Why Content Marketing is the ideal choice for small businesses with limited budget

If you’re a small business and you only sell to a local area. Local SEO is probably still within your budget. For the majority SEO in its entire entity (on-site SEO, link building, content etc) is simply becoming too expensive, due to the vast amount of competition and the dominance at the top by the big brands.

In an ideal world your business will run like a smoothly oiled machine, with your yearly marketing/SEO budget being set to one side, with no detrimental concerns to the company if certain targets aren’t met. In reality, many are frantically looking for where they can make their next sale, online being an obvious choice, and rightly so, but with niches getting saturated and Google having only so many ‘top spots’ its fast becoming an undeniably hard challenge.

I do find the businesses I work with, which do have a dedicated SEO budget, perform so much better than those that don’t. If your business relies solely on successful SEO, I would say don’t commit to SEO in the first place, as there are no guarantees and it is not worth risking your entire business for. That sentence might sound like I don’t have confidence in the SEO we perform. I do. Your business is just never going to work if your chasing rankings using funds which the business needs to function.

Quality visits don’t just come from your main keywords

Clients are slowly becoming more susceptible to the fact that rankings, especially for head key terms aren’t everything. Reporting back on data from Google Analytics, such as landing pages and referral’s can really help back this up and show you that long tail searches are the new traffic driver for those that dont have a powerful site. An effective optimisation method for those with a small budget is content marketing , and I would like to share an example with you, for those that don’t know what this is.

Content marketing example

We worked with a client called booost oxygen. They sell ‘oxygen in a can’. This oxygen is used by serious sports athletes to help them perform better and recover quicker. The dilemma they had in terms of search, was that being a relatively new product, no-one knew about it, so people weren’t searching for what it was “oxygen in a can’ or ‘sports oxygen’  . The people this product suited would search “bodybuilding supplements” or “sports supplements”  which are very competitive key terms which would require a big budget to compete for.

We put a content plan together aimed at tackling this audience. Here are some examples of the articles we produced.

http://www.booostoxygen.com/blog/bodybuilding/free-bodybuilding-supplement-samples/

http://www.booostoxygen.com/blog/bodybuilding/bodybuilding-supplements-cutting-bulking/

The articles inform and educate people looking for helpful tips and information on there sport, whilst also informing them of this new supplement. The above examples were a huge success and gain high search engine rankings for searches such as “best supplements for cutting” and “free bodybuilding samples”

The free bodybuilding samples is an interesting one. It receives over 1000 visits every month and contributes to the hundreds of emails booost get, asking for a sample (great for data capture too!) There were already many websites which have provided a list of free samples, but we went that bit further, we gave reasons why it’s beneficial to trial first, we provided a more detailed list of where to visit, explaining what samples they had available. We then provided an additional list with even more places you could visit . We also reached out to the readers to say, if you know of anywhere missing off our list, we want to know about it, please send details and we will add it in. Going this extra mile with your content is what really gets results.

Although the page does attract a lot of people who just want a freebie and by providing this list on where you can get free samples, we are also telling people where else they can go to get other similar/alternative products, but we have managed to get the brand in front of the right audience, which was the objective. Many become intrigued by the product once they read up on it and then share their newly found product with friends or colleagues. Getting into the mindset of helping rather than selling will generate more sales!

Why choose content marketing as a viable marketing option

Content Marketing suits small businesses with limited budget because, you, the business owner are the catalyst! You know your industry, you know what questions your potential customers want answering, you can write this content, saving money. Working alongside an agency such as ourselves will ensure you are creating content in the right way and that the content will be promoted, whether it be via search engines, your social media audience or via influential external sites and blogs.