Being a small business owner is a though and responsible task. Most often than not you are everything for the business. The CEO, the creative director, the bookkeeper, the marketing manager. Everything. And if you have an online small business, chances are, you will end up trying to reach your targeted audience. One of the best ways to do that is to try implementing content marketing in your efforts. In this article, we’ll cover the basics of content marketing and why it is important.
There is a name that most of the people, participating in any entrepreneurship community have heard. At least once. In one way or another. The holder of that widely recognized name is an American entrepreneur with Belarusian roots. Now famous as much for his entrepreneurial spirit, as he is for abilities to motivate people. Even further, he is more recognized as a ‘motivational speaker’ or ‘internet celebrity’ (as he is referred to in Wikipedia). This is the name of Gary Vaynerchuk.
Gary is surely a person from whom we all can learn a lot.
And when it comes to content marketing, Gary is the guy to learn from.
Of course, there are other excellent examples of entrepreneurs, that took advantage of the power of content marketing, but we’ll talk about that again a bit later in the section about content marketing examples.
But first, let’s find out more about content marketing!
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Content Marketing Definition
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
This definition was given by the Content Marketing Institute
Why is Content Marketing Important
Content marketing is a refined marketing tactic, that is not trying to create a demand for a new and unknown product or service. When creating content for your potential and current customers, you are showing them that you know, you understand, and are an expert that is able to help, to give advice.
Therefore, as you can presume from the last sentence, you are building trust between your company and its customers.
While the market gets more and more saturated, people are not believing in the common advertising (although it still gives results when done properly), and in most of the industries, there are ‘behemoths’ that are way too well known by the audience.
But while some of these ‘behemoths’ are giving their best to teach their customers, and to be valuable, in other industries this is just not happening.
And even if there are some that are doing it in your chosen industry, you can do it locally, better, are more sincerely. Each of which will give results.
Here is the answer to the question why is content marketing important.
David could beat Goliath.
Content Marketing Examples
As already mentioned, the first example, that has a lot to learn from is the WineLibrary, created by Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary’s father had a liquor store in Springfield, New Jersey. Vaynerchuk junior assumed day-to-day control over the shop, once he graduated from college in 1998.
The year of 2006 was the year when Gary started the webcast, named WineLibrary. Thanks to his content marketing efforts – the daily webcast covering wine – Gary grew his father’s business from $3 million to $60 million.
Of course, we can all see that Gary had a business worth $3 million, but the equipment and the actual content creation was not expensive at all.
Gary was filming himself and was talking about the wines that his shop was selling.
No extra expenses, no staff, no nothing.
And that was years ago.
Nowadays, you can film yourself with your phone’s camera and to get a pretty decent video quality even with the budget phones.
Another great example of content marketing implementation is the Blendtec’s ‘Will It Blend?’ series.
The owner and founder of Blendtec – Tom Dickson – was unable to market his product. Therefore, he hired a marketing consultant. Because of the small budget that Dickson had, the consultant told him to create a short video, showing what his blender is capable of.
In the first video, uploaded 11 years ago (it is 2018 in the time of writing of this article) on YouTube, Dickson is blending marbles.
The company was featured in the CNBC’s series “How I made My Million” in its 21st episode, named Mix Master – Blentec, Dickson shares what resources he used to create the “Will It Blend” campaign.
Those are two of the best content marketing examples. They are easily showing how much you can achieve and how little (financial) investment.
SEO & Content Marketing
There is a widely spread misunderstanding about the relationship between SEO & content marketing. Most people believe that SEO and content marketing are the same things. And although in most cases people that are implementing content marketing in their efforts, are doing so, only to be able to optimize some content and get higher in the SERP, this is hardly the truth.
Content marketing is able to live without the content being optimized for the search engines. On the other hand, the lack of content is making it impossible to optimize. Thus, SEO is a technique, that compliments your content marketing, but is unable to fully replace it.
Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses
The number one thing that you need to bear in mind is never to forget that content marketing is just one of the possible marketing techniques.
And even if you decide to rely only on content marketing, there are more factors that you need to consider. Like, the channels you will use. The type of content you will create.
You can rely on text, video, audio, imagery content, or any combination of these main content types.
Once you’ve built your content strategy, you need to follow the planned schedule.
And, of course, the hardest question that needs to be answered is what type of content, you need to create. But that is a question that only you – the business owner could possibly answer. You know your business, you know your clients, your personal strengths, and weaknesses – thus, what you are able and unable to do and stick with.
To get your content viral, it should be:
- Crafted with care
- Valuable
- Entertaining
In conclusion…
To be able to take advantage of any marketing tactic, you need to get to know it and to understand it well enough. When it comes to content marketing, what you surely need to know is, what kind of content you are about to create, and, of course, where you are about to promote that content.
