Small Businesses Need Content Marketing

Even the smallest business can benefit from content marketing. So why don’t more businesses give it a try? What are they afraid of?

I think it’s change. People are afraid to change what they’ve been doing for so long. Doing something different means learning something new, and that takes time and sometimes money. But if you don’t change, what’s going to happen? If you continue to apply traditional marketing techniques (or no marketing at all) to your business, it will eventually stop growing. Maybe not this year or next, but in 10 years, what you do now simply won’t work.

Some small business owners say, “In 10 years, I’ll be retired, so who cares?” If that’s your attitude, then so be it. No one will convince you that the time and money spent learning something new is worthwhile. But let me ask you this: When you retire, what are the plans for your business? Do you plan to sell it or pass it on to your children? If that’s your plan, don’t you owe it to future proprietors to hand off something poised for the new era? If you’re going to sell it, don’t you want to get as much for it as possible? That means making it an attractive purchase, and that means positioning your business for the future.

Or maybe you’re just planning on closing the doors and walking away. Okay, then this post isn’t for you. If you can afford to close the doors in 10 years and retire, then you’re either lucky or a smart planner. You don’t need content marketing. But if you’re planning on retiring in 10 years and you expect your business to survive even after you’re gone, then it’s time to take a renewed interest in your marketing.

Marketing small businesses has changed, and what you used to do isn’t going to work anymore. You might as well get ahead of the curve by incorporating new strategies. Content marketing can help give your business new life, no matter how small it is.

Filed under: Content Marketing, Content Marketing

Content Marketing for $30,000

For the cost of an entry-level employee, your small business could create an effective content marketing campaign with the help of an experienced consultant. Content marketing works because prospects and customers want to be educated and entertained.

If you provide them with valuable, relevant content, they will do your marketing for you. They will pass that content to their friends, family and co-workers, who in turn will pass it along to their friends, family and co-workers. Content marketing builds trust and credibility, because you’re providing information that customers want and need.

It’s a two-step process. First, create good content for a targeted audience. Then, make that content available to your audience in a variety of ways. One is no good without the other. Remember that entry level employee you were going to hire to update your Facebook page? Can they produce the kind of content that will spread far and wide?

What do I mean by good content anyway? Let’s say you sell flowers online. Here are some content marketing projects you could produce for $30,000 that would attract customer’s attention and spread around the internet:

1.    A one-to-five minute video that solves a problem, demonstrates a technique, answers a question or makes your audience laugh. Some topics: “How to Arrange Flowers Like a Pro,” “Flower Arranging Tips,” and so on.  Post the video on YouTube and link through Facebook and Twitter.

2.    An e-book called “Three Flower Arrangements That Will Put Him/Her in the Mood.” Let people download from your website for free.

3.    A blog or microsite where people post photos of their arrangements, so customers can look at ideas.

Filed under: Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Content Marketing Budgets

Developing New Business with Content Marketing Takes Time

The unique thing about content marketing is that it helps you reach prospective customers that you would never reach using traditional marketing campaigns. When you produce valuable, relevant content, it will attract an audience that normally wouldn’t give you the time of day.

Good content appeals to people because it’s important to them. It matters in a way that jargon-laden sales-speak does not. It helps them solve a problem, learn a skill or make them laugh. If they like the content, they’ll pass it around to other prospective customers. Content marketing isn’t just for companies with massive markets. In fact, if you’re a B2B company, content marketing is equally effective, if not more. Take a look at your competitors: How many of them are following more or less the same marketing plan?

Content marketing is effective, but it doesn’t work overnight. It’s an investment. If you start a blog, don’t expect the phone to start ringing with orders the next day. It takes time before people start reading your blog, growing familiar with your company and its services, passing it around other prospects and then finally making a decision. It’s like any other sales funnel. Give it time.

Filed under: Content Marketing, Content Marketing and Sales, Content Marketing

How Bad CEOs Screw Up Content Marketing

This post is for owners and CEOs of companies. If you think that marketing is a necessary evil, something you have to do rather than a real opportunity to grow your business, don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for you when business stagnates.

By the time you own or run a company, one of your most important jobs is to shape the organization’s culture. If your attitude toward marketing is dismissive, that’ll become part of your organizations’ DNA. It will affect who you hire, how much respect and autonomy you give them, how many financial resources you allocate and what kind of results you get. I’m stunned by business leaders who think so little of their employees’ job functions (and usually the employees themselves) that they set them up to fail.

Content marketing takes skill, money and time. It can help take your company to the next level in terms of growth, but you have to believe it’s going to work. And if you don’t, it might be that you don’t understand how it works.
If you’re a business owner surrounded by people whose job you think you can do better, guess whose fault that is? If your marketing staff doesn’t know what they’re doing, then why don’t you spend the money to hire people who do, then let them do their jobs.

Sometimes, owners and CEOs lose sight of the big picture. They focus more on themselves—how much money they make, how many years until they can retire or move on—that they stop making decisions based on the company’s good. They don’t want to invest in marketing, for instance, because that would mean spending money out of their retirement or justifying an expense to their Board of Directors. Is that you?

Some CEOs forget that the company depends on the people working for it. When you tell professionals how to do their jobs, you might as well be asking them to update their resume. Even in this economy, skilled marketers can find jobs.

Some CEOs are more interested in office politics than business results. They’re the kind of people who would rather market on billboards because they’re flashy and highly visible and easy for other CEOs and managers to understand, rather than market in online forums and social networks, because that’s not where the Board is, even if it’s where customers are.

A good CEO asks questions, finds out why a marketer wants to perform strategy A or strategy B. If they don’t understand, they ask more questions until it’s clear. They ask for the advantages and disadvantages. They ask for the upside and downside. A good marketer will tell them honestly and anticipate all the things that could go wrong or right. Then a good CEO says, go for it.

Filed under: Content Marketing, Content Strategy, Content Marketing, Content Strategy

Niche Audiences Need Custom Content

When content marketing fails, a post-mortem examination of why it failed should start with the content itself. One of the mistakes companies often make is producing content that has no value to its audience because the content is too generic to meet their needs.

B2B companies in particular make this mistake. Their marketing departments determine that their niche audience needs information on a topic, but the information they provide ends up repeating conventional wisdom instead of illustrating specific examples.

For example, let’s say you are a brewery. You determine that your audience of bar and restaurant owners need help with marketing themselves. So you decide to adopt a content marketing strategy and publish a series of articles on how social media can help their marketing.

Here’s where your company goes wrong: The articles you publish talk about what Twitter and Facebook, are, who founded them, etc. You include such riveting advice as “Don’t tweet what you had for lunch” and “Post regularly.”  There’s probably a Top Ten list or two thrown in there for good measure. The information you provided is already out there. It’s widespread. It’s not proprietary. Its value is minimal.

What your customers need are specific examples of what other companies in their industry are doing successfully and how they did it. In this case, track down the bar and restaurant owners who use social media tools successfully, find out how they did it, ask about their processes and how they keep to them. Ask questions that are specific to the industry itself. The more specific and aligned with what your customers do, the more valuable your content will be to them.

Filed under: Content Development, Content Marketing, Content Strategy, Content Development, Content Marketing, Content Strategy

Content Marketing Is Like Homebrewing

Besides content marketing, one of the things I’m really interested in is homebrewing. When I first started, every part of making beer was fun except sanitizing the equipment. Unfortunately, the quickest way to screw up a batch of beer is to use equipment that hasn’t been properly sanitized.

A lot of marketers have the same attitude toward writing. Creating  a campaign, setting a strategy and articulating goals are the fun parts for most marketers. Sitting down to write the actual content is the hard part. Unfortunately, the quickest way to screw up a content marketing plan is to use content that hasn’t been properly developed.

So, with apologies to author Charlie Papazian, I’d like to pass on some [modified] words from The Complete Joy of Homebrewing that I think should also serve as a mantra to content marketers and writers:

“[Writing good content] is one of the easiest and most fundamentally important things that you will do. If you do not take care to [write good content], the best [content marketing plan] in the world will result in disappointment. The thing to remember is to relax and not worry…do what must be done. It is easy. It is no big deal.”

By the way, I realize that writing and sanitizing equipment are two different things. One takes training and skill; the other is a task most anyone can do. But what I’m getting at is the importance of your attitude.  Most people are better writers than they think, and they have a lot more knowledge to share than they realize. The important part is to relax, not worry and start typing.

Filed under: Content Development, Content Marketing, Content Development, Content Marketing

Positioning and Strategy in Content Marketing

I sat in on an impromptu SWOT meeting last week. While I think SWOT exercises are useful, I don’t think many people understand how to use them effectively. For example, someone in our group suggested that our newsletters were a strength. I had to ask, what made him think that? The answer was, “Because they’re good.”

The thing about strategy and positioning, especially in content marketing, is this: Nothing you offer is inherently good or bad. What you offer—products and services—is only good or bad in relation to other products and competitors. You might have an awesome newsletter, but your competitor’s might be even more awesome.

When trying to create a strategy and position your content products, it helps to consider what your competitors are doing. Let’s say your competitor has a print newsletter. Starting with that fact now gives you a framework for making strategic decisions. For example, you can make the following choices:

Compete head-to-head: Start your own print newsletter. If you go this route, now’s the time to do a SWOT on your newsletters. Compared to your competitor, rank your design, editorial, circulation, etc. according to whether they are strengths or weaknesses. What are your opportunities and threats?

Compete with variation on the theme: Your competitor has a strong print newsletter? Instead of head-to-head competition, maybe a better strategic decision is to compete with an electronic newsletter.

Compete yin to yang: Delivery platforms like newsletters have advantage and disadvantages. Your competitor may have strong newsletters, but the kind of information they transmit is limited by the platform. Perhaps you should position yourself by supplying different types of content to the market. Be the source of other information and its most effective platforms. Instead of using newsletters to market, why not books, podcasts, blogs, video—things that are distinct from newsletters.

Filed under: Content Marketing, Content Strategy, Marketing Strategies Articles, Position Marketing, Content Marketing, Content Strategy

Local Businesses Need Content Marketing

If your business depends mostly on local customers, then you might not think the internet is that important to your marketing. Many owners of restaurants, bars, hair salons, car dealerships, auto mechanics, real estate agencies and so on think that the internet is only for big companies that reach national audiences. Or they think that new business comes from word-of-mouth and foot traffic. That’s simply not true.

People who use the internet use it for almost everything. It is their primary method of research on companies they might do business with, even if it’s the pizzeria down the street. The internet has replaced the Yellow Pages for many people. You have to be on the internet if you want customers to find you. Even if you reach them through traditional marketing methods, such as advertising, direct mail, radio and TV, once they learn about you, one of the first things they’re going to do is look you up on the internet.

Being on the internet is more than having a website. Your website should be filled with a lot of good information that will help prospective customers decide to use your products or services. Your website should also be organized and optimized for search engine optimization (SEO). The best thing you can do in this instance is to hire a good copywriter, someone who knows how to write persuasive copy that also incorporates keywords that your customers will use to find you.

In addition to keywords and persuasive copy, you also need relevant, valuable information. That means determining why and how prospective customers decide to use your business. If you’re a bar, for example, does your website clearly communicate what the experience will be like? Do you have photos of your interior? Do you have staff photos and bios? Do you have a signature drink? Is there live music or a DJ? How many TVs do you have? When is the best time to come if you want to be alone or if you want to be somewhere crowded? Do you have testimonials and reviews?

The type of content and frequency with which you post content makes an impression on prospective customers. If you have a sloppily designed and written website with missing or outdated information, customers will assume that your service is sloppy and careless. But if you have a simple and user-friendly website with trust-building content, it will drive new business your way.

Filed under: Content Marketing, Content Strategy, Marketing Strategies Articles, Content Marketing, Content Strategy

What Do Content Marketing Consultants Do?

Marketers work in an environment that’s constantly changing. What worked yesterday to build awareness and generate leads may not work tomorrow. Unfortunately, many marketers are used to what they know, and they find it difficult or risky to try something new. That’s where a good content marketing consultant comes into play.

Like any good consultant, a content marketing expert can bring fresh perspective and new ideas to your business practices. If your traditional approach isn’t producing the results it used to, then it may be time to try something different. Content marketing is one approach to achieving your sales objectives. It requires a different mindset than many traditional marketers are used to.

Hiring a content marketing expert is an opportunity to learn the principles behind the strategy. Once you’ve learned them from an expert, you will have more than one approach to marketing your products and services. Learning from an expert affords you the flexibility to choose whether a given campaign is best served by a content marketing strategy or a more traditional strategy.

My suggestion is that you start with a single product or service that you want to promote. Write a marketing plan for that product or service, including a budget. Then hire a content marketing consultant to write a separate marketing plan using the same budget. You might be surprised to find how different or similar your plans are.

Filed under: Content Marketing, Content Strategy, Content Marketing, Content Strategy

Why You Should Give Away Free Content

This post is for marketers and publishers who don’t believe there are any benefits to giving away free content. The truth is that giving away free content can be extremely effective, depending on your goals. Here are a few things that giving away free content can do:

Increase your market: If the content is valuable enough, it will get spread quickly and to a greater number of people than you could hope to reach through traditional means. Some of those people, if not most, must be hearing about your brand and products for the first time. Now that they know who you are, they’re viable prospects.

Raise your cachet: Let’s say you’re a trade association and one of the services you sell is a certification program for new employees. Normally, you charge companies for the educational material and the certification test. What if you gave the educational materials away for free but charged for the certification test? Wouldn’t it be a good thing if every company in your industry used your branded educational materials to train their employees, even if they didn’t pay for them? Wouldn’t it be a good thing to expand your market and raise your cachet?

Increase sales: You’ve developed a bigger market and your brand is familiar and trusted now. It has the cachet of an industry leader. If those two things don’t result in more sales, there’s something wrong with your organization. Maybe it’s your salespeople. Maybe it’s the rest of your products. I don’t know, but if valuable content gets your brand in the hands of more people, it should also result in more sales.

Here’s what you do:

Step 1: Develop the content you will give away for free. It has to be really good, valuable, relevant content. Avoid generic topics and superficial information.

Step 2: Make sure the content has your logo and contact information on it. Make sure people who read the content know it’s from you and how they can get in touch with you.

Step 3: Give it away. Let anyone and everyone who wants the content have it and use it for free. Include some terms: The content can’t be modified, and you have to be credited as the author. Other than that, let it go.

Step 4: Free doesn’t necessarily mean ‘free.’ You can distribute the content absolutely free, or you can ask prospects to give something up, namely their name, e-mail and other pertinent info you want to collect. Just remember that the more information you ask them to provide, the more valuable the information should be.

Step 5: If you’ve collected information, the next step is to follow up with information about your other products and services. Don’t be too aggressive. Just give your consumers the information and include a call to action. Don’t start barraging them with tons of e-mails, letters and phone calls.

Filed under: Content Marketing, Content Strategy, Content Marketing, Content Strategy