Website content marketing for small businesses

As a small business owner, when it comes to marketing, one of your biggest opportunities is creating exciting content that increases brand awareness, attracts new customers, and ultimately helps generate sales. 

Sounds great right?

But as always it’s one of those things that are easier said than done.

It’s also a topic that’s difficult to know where to start.

So, if you want to figure out how to use content to support business growth, you’ve come to the right place.

In this article, we’ll walk you through some top tips on content marketing for your small business.

 

Small business content marketing

For this article, we’re going to focus on website content.

However “content” is a broad term that encompasses everything from websites to social media to video.

You could also argue content covers things like print ads, outdoor advertising, and radio, but it is generally reserved for digital channels.

For websites, the main concept of content marketing is pretty simple. As the name suggests, you create pages that are designed “pull in” your target audience, with the main method of them finding you being through search engines.

Unfortunately, as with most things small business marketing, this is easier said than done. 

So, to help you out, we’ve compiled a list of tactics that can make your life easier and help you get a head start with content marketing. 

The easiest starting point is to create a blog

If like most small businesses you have a website, you’ll likely include pages that outline the services you offer, and if you’re a bit more advanced with your online marketing efforts these pages will be optimised for sales and search performance.

This will give customers a taste of what you offer.  

Sadly, this isn’t always enough to persuade the client to buy your products.

If you’re just writing some simple service pages on your website you’re missing out on a whole host of opportunities to attract potential customers as they search for your services and look to find out more about your brand and why they should buy from you.

That’s why it’s a good idea to start a blog. 

You can create individual pages too, but a blog section on your site provides an easy way to group and manage your content. Creating a blog will give you space to dive fully into your products in detail.  

You’ll have more opportunities to target more search terms, and more traffic means more potential sales.

Plus, search engines like “authority” websites, and you can’t build authority with only five web pages. More pages mean more rankings, more backlinks, and a bigger profile online.

It’s win-win.

That’s why it’s essential that you invest in your website over the long term with a coordinated SEO and content plan. So many small businesses don’t do this, so it’s a brilliant way of gaining a competitive advantage.

 

Know your audience

Catering to everyone is next to impossible, especially for SME’s with limited budgets. Generally, only large multinationals, like Mars or Protor and Gamble, w massive amounts of resources can reach all people.

So, instead of wasting your time, it’s best to focus on certain segments. These are the consumers that are most likely to invest in your services. It also allows you to be a lot more specific and relevant with your messaging. This focus also helps you get a lot more creative as you’re not trying to please everyone and just ending up with plain, vanilla, messaging that doesn’t resonate with anybody.

There are a few techniques you can rely on to identify your target audience.

First up, collect all the data you have on your customers. 

Then, spend a little time figuring out what they have in common (or not). For example, check to see if all your clients are in a similar age group or location or have similar attitudes and behaviours. 

Once you’ve explored your existing data you can perhaps survey your current client base, or even potential client. You can even just observe the behaviour of buyers in your industry.

Finally, don’t be shy about using social media. The platforms can help you identify your most frequent visitors. It’s also a great way or finning quick surveys and polls to collate data.

As with SEO, you don’t need to get bogged down in the detail. Even a small amount of market data will help you build a basic market segmentation, and target audience profiles. Then from there you can test and iterate.

Create a content plan based on keyword research

Now that you have a blog and have decided to invest in more content and create a blog, you’ll need to fill it up with content.

You can just start publishing the first things you think of. That will work to a degree. But your content marketing will be so much more effective for your small business if you do some research and put a plan in place first.

One of our favourite methods is by using content hubs to group your content around broad topics. We wrote about this in detail in our content hubs article.

Whatever approach you use, you want to end this planning stage with a clear idea of the search terms you are targeting, the types of content you need to create for each of those, the amount of content, and an outline of each page so you can brief your creative team (or so you can more easily write the content if you’re doing it yourself).

Get creative

We talked about the importance of using keywords in your content. Yet, there’s another factor that you need to take into account. 

And this is by far the most important area of any content marketing activity.

You need high-quality, relevant to your target audience, and unique content.

There are a couple of reasons behind this. 

For starters, is a highly competitive market out there. Even for hyper-local businesses, competition is fierce.

So you need to stand out and get noticed. Vanilla content will just blend in with everything else in your industry. Think about unique angles your brand can bring to the table.

Unique content also has a much higher chance of gaining backlinks and ranking higher in search engines. And we’ve already covered the benefits of this.

Other than that, publishing the same old content that everyone in your industry is, doesn’t provide anything to make you stand out and capture the imagination of your potential customers. To ensure that customers will visit your site time and again, you have to offer them a fresh perspective. 

So, it’s best to focus on your unique take on any topic. 

For these reasons, it’s never a good idea to copy or paraphrase a competitor’s work. Sure, analyse what they’re up to, but do it with the aim of doing things better than they are.

SEO

Creating original content is an excellent way to improve your site traffic.

While the most important factor is creative ideas that bring something new to the table, it’s still important to optimise your content for good search performance.

So what does this look like?

Some basic factors include ensuring your website is fast to load, easy to use and in a format that’s easy and enjoyable to read.

Then, include your target keyword in some key places such as the URL, meta title (the headline that gets displayed in search results), and your main (H1) page title. Then include some keyword variations throughout subheadings and the body copy of your content.

For the majority of cases, this should cover it. Once your content is live and ranking you can start to tweak this and test things, but it’s far more important to just get started and get your content live. Don’t get bogged down in the SEO minutiae.

Use social media

In today’s world, all businesses, big or small, can take advantage of social media accounts to reach their customers.

Social media works very well in tandem with website content marketing for small businesses.

Just one long form web page provides countless content for social media posts and discussion topics.

You can be active in your community and engage with your customers and link back to your helpful resource. Share bite-size tips. Record companion videos, reels and even do live sessions on the topics you’ve discussed on your website.  

Small business content marketing inspiration

Okay, see we’ve covered some ideas to help you get started with content marketing for your small business.

Here are a few of our favourite small business content marketing examples you can use for inspiration.

LITELOK

Litelok is a Swansea-based bike lock start-up that is making waves in the highly competitive cycling industry. Their blog is an awesome example of creating content around your products to tell your story and provide a unique take on things.

Mazuma Accounting

Providing a perfect example of a content hub Mazuma Accounting has a brilliantly structured resources section on its website. It has a clear audience in mind – small businesses – and covers a range of helpful topics under five broader themes.

Wrapping up

Attracting new traffic to your website can be a challenging process. Small business content marketing is an excellent method of supporting your customer acquisition goals. 

There are a few techniques you can use to promote your business through content. For starters, you can create a blog and write content targeting valuable SEO keywords. Before that though create a content marketing plan and ensure your website is optimised. After that, it’s a good idea to utilize social media to your advantage.