A Complete Guide to Content Marketing for Small Businesses

Content marketing for small businesses, eh? Some people thrive on the idea of marketing, while others break out in a cold sweat at the very word. Which one best describes you? Whichever it is, we hope that by the end of this post, you’ll be eager to start creating.

To guide you through, we’ll look at what content marketing is, why it’s important for small businesses and freelancers, and how to get started. We’ve also included six ideas to help you fill that scary empty page when creating your content.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is pretty much what you might imagine it is: using content as a marketing tool. Content can take many different forms, such as:

• Blog posts 
• Newsletters
• Email campaigns
• Social media posts
• Infographics
• Ebooks
• Videos

Whatever form a piece of content takes, the goal is always to provide relevant, useful information to a specific audience – your current and prospective customers. The idea is to build a relationship with your audience so that when they decide to make a purchase, you’re the first person (or company) they think of.

In marketing terms, you could think of content as the free samples available in a store. You give a little taste of your offerings to entice customers with how you can benefit them in the longer term. You raise awareness of your product or service without going in for the hard sell (i.e., using aggressive, pushy sales tactics).

The Customer Journey

Content marketing can be used at every stage of the customer journey, by which we mean the steps a person takes before and after they make a purchase:

1. Awareness. Your target audience is looking for information or a solution to a problem. They’re just becoming aware of your products or services.
   
   Content at this stage should educate or inform the reader and answer their questions. Here’s an example from the Fitbit blog: Transform Your Walk into a Fat-Burning Workout. The post explores ways to take your walking workout to the next level – with insights from fitness experts – but doesn’t explicitly mention Fitbit’s line of fitness trackers.
2. Consideration. Your target audience is actively considering their options and whether to buy your product or service.
   
   Content at this stage should help the reader research and understand their options. Here’s an example from our blog: 5 of the Best Freelance Writing Courses for Beginners. This post highlights the key features of five different courses and then summarizes them in a table for easy side-by-side comparison.
3. Purchase. The customer makes a purchase. This could be your product or service or that of a competitor.
   
   Content at this stage should persuade the customer to purchase your product or service by showcasing its benefits. For that reason, it can be more overtly promotional and direct. Take this case study from Canva: How Expedia Group saves over 160 design hours per week with Canva. This content discusses specific product features, the problems Canva solves, and provides persuasive ROI data.
4. Retention. If the customer does purchase from you, this stage focuses on keeping them around.
   
   Content at this stage should keep the customer engaged in the hope that they will make a purchase in the future. Take this social media post from Whole Foods on Instagram, which provides tips on storing fresh produce. It gives the customer useful advice and helps keep the company at the front of their mind.
5. Advocacy. The customer spreads the word about your product or service.
   
   Content at this stage should encourage the customer to share their experience with friends, family, and other contacts. For example, Hubspot offers an affiliate program for content creators. In return for promoting Hubspot’s products, affiliates can earn a 30% recurring commission.

Check out this guide from Custify for more on creating content for each stage of the customer journey: What Content Should You Add for Each Stage of the Customer Journey?

Why Is Content Marketing Important for Small Businesses?

Content marketing has many benefits for businesses of all sizes. For instance, as as a small business owner or freelancer, it can help you:

• Increase brand awareness.
• Attract potential customers.
• Maintain relationships with existing customers.
• Boost your online visibility. 
• Establish yourself as a thought leader.

You may worry that you don’t have the resources to compete with the bigger companies in the marketplace. That may be true for the volume of marketing you can do – but don’t confuse quantity with quality.

You may not be able to afford the software to make a fancy-looking ad or buy advertising space, but you can play with the expertise you do have. And that’s what content marketing is all about: showcasing your expertise rather than how much money you must pay for the expertise of others.

The benefits for you and your business will go beyond attracting new clients. Creating content is a great way to keep on top of your game and discover more about your audience and how you can provide a valuable service or product. In turn, having built that relationship, the clients you attract are also more likely to stay.

How to Get Started with Content Marketing

Why not start right away? Here’s what you need to consider:

• Your expertise
  Content marketing is a showcase for your expertise, so this is where you need to start. There’s no point spending a lot of time pretending to be an expert in something if, when that draws in a potential client, you can’t follow up on it. And if you stick to your expertise, your experience, authority, and trustworthiness – highly attractive qualities to Google as well as to your audience – will shine through.
  
  If, for example, you are a copy editor specializing in fiction, you can showcase your expertise by producing content on that topic.
• Your audience
  Time spent researching your audience is never wasted. It will help you create relevant content and ensure your audience can find it.
  
  If you’re not already part of the target audience – and you may be, if you’ve turned a passion into a business – then you’ll need to identify who will be interested in what you have to offer. Think about their age, location, likely problems, and the time they have available. If, for example, your audience includes writers who are concerned about the emergence of AI, you could create content around how AI could be used to help rather than hinder the writing process.
• Your competitors
  Checking out the competition – i.e. who they are and the content they’re producing – is a great way to figure out what works in your industry. It’s also a good way to spot gaps that you could fill.
• Your goals
  Decide what you want to achieve from your marketing and make sure that it’s manageable. Maybe your goal is to increase awareness of your brand, attract new customers, or increase repeat purchases.
  
  It might be tempting to set off all guns blazing, but a modest and targeted approach is likely to be more successful. Make your goals SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).
• Your channels
  Consider where you’re going to publish your content and in what format. Much of this will depend upon the findings of your research on your audience.
  
  Having a blog is usually a good place to start. It can be set up at a low cost or for free. It’s easily updated, you can link your social media, and by using SEO (search engine optimization), you can use your blog to attract casual browsers.
• Your schedule
  Time is tight when you’re a small business or freelancer, but setting aside some time to create and share content about your business will be time well spent. If you’re in an industry that has slow periods, you could use these for creating content and then use a scheduling tool to post automatically throughout the year.

6 Small Business Content Ideas

You’ve set up a blog, but what are you going to fill it with? Here are six of our best content ideas to get you on your way.

1. Discover Your Audience’s Issues

This goes back to the importance of starting out by understanding your audience. Find out what they’re looking for, and then come up with a list of topics for your content.

2. Show that You Offer Solutions

This is the flip side of discovering your audience’s issues: ensure you can address them. Your content should show that you can be trusted to help, so be sure to address the issues you are qualified to solve. You could provide real-life examples from (willing) case studies or from your own experience (e.g., a comparison of products or services that you have tried out).

3. Keep with the Times

To be credible, your content needs to be up to date. However, keeping with the times also means having an eye on the news or events in the calendar so you can echo those in your content. If, for example, you’re in the book publishing industry, it would help for you to know when World Book Day is and have some relevant content ready for it.

4. Engage with Your Audience

Keeping an eye on events or news items that interest your audience is one way to engage with them, but how about actually having a conversation with them? End your content with a question and open it up to comments. You never know, it might even provide a healthy source of topics for new content.

5. Give Your Audience Something to Do

Inspire your readers to do something more than just read your content and then leave. How about providing a step-by-step guide? At the very least, you should include a call to action, but you could also prompt your audience to share your content by including the necessary social media buttons. Or you could entice them to return for more by offering a teaser trailer for future content.

6. Repurpose Your Content

Recycling is always a good thing to do, and you can do it with content, too. If you’ve spent time crafting a blog post, why only use it once? Build time into your schedule to review your existing posts and see how they could be repurposed.

Maybe a previous topic has resurfaced, and you can simply repost your earlier article. Or there may be new developments in an area you previously covered, allowing you to update a previous post.

Use different formats. Take information from a blog post to create a social media post. Similarly, use a series of blog posts to create a podcast or series of videos – or vice versa. If your call to action was to invite your readers to join an email mailing list, then you could use your content in a regular newsletter, perhaps adding some extras just for subscribers.

Becoming A Freelance Writer

In summary, content marketing is a great tool for you as a small business or freelancer. It offers many benefits:

• It’s a showcase for your talent.
• It’s a great way to develop your business.
• All it should cost is your time.
• You can reuse and recycle the content you create.

And now that you know how to get started, what’s stopping you? If it’s the prospect of actually writing the content, how about brushing up your skills with our Becoming A Freelance Writer course? The course includes helpful modules on how to research, structure, and write engaging blog posts and articles. You can even try it out for free.