When it comes to content marketing, many small businesses may scoff at the idea. It’s just blogging, right? We’ve tried that and it doesn’t work. Well, as it turns out, there's a lot more to content marketing than writing a 150-word post about your latest sale or industry award.
Below are three great examples of content marketing done right by small businesses.
Oak Tree Animals Charity
People love animals. Oak Tree Animals in Cumbria know this, so they put the animals front and centre. Their social media (yep, that’s content marketing!) is regularly updated with images and videos of their residents and people go crazy for it. The posts are not only cute but effective.
As a charity, rather than a for-profit business, ensuring engagement is vital. If nobody knows the charity is there, they can't visit or donate.
With a regular flow of content in the form of videos and fantastic content on the charity itself, they drive a regular flow of traffic to their online donation page via calls to action.
Your business might not have animals on your side, but this is a great example of taking the part of your business that people are most interested in and ensuring you push it with a regular stream of social media-friendly content.
Yale Appliance
A perfect example of content marketing for a pretty dry subject. Appliances might not be as exciting or people-friendly as animals, but people ultimately need them. People also need advice on the best appliances to buy and how to use them when they’re dropped off at their door.
Boston, US-based Yale Appliance knows this, and have optimised their blog by regularly pumping out useful, informative content. The company has clearly done their research and are targeting terms people are searching for, positioning themselves as product experts and increasing their clout in the eyes of potential customers.
As we’ve written previously, it isn’t enough to just write about things you think your customers are searching for. You need to do your keyword research and start hitting the terms your customers are actually using.
Kissmetrics
OK, Kissmetrics aren’t exactly a ‘small company’ any more, but an impressively detailed and effective content marketing strategy was vital for this company’s traffic growth. It caught the attention of SEO guru Neil Patel, and the blog itself was eventually sold to him for $500,000.
This web analytics tool is very useful for businesses, but beyond that, its success is partly due to the company’s focus on a strong content marketing strategy. Forgoing paid traffic, Kissmetrics managed to reach more than a million unique visitors in just 10 months. They did this via effective, informative content geared towards CEOs, marketing executives and business managers and the habits of their customers.
As well as this content, the company also offered free webinars to readers, giving them a reason to stick around, and come back. Offering potential customers useful free resources is a vital part of content marketing, and something we’ll discuss in another blog.
Content (done right) is king
These are just a few examples from a range of businesses that illustrate the effectiveness of content marketing… done right. You can’t keep writing the same dry blogs and expect something to change.
Your blogs need to informative, interesting, and well-targeted, all at once. Not everyone is a born writer, however, and it can be difficult to strike this balance - or even find time to blog at all - when you're a manager with a thousand other priorities.
I've been creating effective, persuasive content and copy for years. I can work with you to identify your target market and what they want out of your content, then create it for you, saving you time, money, and effort.
If you want to start ramping up or optimising your content output, why not take a look at my portfolio to see how I can help, or get in touch and let's chat.
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