Content Marketing for Small Businesses | Grow Your Business and Generate Warmer Leads with These 5 Types of Content

Content marketing is difficult. It takes a grueling amount of time, energy, and resources (both human and financial) to set up your business for success with a content marketing campaign. Still, all businesses need good content to spread awareness about their products and services, generate warmer leads, and attract more opportunities.

Unfortunately, businesses find it difficult, but small businesses find it even more challenging to create and distribute their content due to the absence of much-needed resources (people, money, time, and expertise). But what if I told you that there are several types of content you can start on, tap into your existing expertise/resources and kickstart your content marketing campaign?

Are you a small business or solopreneur struggling to bring your content to the light, generate more leads, and spread awareness of your existence to more potential customers? Then you’ve come to the right place! By the end of this article, you should be able to leverage content (specifically, written content) to grow your business over time.

What is Content Marketing?

From Content Marketing Institute’s definition, we can carve out the following:

Content marketing refers to a calculated approach to marketing that’s centered on creating and sharing valuable and relevant content consistently to build and maintain a defined audience.

The end goal of content marketing is to drive desirable customer action by stimulating interest in your products and services without constantly pushing adverts in your audience’s faces as many sales campaigns do.

Key Terms and Concepts Commonly Used in Content Marketing:

• Content strategy - Refers to a series of activities, from the creation, planning, and delivery of content to your audience. Your content strategy is shaped by 4 key components; substance, structure, workflow, and governance. You can read more about this content strategy model from Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy Quad.
• Keywords - Refer to phrases that are commonly searched by users. Keywords can be divided into two broad categories - short-tail or long-tail keywords. A keyword inserted in any piece of web content should be relevant to the search query.
• Search volume & traffic - Search volume refers to the number of searches for a specific search term (keyword) within a specified amount of time. Traffic, on the other hand, is the number of visitors a website receives, often measured in monthly and annual terms.
• Buyer persona - This is a fictional character that represents your would-be customer. Some aspects of your buyer persona include age, gender, location, hobbies, interests, and so on. The purpose of a buyer persona is to create a complete, visual picture of the target customer that helps shape your content marketing strategy.
• Buying cycle - This is a key marketing concept that represents the journey your prospects take to become buying customers. The most important stages in the buying cycle include awareness, consideration, intent, and purchase.
• Brand voice & tone - Brand voice and tone simply reflect your brand’s “personality”/”character”. Your brand voice and tone should be intimately tied to your brand’s values. What do you stand for and how does it align with the prospect’s beliefs? Ultimately, this influences how you communicate with your target audience.

Other essential concepts include lead generation, which refers to the process of attracting people who have shown interest in your products and services and ultimately turning them into prospective buyers.

Why is Content Marketing Important?

Major search engines run on algorithms and content. In fact, all search engines, social media platforms, and the web, at large, are powered by the existence of content. Without it, the internet would become a massive directory where businesses only list their products/services and contacts.

With relevant, informative content, however, businesses can spark interest in their products and services and gradually nurture prospects into buying customers.

Here are a few reasons why content marketing is important:

• For lead generation - A survey released by the Content Marketing Institute showed that 67% of marketers reported that content marketing generates leads. In addition, 72% of marketers say that content marketing helps to educate the audience and 63% say that it helps build loyalty with existing clients/customers.?
• To increase brand awareness - Companies that create content consistently get rewarded by search engine algorithms as their content gets pushed to a wider user base. By consistently creating and distributing valuable content, companies can attract more leads to their websites.
• To improve SEO rankings - SEO is a vital element of your content marketing strategy. Search engines see high-quality, relevant, and informative content as trustworthy sources of information. And trustworthy sources of information receive more traffic, which attracts more leads and more potential sales revenue for your business.

One well-known example of a company that has successfully used content marketing to grow its business is HubSpot. HubSpot is a leading CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform helping businesses streamline sales, marketing, and customer service through several software products.

In 2006, the company launched its first blog and began producing large volumes of content. Today, it is known as the company that first coined the term “Inbound marketing” and one of the world’s richest sources of valuable growth content for small, medium, and large businesses.

The following types of content have proven effective for online business growth:

1. Blog Content

Blogging has been recognized repeatedly as a powerful tool for online business growth. According to a study by HubSpot, businesses that blog regularly get 55% more website visitors and 97% more inbound links to their websites.

Blog content helps business owners demonstrate their industry expertise by creating and sharing deep, well-researched, and informative content that seeks to solve the reader’s challenges. Value in content is measured by how efficiently readers can use the content to solve their problems, whether that means achieving higher conversion rates, increasing brand awareness, or higher conversion rates.

There are several things to consider to stand a chance of success with blogging:

1. Frequency of your posts - Frequently published blog posts demonstrate consistency and search engines love that. Marketing Insider Group reveals that publishing blogs 2-4 times a week yields the best results for every dollar spent on your content marketing campaign.
2. Relevance - A relevant blog post answers the user’s questions with completeness. Its intent closely matches the blog’s topic (which, in most cases, happens to be the main keyword). For instance, a blog post that talks about legal practices should have topics and sub-topics that are relevant and closely tied to legal practices. In most cases, the more specific your blog content can get, the better.
3. Architecture and flow - A good blog has the right structure, where readers can easily find what they’re looking for without hassle. A well-designed blog looks trustworthy and easy to read through. Where possible, add a table of contents at the top of the blog post and insert links to different sections of the post.

At the end of the day, the goal of your blog is to solve problems, showcase your industry expertise, and nurture prospects into buying customers - not to sell. Blogs are meant to distribute and share information while sparking consumer interest and action in the long term.

2. Social Media Content

Content marketing is incomplete without social media marketing.?

In fact, social media is considered an integral part of content marketing, where marketers distribute their brand’s content on social media channels (Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and many more).

But just how important is social media marketing?

59% of marketers agree that social media marketing is a very important part of their overall strategy. Over 4 billion people use social media globally, presenting social platforms as excellent starting points for your content marketing strategy.

Social media content is particularly important as it seeks to target the very consumers of your products/services, usually away from their professional working environment. Here, marketers can distribute branded content that addresses people’s challenges and sparks important conversations in a unique brand voice that appeals to the consumer’s emotions.

What’s more, there is room for flexibility in the types of content that can be shared across social media. Reels, for instance, are a type of content in short video format that sees a high engagement rate on Instagram. They’re short, fun, and easy to engage with and marketers can use them to showcase their brand’s personality.

Written content in the form of articles is received quite well on LinkedIn, a social media platform dedicated to professionals. The platform is home to over 800 million professionals, and sharing in-depth, well-researched, and educative articles is an excellent way to showcase relevant industry experience and initiate meaningful conversations.

3. Video Content

Video is a versatile type of content that can be used to spread powerful messages on various marketing channels, especially on social media. The reason for video content’s success in marketing is its high engagement, where viewers can gather practical knowledge. Video content further inspires a sense of trust in the prospect’s mind, knowing that they’re receiving first-hand information directly from the subject matter expert.

In terms of versatility, video content can be used to fulfill a wide variety of tasks. Some businesses use it to showcase their brand’s values or for product/service demos. Others use video content to demonstrate their expertise and customer testimonials to boost trust and brand awareness.

One sure way to get prospects hooked on video content is by creating videos for entertainment through music, memes, and comedy. But to get even better results with video marketing, marketers should consider creating educational and how-to videos that share practical solutions to a particular problem.

According to a recent Hootsuite Report, 92% of people watch online videos for entertainment purposes, product reviews, entertainment, education, and live streams, among others. In the same report, 29.8% of people that watch online videos seek how-to tutorials, while 28.5% seek educational video content.

Your prospects are constantly looking for information on how to solve their biggest challenges. Creating and sharing video content that offers solutions to these challenges sets your business out as a trustworthy and credible source of information in your niche. But as you may have guessed, video marketing is no easy feat!

Check out Hootsuite’s 9 Tips and Tricks to Increase Your YouTube Engagement Rate to get started with video marketing.

4. Case Studies

Case studies are in-depth accounts of long-term company challenges and the routes taken in solving these problems with a particular product or service.?

Case studies are a powerful tool for content marketing, as they provide potential customers with real-life stories of how a business’s products or services helped other companies achieve success.?

Case studies are usually created for B2B audiences. In fact, a whopping 80% of B2B buyers factor case studies in their buying research, with 42% finding case studies valuable in the mid and late stages of the buying cycle. By sharing their success stories, businesses can clearly communicate the value that they bring, build trust with their audience, and ultimately drive more sales.

That said, there are several moving parts to a successful case study:

• The problem - Refers to the specific challenge that the company faced prior to discovering the product.
• The product - Refers to the product/service that was utilized to tackle the problem, its features, functionalities, and benefits.
• The solution - Describes the specific approach to solving the problem using the product or service. It delves into the details of how the product was applied to meet the unique needs of the situation.
• The result - Presents the outcomes and impact achieved from implementing the solution.

The real power behind case studies is that they’re actual accounts of a buyer’s experience with a particular product or service. As such, they’re authentic, believable, and trustworthy.

Better yet, case studies contain valuable, first-hand information that demonstrates how a product/service works, which aids in generating leads and closing deals with prospective customers. On the downside, case studies drain a lot of time and energy, which eventually adds up to the high cost of business.

5. User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) refers to any form of content created and shared by individual users or consumers. Your customers are the biggest advocators of your products and services. But lately, companies have been paying UGC creators to create brand-specific, authentic content in the same way an ordinary customer would.?

User-generated content has been around since the 90s and has gained its spot in the content marketing world, particularly from the high engagement and conversions it delivers today.

Authentic user-generated content highly impacts the purchasing decisions of nearly 80% of consumers. Authenticity is an important factor shaping your prospect’s buying decisions, and there’s nothing more authentic than content from your own customers.

One of the main benefits of using UGC for content marketing is that it allows businesses to showcase the experiences and perspectives of their customers. This can help build trust and credibility with potential customers.

Social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are great places to find and share UGC.

Conclusion

Of course, there are several more types of content that can help you get a solid footing in your content marketing campaigns. Creating these types of content with the aim of helping businesses solve their problems can help you garner trust, which then goes a long way in creating the foundation for generating leads and warming up prospects to become long-term buyers.

But to do this successfully, you need good volumes of high-quality content.?

As a business owner tasked with crushing tasks and deadlines, it’s difficult to get things on track on your own, and still find time to create the content you desperately need for your business. That’s where we come in.?

The Alternate Writer is a content-focused company helping small businesses, individual website owners, content marketing agencies, and digital marketing companies create high-quality and optimized content. We’ll take the entire content creation burden, from research to writing and editing the content, and deliver optimized blog posts, and articles that are ready to publish.

We’re a registered company in Nairobi, Kenya, consisting of a small team of dedicated content writers. We’re an outsourced content writing company established to help you create high-quality and relevant articles for your audience. If you need fresh, well-researched content, get in touch with Erick M. today.