Content marketing 101 for small businesses

Where to start and what to do

Small businesses, start-ups and freelancers understand the intense dedication and hard work that goes into becoming an established brand. Where to start. What processes to create. What outside support to hire. What types of marketing to employ when the budget’s tight. Most marketers never build a brand from scratch. When they enter new marketing roles, there are established workflows already in place. Incoming marketers go with the flow and expand upon what their predecessors started.

It wasn’t until I worked with a business getting off the ground that I realized just how easy I had it marketing for well-known companies. Now, years after that first experience, I catapulted into this sink-or-swim situation again. This time it was for my own business. Now they were MY processes I needed to create, MY key performance indicators (KPIs) I needed to measure and MY content I needed to curate.

After getting this second crash course on small business marketing first-hand, I wanted to offer a starter kit. Most entrepreneurs are not marketers and don’t know where to start. Even if you do know like I did, it’s still overwhelming and things can get lost in the shuffle! 

If you’re a small business owner (or hoping to be!) without a clue how to begin content marketing, here are a few must-haves from both a seasoned marketer and small business owner:

Brand and voice

This might sound like a tip from a designer, but it is just as important where I sit too. Every single document, email and element of a company incorporates the brand and voice in some form. From your Outlook signature to your social media posts, target audiences easily identify brands that consistently adhere to brand standards.

Logos, brand colors and fonts are essential. Consumers recognize brands based on sight and are more likely to trust a source if it seems like a legitimate, professional company. If everything looks disjointed, it appears amateur and people will steer clear. Hire a freelance designer to create the logo and brand basics for relatively cheap or DIY with websites like Canva.

Brand voice is also essential. Will you use Oxford commas? Are all headlines uppercase or sentence case? Do you use periods in abbreviations like US or Washington, DC? These are imperative to ensure continuity from a content standpoint.

Email marketing

While many speculate email marketing is on its way out, stats show email generates $38 for every $1 spent. With any other marketing effort, inbound marketing takes a front seat. Inbound marketing is when a prospect or client comes to you. As you probably deduced, outbound marketing means you’re going to them. For email marketing, you’re going right into their inbox. A lot goes into email marketing — developing the lists, creating the email designs, preventing spam filtration — but the hassle is worth it when the timing is right and a prospect stumbles on your email the moment a need for your product or service arises.

Social media

While ever social media platform has its purpose, an up-and-coming business doesn’t have the bandwidth to do all of them. Choose where your target audience congregates (but don’t ignore some based on age demographics as I pointed out in my last blog post). 

LinkedIn is a great place to start as a B2B company. For B2C, Facebook offers the largest consumer base and highly detailed geo-targeting options so whoever sees your ad or post has the highest likelihood of using your product or service. Twitter is also important for client-facing interactions, quick responses to current events and to insert yourself in global conversations in real time. 

Do your research on who you expect your audience is online and choose your medium accordingly.

Blog posts

Search engines like Google give preference to frequently updated websites. Good luck trying to get on the first page of search results with a stagnant website that hasn’t been edited in months. Blog posts ramp up search engine optimization (SEO) and offer more keyword opportunities critical to pop up in search results.

Beyond that, content is truly king in 2020. Industry insiders offer their two cents on relevant topics, propelling them to the top of the list for prospects looking to find a service or product. Without thought leadership through blog posts (or other content methods), you’ll be out of sight out of mind. I recommend a new blog post every two weeks to start, but once a week is ideal. You could also combine your efforts by creating an email newsletter that features the new posts, killing two birds with one stone.

There are so many more things that go into marketing plans for small businesses, but providing foundational guidance to build upon is key. For help getting a content marketing plan off the ground, contact julianne@contentbyjulianne.com.