Content marketing is an excellent way to show off your expertise through thoughtful, actionable articles. It also can lead readers into your sales funnel in a low-pressure manner.
To learn how to take advantage of content marketing in your small business, we asked members from the Young Entrepreneur Council this question:
Q. How has content marketing helped your business's reputation, as well as sales? Do you have a specific anecdote that speaks to this?
1. We attract customers without a pushy sales pitch
Through content marketing, we are able to reach out to and attract new customers without a pushy sales pitch. Customers are able to learn what our company does and the benefits we can provide for them instead of the other way around. Consumers today are savvy and have plenty of resources at their fingertips; content has been a way for us to explain what we do and how we can help solve problems. —Dave Nevogt, Hubstaff.com
2. I've been published hundreds of times
Content marketing has been a primary strategy for growing my businesses. In fact, I've been published over 325 times in the last three years, thereby earning hundreds of backlinks to my various businesses via my byline. Internally we call this process "SEO PR," because not only are we increasing our domain authority via links back to our site, but we are drumming up new business via public relations. —Kristopher Jones, LSEO.com
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3. We offer an e-book in exchange for an email address
We've created articles that are highly relevant to our audience, which helps us to come up on search engines when people are searching for different topics. This in turn shows our relevance and drives free traffic to our site. We've also created high-value e-books that we offer to site visitors in exchange for their email addresses. We’ve nurtured and acquired a lot of our users this way. —Mark Krassner, Expectful
4. I communicate who I am to my audience
If you are able to communicate well with the people who you know are going to read your content, you will increase sales and promotion. From my side, I try to focus on generating as much value as possible within the content. I like telling stories that are easy to relate to and flow well into content. As such, people have been able to learn quite a bit about me, my ethics, and values in business. —Nicole Munoz, Start Ranking Now
5. We create content that answers sales questions
As a content marketing agency, we have to do what we sell. It helps us in the sales process when we can point to our own content, be it webinars, e-books or blog posts. For the biggest impact, we focus our content topics on questions and challenges our prospects face. This allows us to answer their questions and show how we effectively use content marketing to promote our business. —Dan Golden, BFO (Be Found Online)
6. We publish content to establish credibility
We write content regarding startups, mobile apps, and web and cloud technology on our site and other media outlets. I have had several customers tell me that they read our article before they called us; they were convinced about our expertise once they read our content. Our content helps our clients to form an opinion about us. We publish three to four articles a month to increase our conversions. —Piyush Jain, Simpalm
7. We offer niche advice
We provide custom programming that can be integrated on any e-commerce platform. Even though our custom solutions can be integrated on any platform, we create content specific to each individual e-commerce platform to promote these solutions. Since the content we publish is relevant to specific platforms, we have been able to increase authority and establish ourselves as experts in each platform. —Duran Inci, Optimum7
8. We create product guides
A year ago, we published instructions on how to use our products; we didn't expect it to get much traction. This year 25% of our organic traffic comes from those instruction guides alone. We hadn't realized it, but before then nobody had ever taken the time to describe how our products should be used. Because it is old technology, the market assumed it wasn't needed. As a result, our sales and reputation have grown. —Diego Orjuela, Cables & Sensors
9. We make our topics interesting and accessible
In a traditionally "boring" niche, we chose to stand out with content marketing—putting time and resources into making payment processing more interesting and accessible for business owners. We're thought leaders, not just merchant services providers. From sales videos to blogs and more, we're able to support every aspect of the sales funnel with strategic content—which is pretty exciting. —Suneera Madhani, Fattmerchant
10. Our behind-the-scenes case study draws positive feedback and interest
When I started a second business, we documented our entire growth strategy from day one. After eight months, we turned that into a 9,000-word article and featured it prominently on our site. Almost every day, we get positive feedback about the case study from new prospects who visit the site and contact us. It's helped to increase trust and conversions in one fell swoop. —Ajay Paghdal, OutreachMama
RELATED: 4 Ways to Produce Better Content and Stand Out From the Crowd
