Content marketing can become tedious or expensive. Tedious if you do the work yourself, and expensive if you outsource it to somebody.
It is a double-edged sword. So, should your small business be focusing on content marketing?
I say yes, it should. Today, I will explain the reasons why content marketing is an essential component of a small business.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the process of creating and publishing content. This should not be confused with advertising. Content is a kind of published material that adds value to the reader or user. It is something that they anticipate—something that they can learn from.
Here are some examples:
- Instructional materials
- Product reviews
- Product comparisons
- Tips and tricks
- How-to articles
- Listicles such as “best of” or “top ten”
As you can see, the content you publish serves the interest of your target users. From this content, you will be able to build a following. This can be in the form of YouTube subscribers, email subscribers, and social media likes and followers.
Benefits of Content Marketing for Small Businesses
Now, let us take a look at how content marketing will help a small business. These benefits are all geared towards one thing: making your small business grow.
1. Increase the visibility of your business
The first benefit of content marketing for a small business is that it increases your visibility. You have to understand that it is difficult to get seen while it is easy to build an online business.
Just think of the millions of blog posts published per day. How will you even rise above that? The same thing goes with YouTube. There are 500 video hours published on YouTube per minute.
If you do not do content marketing, these publishers will drown you. Nobody is going to see your brand or your business.
The only way you can improve your visibility is by taking advantage of SEO in any content you create. The more you publish, the better chances you get at hitting your goals.
If you have a lot of content, Google is going to crawl your site more often. Since Google indexes your content on both your blog and YouTube, the algorithm will have more to show to the users, and your content could be one of them.
2. Create trust and loyalty between you and your audience
Content is what creates trust and loyalty. If people could see what you are doing, they will believe what you have to say.
Let us say that you are offering a product. What you can do is show your audiences different variations of your product demonstration.
You can also create content with little or nothing to do with your product but is still related to your industry. An example is if you are selling a circular saw or power tools.
In this case, you can create content where you show people how to make cabinets. You can also create content showing tips on how to make joints on wood.
These things have little to do with power tools, but they are still related. And since you are giving value to your users, you will create trust between you and them.
The more content you publish, the more loyal people will be to you. Why is this? Because if you keep adding value, people will trust your credibility, and they will look forward to your new content.
This is also why people subscribe. They want to get notified of your new content because they find it valuable.
3. Get traffic volume and generate leads
Traffic is a natural result of content marketing. If you publish great content, the people who watch it and like it will get curious about what you are offering.
Whether you are trying to get leads from YouTube or email marketing for e-commerce, you can expect to get traffic because of your content.
Take it as an accomplishment if you have subscribers. They are warm traffic comprised of people who are interested in what you offer. Maybe they are not yet ready to make a purchase now, but it only takes a little nudge and convincing to make them buy.
4. Improve your revenues
Not every person who visits your offer page is going to buy. The internet standard is between 1% and 3%. You are lucky if 3% of your traffic makes a purchase.
So, if you have a target number of sales, you can do the math. If you want to make 100 sales a month, you need traffic of 10,000 users per month.
How will you get that kind of traffic?
By publishing content. Content marketing is the only ally you have. It is much better than advertising because once your ad is over, it will never run again unless you spend more.
Content marketing is that once it is published, it is already there for people to consume. If you have subscribers, you can expect these subscribers to return to your website or YouTube channel once they get notification of new content.
Revenue is driven by traffic. And traffic is driven by content.
Your priority, therefore, is to produce high-quality content by getting a good copywriter for your products or your content plan.
5. Create a relationship between you and your followers
The last benefit of focusing on content marketing is that it allows you to build relationships with people. This is a critical factor in business. Your business must be seen as the go-to place for consumers who need help.
Let us say that you have already published hundreds of videos on YouTube. If people need to know something, they will search for your content.
If the content they are looking for is not in your blog or channel, what will they do?
They will request you to create one.
This is the power of content marketing. And if you create that requested content, you just improved your customer loyalty.
Your various content will also encourage your users to comment, like, and share their opinions. And if they do this, you are building a community of like-minded individuals.
It is a good place to build a relationship with people. And if you have a good relationship with your followers, they are more likely to buy from you than any other brand.
Summary
Content marketing is not a miracle or magic activity that will bring immediate results. You have to put in the work and let time do its thing.
There are many content marketers out there on YouTube who have been around for ten years. It took them ten years to earn a subscriber count of a million people.
You can do the same, but you should not limit your marketing content only to YouTube. You can do it on blogs and social media. However, social media is not going to yield great results like YouTube videos and blog posts.
Making a YouTube video is more tedious and expensive than a blog. My advice is to start filling your website with content at least three times a week—hire an affordable content writer to write the content for you.
While doing so, you can also target publishing at least two video contents on YouTube per month.
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