Content Marketing How-to Guide for Small Business

Content Marketing How-to Guide for Small Business

Content marketing is offering valuable content (articles, reports, eBooks) on your website and/or blog and through outbound marketing activities like email newsletters and direct mail to attract people to visit your website. The content can be open access (free) or premium content that people pay for to download or to subscribe to.

Content marketing can be educational or entertaining. YouTube is content marketing and so is a blog from an attorney explaining an aspect of contract law.

One approach that is particularly effective for content marketing is what we refer to as "edu-tainment". That is content that is educational and entertaining in how it's presented. That could be done through videos, games and interactive learning techniques that make it fun for people to learn something. Imagine if this article on MarketingZone.com had videos from experts in marketing from big companies who shared their expertise. Those experts couldn't (or wouldn't) have the time to visit every small business Chamber of Commerce or SCORE workshop in every town across the nation but they could create a powerful video like a talk they'd give at one of those meetings and "scale" it to reach millions and millions of people who would appreciate their advice. That builds goodwill for a brand and new business leads for a company.

Content Marketing Ideas - sometimes it's easier to understand something and figure out how you can apply this to your business when you see examples and get ideas of how you can use content marketing.

Content marketing

The purpose of offering content (articles) is to attract website visitors

TIP: Think of content marketing like a trade show. People come to a big trade show and you want as much "share of time" as you can get from customers and prospects. How can you do that? Have a live show or demonstration; offer food and/or drinks and places for people to sit down; bring in experts they'll want to talk to and learn from. On a website, content marketing is trying to engage people at all stages of the learning-purchase process and then building their loyalty by sharing valuable information to help them after they've purchased. For instance, a large bank may have millions of visitors to their website but those people are very "transactional" (they do their banking and bolt). To get customers to stick around, what information could they offer that would be considered valuable?

Content marketing is similar to article marketing

Article marketing is posting articles on other sites. Content marketing is posting articles on your website or blog to attract visitors. One is pushing your content and advice out; the other is pulling people into your site directly by writing content that will be found by people searching online.

Article marketing is a low-cost and effective way to be seen as an expert on a topic, to boost website traffic and search ranking. Article marketing is the practice of submitting short (400-700 word), original and useful articles with tips or other insider information to article directories. These articles all have an author byline and links back to a website or blog where people can learn more or "get the rest of the story."

Learn how to do Article Marketing

Content marketing is writing articles and advice that is credible and helpful to people. People pay for magazines, newsletters and subscriptions to online sites because they view this information to be credible. Marketers can shift from being "sellers" to "consultants" to attract more visitors to their website by writing how-to guides and reviews to help people earlier in the purchase process. And to attract people back to a website after they've purchased.

How the Customer's Purchase Process is Influenced by Social Media will help you think through the different opportunities to intersect people
Helping Prospects at All Stages of the Purchase Process

TIP: The Challenger Sale is a book for sales people based on research for how to sell more. The key insight from the book, which is based on research, is that the best sales people teach people something new. They get them to think. The best content marketing needs to do the same thing: add value.

MarketingZone blog Book Review: The Challenger Sale

Next page - how to get content marketing done and cautions about content marketing you want to know about

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