3 Benefits of Content Marketing for Small Business

By Andrea Pikscher

Marketing. If you’re a business owner you need it to communicate your goods and services to people. Unless you’re a giant, well established business, it can feel overwhelming on what exactly the best marketing tools are to use. Without a huge budget and a team of marketers, where are you supposed to begin? One of the easiest places to start is with Content Marketing. Making sure you’ve got a website, and your company on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. is the best place to start making a name for your small business.

#1. Why It’s Important To Have a Website as a Small Business

First things first. One of the best ways for you to begin to market your business is to make sure to create a website. We know, it can seem intimidating, but the good news is there are plenty of companies out there that will do most of the heavy lifting for you. Wix.com is one of our favorite companies for website creation. With social media these days, we know it can be tempting to just rely on your social pages, but having your own website gives you so much more control over your image and messaging. Plus, a lot of website creation tools give you a ton of integration options that make transition from socials to your website a lot easier.

Making Your Website Work with SEO

Not to mention that having your own website means you have control over your SEO (search engine optimization) , a severely underutilized tool. Your SEO is what helps people find you on Google. By picking keywords and phrases that your consumers may be searching for into the backend of your website, you will start to pop up in the search results on Google a lot more for those interested in what your company is offering. If you don’t want to create a website and/or build in SEO, you’re missing out on a huge portion of your audience that goes to the good old Google whenever they’re looking for something. 

#2. Why Social Media Matters for Small Businesses

Now, once  you’ve decided to build a website and optimize your SEO on your website, you may wonder if you’re good to go. You don’t really need to be on social media if people are able to find you on Google, right? Unfortunately, wrong. Social media platforms will only aid in growing your business and audience. The good news here is that you may not need to put your business on every single platform - because we get it, there are a ton. The best platforms to create accounts for your business are the ones where you think your audience might naturally be. For example, if you run a theatre company or entertainment venue, there’s no harm in including your company on Linkedin - but if you’re looking to connect directly with people looking to buy tickets, you may fare better using Meta (Facebook and Instagram). If you’re a small non-profit, Facebook and Instagram are still a great place to spread your organization's message, but on LinkedIn you may be able to connect with people in your industry more easily. You can also build slowly. Maybe start with just one or two social media platforms, and once you get the hang of it, add others if you feel they’re necessary. Don’t worry, no one expects you to tackle TikTok right away. 

You may be asking yourself, “But what truly are the benefits of a social media presence? Isn’t that just where I sometimes see funny memes, and try to avoid awkward conversations with distant family members?” On your personal account sure, but creating social media for your business is a little different. First, make sure you’re setting yourself up with a business account. On platforms like Meta you’ll be able to list business information (contact information, business hours, your company website). It’s also where your patrons can stay up to date on what your company has going on. Even if you update your website, and send out a newsletter, people may not always read those items, but most people are scrolling around social media on their phones really often. And if you are updating your company pages with info your followers want to see, you’ll pop up in their feed a lot more. And popping up in people’s feeds is one of the best things about social media for a business - FREE marketing. Plus, hitting people with information multiple times is never a bad thing.

Navigating Social Media Algorithms as a Small Business

Of course, social media platforms all have different algorithms, which can be tricky to navigate. But the core of these algorithms is the more people interact with your content, the more it appears to them in their feeds, again, for free. You can also encourage people to engage with your content through using hashtags, and tagging other people in posts. If people are searching for a particular hashtag, your post may show up in their feed even if they don’t follow you. The same can happen when tagging people in your post. If you tag other people and companies in your post, they’ll be notified and get your post, even if they don’t yet follow you. Plus, if you tag them, they then may share your post to all of their followers, which will show your content to a brand new audience that may in turn become consumers of yours. That’s right, it’s just one big circle of life over on social media.

#3. Making Ads Matter For Your Small Business

If you do want to put more money behind what you post on social media, there are bonuses to that as well. Meta is probably one the easiest places to begin to test out paying for targeted ads. That’s right, TARGETED ads. You don’t just throw money at an ad and hope that Meta just happens to show it to the right people. I mean, you can do that, but Meta has an entire ad center for you to use. You can choose how much you want to spend daily, what your goal for your ad is, the age, location, and even hobbies of  your audience. And you don’t have to run ads for months to see results. You could run them for a few days or weeks, and then try something else entirely. So while you are putting money behind an ad, it can be almost as affordable as you’d like it to be. 

Overall, we know there are a ton of moving parts when running a small business, but a good content marketing strategy can give any business owner some peace of mind. And with Content Marketing you don’t have to go all in at once. You can slowly build out your different platforms, test different ad campaigns, test the popularity of new products or services for relatively low cost. Content marketing is a great way to avoid throwing a ton of money out the window on trying different marketing strategies, and instead focus a smaller dollar amount on different kinds of ads, campaigns, and content.