Small business owners often wonder if they should be using content marketing.

They’ve heard that content marketing can help with conversion and lead generation, but they don’t understand how it works.

Does this sound like you?

If so, it’s important that you keep reading so you’ll have a better understanding of content marketing for small businesses.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is promoting blog posts, articles, whitepapers, and other types of content online.

As the content is being marketed, the business also receives attention. Businesses indirectly reap the benefits of content marketing.

How It Works

Every business owner should have a blog. This blog is the platform to publish content. This can be text, images, videos, or even audios.

Posting regularly to the blog will build a library on the site. The more content a site has, the more traffic it receives.

Blogs generate 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links.

As a business owner publishes posts, he will share them on social media. This can be on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. These are the most popular social media networks for business owners, so it’s important to be active on them by sharing content and engaging with followers.

It’s also important to market content in email newsletters. This brings website visitors back to the site to possibly make a purchase.

Sharing content in groups and on forums is another good idea.

Use content as a way to help people who have the same interests. When they realize a business owner has knowledge, they will likely return to the site for more and that could lead them to buy services or products.

Why Small Businesses Need to Market Content

When a small business owner develops a website, puts his services and products on it for sale, and publishes the site, search engines crawl and index it in search engine results pages.

Without content, a site doesn’t have much value to Internet users.

It has services and products, but consumers these days want more from businesses. They want guidance, information, and support. Search engines know this, and they will show more of their users sites that give people what they want.

That’s why a website with only products and services will usually not receive much traffic. It competes with sites that have services and products AND content.

Not only does content help with search engine ranking, but it’s also used to drive traffic from social media. As mentioned above, content should be shared on social networks. When social media users see the content, they may click on it to go to the site, or they may share it with others.

This increases the chances of many other people seeing the content. The more people who see it, the more people will come to your website who may turn into buyers.

Why can’t you just share your business’s website? Social media users do not want to read advertisements in their newsfeed. This is why Facebook changed its algorithm to decrease the reach of pages, especially those belonging to businesses.

The content posted on social media must be informational and/or entertaining. It must be valuable to people, or they won’t engage with it. Engaging means clicking on the links, commenting on it, liking it, or sharing it with their followers.

Start Driving More Business

Content is the new billboard.

Businesses need content to grab people’s attention online. Without it, people will turn to other businesses because they feel as though they receive more for their money.

They feel as though the business owner has a lot to offer in addition to the products and services.

Conclusion

Give your consumers something more today. Start a blog and publish posts daily. Market that content and before you know it, you’ll see much more traffic and probably an increase in revenue.