7 Reasons Why Your Small Business Needs Content Marketing

Lots of small businesses have problems with sales. Entrepreneurs often don’t know how to sell the products. They have a few options:

• Cold calling
• Advertising on Google Ads and Facebook Ads
• Content marketing
• Email marketing

Personally, I think content marketing is the best way to scale your business because once you build an authoritative domain, your business will have lots of leads and potential clients.

In this blog post, I will give you 7 reasons why small businesses need to invest in content marketing today.

Let’s start and stop losing the money!

#1 Generate More Leads

There’s no better medium than a blog for your content marketing efforts.

In fact, B2C companies that blog generate 88% more leads per month than those who don’t blog.

I think you don’t need a better reason why you need content marketing.

The biggest problem with content marketing is that it takes time because your blog won’t be visited so many times when the content marketing journey starts.

Cost per lead is very important because it makes no sense to acquire leads for costs higher than gross margin you have.

Blogs, social media, and SEO have the lowest below average cost per lead, according to HubSpot, which is another reason why you need content marketing.

Imagine what you can do once you achieve 100,000 visitors to your blog.

What do you think how many leads you could be able to collect? Capterra claims that you should be able to collect up to 7% leads.

Based on my experience, that’s too much, and I believe that 3% is the more realistic expectation.

So, if you got 100,000 visitors and 3% lead rate, it means that you got 3,000 potential customers each month, or 36,000 potential customers each year.

If you convert 10% of them, that’s 3,600 new customers every month. Depending on the type of the business model you have, subscription business seems to be amazing.

#2 Better Google Rankings

Content marketing will boost your Google rankings. The photo below shows you SERP of the Paulo Coelho The Alchemist query.

If you take a look carefully, you’ll see that E-commerce products don’t have lots of backlinks, and we know backlinks are still the most important ranking factor.

Unless you are an Amazon. Their products got lots of backlinks.

If you do content marketing, your blog posts will acquire backlinks easier than any other page on the site, and as the consequence, your Domain Authority will definitely be increased.

DA is the metric which estimates how well a domain may rank in Google results. In order to get first Google positions, average content length matters too.

SerpIQ claims that top ranked pages have a total length of at least 2,450 words.

Writing articles with such content length is not an easy task, but it’s surely achievable.

For example, it takes me between 8 and 10 hours to write 2,000 words article.

When you start with content marketing, you’ll write slowly, but as time goes on, you’ll see how your effectiveness increases.

Next, you need to be very patient with content marketing and Google rankings.

Here’s what Dorie Clark said for Jellymetrics:

One post, or 10 posts, or 100 posts probably won’t make much of a dent in raising your profile, or your company’s. But 300 or 500 or 1000 will, and very few people are willing to commit to that.

You’ll definitely see lots of benefits once you write 300 posts on your company’s blog.

As you now probably understand, content marketing and SEO are closely related to each other. They are like pizza and ketchup, or like New Year Eve and fireworks.

Without content, there’s no SEO. Without SEO, there are no visitors and your content is useless.

#3 Brand Awareness

Content marketing is great for increasing brand awareness. If there’s no content marketing, how else potential clients could learn more about the brand?

They could, but it would cost you a lot. According to WordStream, clicks on Google AdWords may cost you up to $5.99.

Of course, it depends on the industry you work in, but the point is that AdWords is definitely more expensive than content marketing.

On the other side, it gives you faster results. Placing an ad today means that you’ll see the results immediately.

However, the blog is just one medium where you can put your content. Maybe you could consider other sites and services as well.

For example, Medium is a great platform for sharing your content. The trick with Medium is that it has a Domain Authority of 92 which means medium.com ranks highly in Google SERP.

Simply said, this way you can increase the company’s brand awareness. YouTube is also a great platform for sharing the content.

Producing a professional video is not so cheap, but it’s worth because an average YouTube video has a total of 8,332 views.

That’s just an average number of video views, so the real number of videos could be increased if you apply small YouTube SEO tricks.

Google tends to embed videos in the following types of queries:

• How-to videos
• Review videos
• Tutorial videos

Here’s a classic how-to query and its embedded videos.

This is great for increasing brand awareness, isn’t it?

#4 Boost Email Marketing

Maybe you don’t know this, but email marketing is still the most important marketing channel when comparing it with marketing channels. It has the best ROI.

Every $1 invested in email marketing should result in $40 in revenues. The biggest email marketing challenge is earning new subscribers.

After that, increasing open rates and creating compelling content.

Although there are many ways how you can earn new subscribers, the biggest problem with acquiring new subscribers is that it takes too much time.

Content is surely the best way to acquire new subscribers, but increasing total number of visitors is that what takes time.

Here are some ideas how you can build an email list. Firstly, you can try with content upgrades.

Identify top visited blog posts and add an extra piece of content which is available only if the user writes an email address.

Content upgrades are the most efficient way for acquiring new subscribers. Next, you can create a free tool like HubSpot.

In order to get results, you users have to write an email address.

Developing a tool like this won’t cost you too much because a developer can code in less than 100 hours. If you don’t have coding skills, you can always hire a freelancer on sites like Freelancer.com or Upwork.com.

How many subscribers will actually visit a landing page doesn’t depend only on the number of the subscribers. It also depends on the number of sent monthly campaigns.

Sending too many newsletters will result in a decreased click rate because subscribers get bored, but if you don’t send enough newsletters, there won’t be chances for users to click.

Trust me, email marketing is incredibly great for small businesses.

#5 Social Shares

People love great content and they want to share it. There are various factors that may have an impact on the number of shares, and content length is one of them.

Articles with more than 3,000 words definitely have a higher number of average shares.

I don’t need to mention (again) that in-depth articles tend to acquire more backlinks and how they rank better in the SERP.

Different social networks work for different types of businesses. Running fashion store means that Facebook and Pinterest are the best social networks for sharing the content.

LinkedIn is horrible for B2C but works great for B2B. According to the photo above, if your business is providing services or products to other businesses, then LinkedIn and Twitter are the best social media for sharing the content.

It makes complete sense because, as you know, LinkedIn is something like Facebook for business.

Take a look at the following photo, and you’ll understand why LinkedIn matters. In the United States, almost half of the population is registered on LinkedIn. Incredible numbers.

So, there’s no better way to promote a B2B content than LinkedIn. Business owners don’t need to wait for other visitors to share the content, they can promote the content by itself.

Imagine that you’ve created an app that marketers can use to improve their content marketing efforts. So in the search box, enter content marketing and click on Groups about Content Marketing.

There, you’ll (obviously) see groups about content marketing. Next, join the group and share your content there.

Keep in mind that you need to follow LinkedIn Terms of Service (no spam), but also, group owner’s rules. The best way to promote the business is to involve yourself in the discussions.

This way, you can drive tons of visitors to your site, but you need to have a quality content so you have something to promote.

#6 Keeps Your Website Fresh

Keeping your website fresh is definitely what your business need. Here’s the photo from HubSpot which shows you how publishing more than 16 blog posts per month increases the traffic.

Not only because of Google, it’s also because of social networks.

Who wants to see the same article in the news feed on Facebook each day? According to ImageBox, the freshness of content started to be important to Google in 2011.

Google likes when you frequently publish new blog posts because they want to provide the fresh and relevant information to your customers.

Users that are researching the Internet about building a new house are probably more interested in articles that are published in 2017, than articles from 2012.

Next, more content means more long-tail keywords.

In fact, publishing new (in-depth) content means you will target lots of long-tail keywords. How else could you increase the traffic if not publishing frequently? No other way.

#7 More Authority

I’ve already been writing about Domain Authority, but here, I’m not talking about that authority. I’m talking how sharing wonderful pieces of content will increase your company’s authority.

According to IronPaper, 80% of people appreciate learning about a company through custom content.

Imagine that you run an Google Ads agency and you share everything you know. Well, now you probably think why would someone hire you if you reveal all secrets you know?

You’re not charging Google Ads services, you’re charging your time. People will consider you as a true expert, and they will be interested in your services.

They know that you are someone who has the knowledge. That’s the point of content marketing. It’s interesting to see how digital marketing industry is one of the friendliest industries.

What do you think which industry is the opposite? Probably pharmacy. They’re not interested in sharing their knowledge.

But medicine - yes! Every medical center in the world should do content marketing. You probably know that Cleveland Hospital Center is one of the best medical centers in the world.

Content is what increases their authority because they share lots of their knowledge on their website. Take a look at the following photo.

The truth is that Cleveland Hospital Center has more 2.05 visitors each month.

Patients will respect them because they know (thanks to content marketing) their knowledge is amazing.

Conclusion

Now you should understand why content marketing matters so much. If you’re not writing the content on your blog, you should definitely start.

I know it might be frustrating because 25 or 50 articles may not bring great success, but after 200 or 300 articles, you’ll definitely have something valuable.

In fact, if you don’t have enough money for investing in Google Ads, then you can’t do anything else to scale your business. I mean, you can’t call other businesses by phone and offer your services.

That’s not the way how you scale the business. Furthermore, it’s less applicable in the B2C model. Everything is up to you - will you succeed or not. Content marketing is ready to help!