There’s a reason why Digital Marketing guru Neil Patel recently dedicated an entire article to reaffirming content as king, and why Hubspot calls content marketing a “mission-critical growth method” for businesses. Though many small business owners view content marketing as intimidating, what can be gained by putting out high-quality content on a consistent basis certainly outweighs any potential efforts involved.
A major key to successful content marketing is planning out fresh, relevant content consumers will enjoy and publishing it on a consistent basis. You can learn more about this in our on-demand training, Creating Your Content Calendar— but first, let’s take a look at what content marketing actually is and what significant benefits it brings to small businesses like yours:
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic marketing technique that focuses on creating and delivering relevant, compelling, and consistent content that attracts and retains a specific type of audience or target demographic and compels them to take profitable consumer action.
Examples of content marketing include:
Benefits of Content Marketing
Content marketing offers myriad benefits to small business owners looking to breed success online. Major benefits of SMB content marketing include:
- Higher Engagement Levels
- Sharing content on social media increases audience engagement and drives more consumers to your website
- Create blog posts that answer frequently asked questions (FAQs) or clarify processes to engage with your community
- An Established Online Presence
- Content marketing puts you in control of the narrative and gives you an opportunity to establish your brand’s personality, perspective, and expertise.
- Helps you to establish your brand as the authority in your space.
- Increases brand awareness and visibility and keeps your brand name fresh in people’s minds through repeated exposure.
- Increased Sales
- Content marketing creates value for buyers before making a purchase, or, in some cases, before the consumer even considered making a purchase.
- “When your audience views your content, they’re more likely to purchase from you in the future. Additionally, calls-to-action (CTA) placed directly in your content can generate new leads for your sales team.”
- Better SEO
- From blogs to landing pages, podcast titles to YouTube descriptions, every piece of content you publish on the web serves as an opportunity to improve your brand’s standing with major search engines.
- Content should be SEO-friendly and hit all the relevant keywords you want your products and/or services to be ranking for.
