How Content Marketing is Changing the Game for Small Business

I’ve been working in the Content Marketing field for a few years now and more and more I see small business owners struggling to juggle all their demands and determine what is actually a priority for their website. The bottom line is, content marketing is important for the success of your website and your small business because it helps attract online traffic to your website.

 

Being a Content Marketer, I may be a little biased, but all arrows seem to point to the belief that quality content is essential for small business website growth and success. Content is the key that potential customers use to unlock their wallets and ultimately decide who to do business with. If you don’t have anything worth reading on your website, searchers will keep scrolling and many times end up working with your direct competition instead. 

 

If you want customers, you need quality content. Keep reading and I’ll prove it to you!

 

What is Content Marketing?

 

According to Wikipedia, “Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online.”. But what does that actually mean and what does content marketing involve?

 

Well, content marketing is a broad topic. Look at the words on a specific page of a website. What’s the topic of the page? What’s the goal of the page? What’s the page about? Who is the content written for? It’s these questions that form the backbone of what content marketing is.

 

Good content marketing is all about providing as much quality information as possible on a particular topic to a potential customer to make their decision to do business with you as easy as possible. Content can come in any form too, whether it’s a blog article, a video, a social media post, an infographic, a case study etc.

 

And, there are tons of online tools for SEO keyword research, content topic ideas, website analytics data and so on to help you accomplish this. You also need to remember that while you’re writing your content for real people, search engines, like Google, also “read” your content too. 

 

SEO and Content Marketing

 

A good content marketer knows you write content for readers first and search engines second. That means you write in natural speaking language like you are having a conversation with an actual person. This is to avoid bad SEO (search engine optimization) practices like “keyword stuffing” and will help readers be able to understand what your content is actually about. 

 

 

Now, where do search engines come into this process? After you create some new content on your site and optimize it with SEO keywords, search engines “crawl” your page to determine what it is about, how well it can answer a searcher’s question, what keywords it is optimized for, and so on. Search engines then decide on what result page to show your content and what search queries to show your content for as well. The better your content answers or provides information on a specific topic or question, the higher your content will rank in the search engine result page (SERP). 

 

The goal of content marketing SEO is to rank on page one of the SERP. Most searchers don’t continue to look for results past that page, so it’s prime real estate. The more quality and optimzed content you provide, the higher your result will rank, and more potential customers searching on that topic will see your result. 

 

How Content Marketing Increases Sales

 

According to Think Like Google, 53% of shoppers say they always do online research before buying. Your potential customers are online doing research before they come into your store, call you, or complete a “Contact Us” form. If they click your link or visit your website, they expect to find information to help them answer their questions or solve their problem. If they can’t find any quality content about your products, services, or business, they will automatically have lower trust in your small business and will be less likely to do business with you. 

 

Part of your content marketing strategy needs to focus on inbound marketing and transparency. By providing potential customers with all the information they would need up front, you increase your sales while decreasing the resources spent on finding ideal fit customers yourself. 

 

Content marketing works because it prioritizes your target audience before the sale even begins. It is an ever-increasing, essential part of an online marketing strategy for small business. If you want your small business to grow, you NEED content to help distinguish your web pages and stand out among your competitors. 

 

Have more questions about how to get started with content marketing? Check out our Resources page for more info!