietary or Internal Knowledge

The most interesting blog posts or articles (and the ones that get the most links that are important for SEO) are ones that present information that may not readily be available to the outside world. Do you have access to a data set that you can analyze? Do you sell fireplaces? Well, what trends are you seeing in design or fuel types – are a greater percentage of your sales coming from wood this year over last? Why or why not? These types of articles may seem mundane to someone inside the business but can create real value and drive real traffic for your business from people looking for these questions.

Answer People’s Questions

Probably the single best way to get people to your site is by researching questions that people are searching for in your industry and answering those questions with your content. Questions are the easiest and quickest way to build up organic traffic to your blog or website is a strategy I have used on virtually every single website I have ever worked on. Trust me, it works – give it a shot and perform a couple of searches in Google looking at the “People Also Ask” boxes in the search result or try Answerthepublic.com a great resource for getting questions that people are searching for.

Quality over Quantity

One good piece of content is worth ten bad blog articles. Create the most important and in-depth pieces will yield you far better results. Make sure your articles are long enough to be relevant and that you are answering any and all additional questions that could pop up with a reader. All it takes is one single piece of well-written content to drive hundreds of visits per month to your website so take your time, do it right, and follow all the typical best practices of writing – clarity, conciseness, grammar and spelling.

Top 4 Content Marketing Pitfalls for Small Businesses

Misunderstanding Your Audience

This is likely the number one most common mistake I see when small businesses are creating content – they do not understand who their audience is. You likely know who your customer is but that is not always the person who is going to be engaging with or consuming your blog posts or watching your videos. Before you write or create anything you should ask yourself who am I creating this for and then speak directly to that person.

No Reason to Join The Conversation

I am not going to lie to you, this is a big pet-peeve of mine. Companies that are trying so hard to be a part of a conversation or trend that they go out of their way to create content about that topic. This ties into the above point about staying in your lane, stick to what you are good at and funny little videos here and there on your Facebook page or a one-off piece of content that is following a recent online trend can be ok if done rarely, however before you do post this on your business page ask yourself – what do I bring to this, what is my reason for my business being in on this conversation? If you can’t answer that then maybe don’t post.

Being Too Unrealistic

Be realistic, this is very important. I have seen many businesses say they are going to publish 3 or 4 blog posts per month and post on social media 3 times per week. Understanding how busy you are and how you realistically start building content is important to ensure long term success. Start simple – one blog post per month and 1 Facebook post per month and go from there. The more you do it the easier it gets and the less time per post it will take, then you can start ramping up and doing multiple a month.

Expecting Instant Results

Like everything that’s worth it, content marketing takes time. Don’t rush the process, even if you don’t see results right away know that it only takes one piece to start the whole thing going. Content marketing is like a flywheel, at first it takes a tone of effort to build it and get it all set up, continually pushing it around and around until one-day momentum takes over and all of a sudden you are getting hundreds of daily visitors to your blogs, people are downloading your content and leads start coming in organically.