How Content Marketing Can Help Small Businesses
The Australian business landscape is increasingly competitive, with small businesses in almost every industry increasingly coming up against market-dominating enterprises.
When you’re trying to be seen in a marketplace full of big businesses that seemingly have a bottomless marketing budget, how do you get your prospective audience and customers to notice you?
With decades of experience working across traditional and digital marketing in businesses of all sizes, Ebony & Salt can tell you all about one of the most important tools in every business’s arsenal: content marketing.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is designed to help you build a relationship with your customers by establishing your brand as a go-to authority on all things relevant to them through the use of credible, valuable content.
Whether you choose videos, podcasts, ebooks, emails, blogs, or social media as your platform (or a combination of all!), great content marketing keeps one important feature at its core: your goal is to educate, entertain, and inspire your audiences.
This means, as tempting as it may be, you can’t have every piece of content operating as a sales pitch, focused only on showcasing what you’re offering to your audience.
The benefits of content marketing for small businesses
For small businesses, content marketing can level the playing field and help you reach new customers who are looking for information or help related to your offering.
By creating a range of optimised content that can be shared on different platforms while also appearing on search engines, you have a much better opportunity to appear on the radar of people likely positioned to be your future customers.
Regularly creating high-quality content and hosting it on your website and social media has even more benefits:
Establish trust and authority with your audience
When it comes to spending money, especially more than a spontaneous purchase would involve, there is a lot of psychological consideration and evaluation that goes on in a prospective customer’s mind.
By creating content for your business that addresses the preconceptions and ‘roadblocks’ that your audience may already be thinking of, you can establish your brand as a trusted voice on the topic. This authority helps you achieve cut-through in an often noisy market, and can be especially helpful if you’re in a niche industry or location.
As B2B specialists, we find that content that refers to current conditions in the Australian environment and business landscape performs especially well for our Aussie-based clients.
Improve your SEO performance
Although all forms of content have benefits to your website’s search engine performance, written content carries significant weight when it comes to having a high-performing website for different search terms.
Most SEO is controlled by ever-changing algorithms, but at their core, the algorithms are looking to highlight and promote content that answers the questions of the audience – this is where good content marketing is worth its weight in gold.
Create audience engagement
Nobody wants to follow or interact with a social media page that hasn’t posted anything since 2019. Using content marketing to keep your platforms alive and interactive is a key indicator to prospective customers that your business is still operational and has an existing platform with an interested audience.
By diversifying the types of content you use (think videos, animations, carousels, articles, podcasts, and blog posts), and being open to two-way conversation with your audience on different social media platforms, you create audience engagement and continue to build your authority and trust.
How to create quality content
At its core, content marketing is all about creating the right pieces that can ladder up to your business’s strategic framework. How do you want your brand to appear? Are you aiming to educate, entertain, or inspire your audience? Who is your audience and what pain points are you solving for them?
For a small business, especially in the Australian business landscape, content marketing levels the playing field. Gone are the days when you needed a studio and a professional crew to create a compelling video for your business, or when you needed to hire a team to create and print a lengthy brochure to help you educate audiences on what you do.
Small business owners and operators are often time-poor, and many choose to outsource their content marketing (or indeed, all their marketing) to dedicated agencies or producers like Ebony & Salt. This allows them to focus on their operations while knowing they have an acquisition play ongoing all year round, and doesn’t require them to upskill and remain across current marketing trends and requirements.
If you’re in the earlier stages of your business, you may prefer to create your own content – whichever path you go down, content marketing can be one of the best choices you make for your business’s future growth.