4 Benefits of Content Marketing for Small Businesses

It’s tough out there for new businesses. Without a massive budget for marketing and advertising, how are you supposed to attract new customers?

With enough time, dedication, and creativity, you can use content marketing to gain visibility, differentiate yourself, and build trust with potential customers.

You’ve probably heard a lot of hype around content marketing but aren’t entirely convinced it can work for you. This post highlights some of the most important benefits of content marketing for small businesses and explains how you can use this tactic to your advantage.

4 Important Benefits of Content Marketing

The following four insights are bound to sell any small business owner on the importance of content marketing:

1. Content Marketing Improves Search Engine Optimization

You need to rank for various keywords related to your business to capture search traffic. But you can’t just stuff all your desired keywords onto a single page and hope for the best. That is called keyword stuffing, and it will eventually hurt your rankings.

Instead, you need to create a separate page for each keyword (or group of keywords) for which you want to rank and develop an internal linking strategy. The best way to do that is through blogging and other forms of content marketing. This allows you to go beyond small paragraphs of homepage copy and add long-form content to your website without affecting the user experience.

To put it simply: more content = more keyword opportunities.

2. Content Marketing is Educational for Your Audience

Providing educational content on your website is necessary for small businesses that want to be trustworthy. The benefits of educating your audience are twofold:

You get to capture some of that search traffic
You get to build trust and credibility with potential customers

Research shows that 81% percent of consumers do research online before making a purchase. If your customers can’t get the information they are looking for from you, they will get it from someone else. Your chances of winning their business are significantly smaller if that happens.

It’s also important to show that you are a legitimate business that knows what its customers want, just like if you were to walk into a store and ask an associate about the differences between two products, you would expect them to tell you. If they can’t tell you what the difference is, that store would not seem credible, and you would probably go somewhere else.

People research products and businesses because they want to feel confident and well-informed. Content marketing aims to help your audience make better decisions by providing them with the educational content they are looking for.

Simply put, confident shoppers are more likely to spend than those who are “still thinking about it.”

3. Content Marketing Establishes You as an Authority in Your Field

The easiest way to sell something is by building a brand. People want to do business with someone who has core values to which they can relate. They also want to know that they are getting the best, so you have to show them why you are the best at what you do.

Whether creating a business brand or a personal brand, authority is everything. Positioning yourself as an expert or a thought leader in your industry is a great way to stand out from the competition and appeal to consumers.

An excellent long-term content marketing strategy can help you achieve this status, regardless of your business’s size. You can do this by appearing in industry publications, guesting on other blogs or podcasts, and generally providing insights whenever and wherever you can.

4. Content Marketing Helps Level the Playing Field

Your small business wouldn’t stand a chance against the industry’s giants if you relied solely on traditional marketing methods such as ads. However, you don’t need to spend a fortune on ads to feature at the top of Google’s organic SERPs – you only need a smart content marketing strategy.

Sure, it’s a lot of work to build and maintain a long-term content strategy, but if you can stomach it, you have a shot at competing with more prominent companies in your space. It’s more cost-effective than constantly running ads, and it provides a consistent source of leads over a more extended period.

Harness the Benefits of Content Marketing

When done right, content marketing can turn your website into a primary source of leads for your business. But it takes time, patience, and dedication to reach its full potential.

To learn more about the different tactics you can use to grow your small business, download your free Growth Stack guide below.