More and more business is done online. That’s why small business content marketing is essential for getting your message across — and for competing with others in your field.
More and more sales and marketing are done via the internet these days. There are growing numbers of people who are looking for you and your services or products via the internet.
Small business content marketing is the art and science of creating content via video, audio, or text – which attracts and enables customers to find you quickly. It also builds social proof and credibility for you and your business.
Small Business Content Marketing: Why Do It?
This question is about small business content marketing, and why it’s important.
I get asked this quite a lot and some of you are pretty savvy and you understand it. You understand the importance of having content on your website or online that depicts your business so that people can be attracted to your website or to sites that promote you.
And so you can get more business that way and more and more business is being done online these days. More and more people are finding or looking for businesses to do business with online. And that includes business to business as well as other forms of doing business.
I feel it’s more and more critical to understand this, at least start being aware of it, if not do something about it. The longer you wait the more difficult it will be to compete against people in your field, who’ve already got a huge start compared to you and this includes attorneys, CPAs, almost every field or solopreneurship, or small business that I can think of.
And I know some people are still poo-pooing it and, my invitation is to look at it and to look at it objectively, especially in the long-term it’s easy to look at it and look short-term and see there’s not much return, but you have to look at it in terms of the long-term. Most marketing really is about the long-term.
Small Business Content Marketing Means Thinking Statistically
And why is it important? The first distinction is that you want to learn to think more statistically, rather than intuitively. Now I must poo-pooing or saying intuitive thinking is wrong. I’m just saying sometimes you can be wrong about your intuition and some of you will say, I’m never wrong about my intuition.
No, it’s not true. You can be fooled by your intuition. In fact, it can be wrong even with statistical thinking or mathematical thinking, but you’ve got to have both why exclude?
You want to have more arsenal, weaponry, or tools in your chest, so why not have both statistical thinking and intuitive thinking. Statistical thinking involves looking at how things build over time. Small things can build to much bigger impacts or effects over time.
And the same applies to small business content marketing. So some of you may have nothing online right now. You may have a website, but it doesn’t have a lot to see on it.
And but if you think about it, the best way to compete with your competition, the first thing is to find out where your competition is online.
If you are, let’s say a financial planner living in Palo Alto, you do a search for financial planners in Palo Alto. Very simple. And if you go online and you do that, you will find out who your competition is fairly quickly, because Google is very fast to come up with search results in a split second.
Small Business Marketing Means Hanging Out on Google … And Exploring
And you’ll see a list of your competition. Now, if you look at some of that competition, I almost guarantee you perhaps not an example of Palo Alto because all my clients really dominate. But if you look at some of that competition in whatever area you may be in, you may notice that some of them really don’t have a very strong website.
It’s just that they were lucky enough to get their website posted early and they have some time on you. But the truth is they don’t have a lot of content and they don’t have a lot of keywords. For example, we are talking about financial planners who are looking for certain kinds of clients.
When potential clients look for them, they’ll find them now, but here’s the opportunity for you. If they only have a few articles pertaining to financial planning on their site and they only have a few paragraphs dedicated to financial planning, then if you created more paragraphs or more articles or more videos or more stuff either video or content or even audio for that matter.
If you created more of that stuff. And if you create audio with text underneath it, that has keywords and you do more of that than your competition, then mathematically speaking, nothing’s going to stop you or stop Google from starting to at least put more pressure on you and your company is showing up on the first page.
Small Business Content Marketing Takes Time and Consistency
Or even kicking off your competition from the first page. Now I’m not guaranteeing you all this, obviously, but I’m just saying mathematically, it makes more sense to do that. So you have to start thinking mathematically now. Now, is this a simple, easy solution? No, it’s not. It is in one sense because it’s mathematically just simple, but it takes time and energy, and effort.
So I know, and I understand that some of you have not done any kind of marketing. You haven’t changed your website, even, maybe even be scratching your head and asking me what is a website, and if you’re in those categories, fear not, because with time and with some proper guidance, you can actually get to a good position in Google on that first page and begin to get a lot more business than you are.
I know it’s certainly true for me, and it’s been true for quite a number of my clients who have really seriously taken it on. But again, we think about it, if your competition, on the first page has only three articles, then all you have to do is write four to start with.
If you add five more, you get nine. There’s again, more and more pressure to get you on that first page and kick off your competition. So I hope that makes sense in terms of thinking statistically you’re marketing versus intuitively. And of course, you need both to have a holistic marketing plan.
If you’d like help rethinking your marketing, contact me or follow me on LinkedIn.
Since 1991, I’ve been reflecting on, designing, and implementing methodologies and systems for bringing a transcendent, creative and innovative approach to critical aspects of entrepreneurship.
