The Key Benefits of Content Marketing for Small Businesses: How to position yourself for success

The benefits of content marketing for small business owners and entrepreneurs are plentiful. Here we examine the top three benefits for you and your business:

• Establishes your expertise and highlights you as a credible authority
• Demonstrates a willingness to share information and helps build trust
• Educates your prospects and helps them through to point of purchase and beyond

And for a bonus, it’s extremely helpful for SEO (and we’ll examine that further in another post)!

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the process of creating relevant content (blogs, videos, articles, speeches) and using it to demonstrate your expertise in a particular area to as wide an audience as possible through the various channels available.

What does that mean? Picture this: you see a story on the news about your industry. The reporter interviews various experts in your field about their views on the situation and you find yourself agreeing or disagreeing with them. Knowing you have something important to add to this conversation, how can you get your viewpoint out there?

Establishing authority

(AKA You’re an expert at what you do, and you’d like the world to know it!)

Start off by writing a blog about the subject. If you’re more visually inclined, you can video yourself telling people your thoughts.

Post it to your website then add it to the appropriate social channels. Share it with your network and see what kind of response you get. Share it with different groups on different social networks. Engage in a discussion with your audience.

Do this again and again for topics you love in your specialist area. Topics you hate (make sure you tell people why!). Topics you know people have difficulty understanding. They’ll to know you and what your stand for.

Building trust

Provide useful pieces of information on your specialist area for people who may need your services (and even for those who don’t) and you will build trust with your audience and become a go-to source for any questions they may have or advice they need. That way, when they are ready to engage services in this area, they’ll naturally go to you.

It a way of attracting customers to you, rather than going out there and hunting them. You also get to avoid the hard sell!

Converting prospects into customers

It may seem counterintuitive to you to “give away” your expertise for free, however, it establishes your expertise and authority in a way that no sales pitch ever will. It shows you have the confidence to share this information and still believe that you can provide even more value to your clients when they hire you.

Let’s face it, even if you told someone step by step how to do most tasks in your repertoire, with your years of experience and expertise, you are still going to do it better, faster, and more effectively than someone with no experience at it.

Indeed, after trying to do it themselves, many clients will come to value you doing these tasks for them far more than if they didn’t know precisely what was involved. They’ll gladly pay you to do them to save themselves from having to do it!

And after a while, if it’s what you want, that reporter could be asking you those questions on camera, and you’ll be a core part of leading the discussion!

Help is available if you need it

If you’re not confident with your own writing skills, or simply don’t have the time to do all of this, you can hire content writing experts to help you craft your expert story. There are freelancers available on all sorts of platforms including Rachel’s List, Freelancer, Upwork – the list goes on and on and on!

We even have easy to manage content writing services available at SMB Marketing Solutions.

Get meaningful results for your business

Of course, if you make content marketing a key component of your marketing, you’ll need content marketing plan. There are many free resources to assist you with this (just search “content marketing plan” and see how many show up!), or you can work with an expert to speed up the process.

At SMB Marketing Solutions, and we will gladly collaborate with you to determine the best content marketing solution for you and your expertise.

Content marketing could be a good fit for you

Content marketing. It helps you to build your expert profile, establishing you as a credible authority in your field. It helps keep your website fresh and current (Google et al like that!). It helps with SEO when your expertise is related to the products / services you sell. And it also helps you gain and retain clients! What’s not to love?!