Content Will Grow Your Business, No Matter The Size Of It

In the world of digital marketing, there are so many options to choose from for your business. But what’s the right one?

Although we’re a content writing agency, we’re multi skilled. That means we’re a team of experienced writers and digital marketers. We love all things creative and digital!

During our time as a company, we’ve worked with businesses of all sizes. Small, medium, and global brands. We’ve seen what works and we’re proud to be behind those successes.

Any experienced marketer will also admit that they’ve also seen what hasn’t worked in the past, which is also a good marketing lesson that every marketer needs to experience.

Whether you’ve been researching search engine optimisation, email marketing, paid advertising, print marketing or social media, there are many other factors to think about other than those options.

• Will you be going for organic success?
• Will you be boosting and promoting your content?
• What is the message you’ll be putting out on your marketing?
• Who is it you’re trying to talk to?
• What even is your budget?

Before you get around to answering those questions, you really need to work out your budget and also figure out what your message is in your marketing.

If you don’t have a content plan in place, that’s your first hurdle to get over right there. Once you have that, then you can think about the best way to get the message out.

Digital marketing options for small to medium budgets

Getting your business online is one thing, but marketing it and seeing real results is another. Being online isn’t enough anymore.

With a small to medium budget, you can still do digital marketing, but you need to be clever about it. Don’t blow your budget on something like paid advertisement on Google or social media – your best friend is the long game. And by long game we mean creating content and growing your business the organic way.

By ‘organic’ we mean creating content and publishing it without money behind it to make it appear. Basically, avoid things like Google ads, Facebook paid boosts etc. They will use up your budget fast.

Here is what you should do as a small – medium business with a restricted marketing budget.

Website content production and SEO – our top recommendation

Content is the perfect focus for anyone with a small – medium marketing budget. Content costs 62% less than traditional marketing, but generates 3 times as many leads!

The return on investment in content writing is huge.

Content production, content creation, content writing or copywriting, whatever you want to call it, it’s the most cost effective way to take your business to the next level.

And synonymous to writing content on your website, it will boost your search engine optimisation (SEO). FYI – SEO is the process of getting your website found by your customers on Google search.

When we say website content production, we are referring to main website copy, blog posts, landing pages, and guest posting. These types of content are essential to effective SEO.

A good backlog of content like this can push your website to the number one rank better than any other.

The overall strategy for writing content for your website for SEO is part of what’s called your content marketing strategy. And best of all – content is the most cost effective marketing approach to marketing.

Once you invest in content, it stays there to continue being found online by your customers. This is why it has such a great return on investment.

Unsure if content writing will build brand credibility and generate you sales leads?

Our clients have trusted content and they’re flying now!

Take Lucky Beans Childcare – before working with us, they had no visibility online and didn’t get any enquiries.

Totally different story now. A year in, this is their achievements:

• 102.43% improvement in organic traffic.
• Ranking page 1 for multiple keywords.
• SEO enabled Lucky Beans to open and fill an additional four child nurseries across Norbury, Balham, Tooting and Streatham.

That bottom point is HUGE. They actually got more parents reaching out to them from their website and have been able to continuously open more nurseries across South West London. Amazing result!

Make sure to check our their full SEO content case study.

Social media

Social media is absolutely essential in marketing today.

It’s easy to set up a profile on various platforms, and you don’t have to pay anything to put posts out there. And seeing as literally billions of people use a form of social media, you’re sure to find your audience there.

We’re not talking about paid advertisement on social media here, we’re talking about posting on social media regularly with organic posts. Post content that your audience will find interesting regularly, and in no time, you will get interactions.

Creating good quality (not waffle and pointless content) social media content consistently is a challenge.

It takes patience, but if you stick to it you can really build a following. In fact, I’ve taken social media accounts from 0 followers to 5,000+.

Email

Setting up a mailing list can help you to stay in touch with customers, both past and present. It’s a way to ‘directly’ market to the right people. And you can be sure of this, because the emails signed up to the list are already aware of you as a business and are interested in what you’re offering.

Overall email marketing is an effective way to bring your business straight to a customer’s door and keep in touch with them with relevant, worthwhile content.

It can be hard to build your audience using email alone, but if you work on your website’s SEO, you can grow your email list over time.

Content is what makes your digital marketing work or not

Despite their cost and outreach differences, all of the above marketing methods have one thing in common: they need content.

Without high quality content, any promotion you do via the above methods won’t go very far. There won’t be anything interesting to click on, read or guide your user into action.

Of course, there are other elements involved. The budget you’re working with is a big one, as is the targeting you choose, the keywords you want to rank for, and the imagery you create. And through it all, stands content!

Content marketing ideas for small businesses

Content tends to be evergreen, which means you can publish it and it stays relevant… well forever in some cases! This means it can pay for itself the longer it’s used on your website. Pay one time for creation, use forever.

Digital marketing is made to benefit all business sizes, and content is the effective marketing approach being used by the biggest brands out there. They may have a bigger budget than you, but you can still put your budget to work and make a start on competing and owning your industry.

You too can achieve brilliant results by creating high quality and relevant content.

The most cost effective content marketing you can do

The web is littered with terrible content – it’s part of the reason why it only takes a potential customer 2 seconds to click off of a website. And in a society where people expect answers immediately, it makes writing quality content hard work. It’s this reason you have to respect your content, otherwise, people won’t read and they’ll leave your website right away.

When we say the web, we are of course talking about other channels too, not just your business’s website. It’s social media profiles, business listings, and online ads.

Thankfully though, we as content creators are being held accountable to producing quality content. The way it should be!

Google’s standards and expectations are what us as marketers and business owners respect, and so it’s great to see them putting out more updates to focus on content quality.

Google’s Helpful Content Update is part of the reason that content marketing is better than ever before.

Content now more than ever is being respected more and more. And in our experience, the most cost effective forms of content marketing fall under the three categories below.

SEO content

The king of content marketing itself. SEO content is the best way to gain traction online. Content itself is there to ensure your visitors have something to look at, and that search engines have something to rank you by. But SEO keywords are what ensure you’re pulling in the right audience via this ranking system.

It’s not just about stuffing keywords into sentences and hoping for the best. This doesn’t offer any value to the reader. And search engines have always binned this practice when noticing it across a website’s structure.

But if you’re worried you won’t be able to use SEO without consciously including every single keyword on your list, you’re going about the content creation process wrong. SEO content comes about naturally when you’re writing high quality content. If it’s good, Google is going to notice that!

Website copywriting

Your website needs content in order to function as a website. That’s where copywriting comes in. Copy is simply any body of text you use to transmit a message to a reader, whether it be through a landing page, your home page, a product description, or a blog post.

Good copy is essential. There needs to be a clear message, a clear purpose, and something interesting to stay focused on. It’s where your brand’s inherent style and tone comes into play. If your copy sounds like something you wrote and is written to suit your business’ purpose, it’s going to draw your audience in.

Blog writing

There’s no doubt about it, writing blogs is one of the best ways to get customers finding your website AND get sales and customer enquiries coming through to you.

Blog writing is ideal for developing and promoting your business, but most importantly, to create content that your customers are interested in. And in doing so you can entice, entertain and even guide them into buying from your business.

Blog writing is a proven tactic to grow sales

Our blog writers will write in a way that your brand sounds and create a unique voice that your existing or potential customers will relate to and recognise anywhere after just one blog.

Customers today do more research than ever when it comes to buying products, and your blog means you can keep their attention and really show off how much you know about what it is you do.

Retain your audience for longer through blogs content, and you’ve got a chance to increase your conversion rate!

Benefits of content marketing for every business

There are many, many benefits in businesses using content marketing. At its core, small to medium to big businesses alike can roll out a variety of content to suit a variety of purposes.

But most of all, you can show your target audience just how much value you can offer them. You’re not just posting an advert – you’ve got a content library to go through that offers plenty of expertise that they find helpful. And in doing that, you gain their trust, and their custom!

Here are some of the other key benefits of using content marketing:

SEO content boosts website traffic

SEO is the best way to draw attention to your website simply by placing it where it needs to be found. And when you’ve got killer content to back up your keyword research and implementation, this will boost your website traffic higher than any other method.

Pinging back a search related to a keyword is one thing. The rest of the content has to follow suit. It needs to make sense and have the answer someone behind the screen is looking for. How can you ensure this? By mixing your content strategy with your SEO strategy.

This ultimately results in organic traffic you’ll never have to pay for. The more you write high quality, unique content that aligns with your keywords, the more you’ll see a healthy return on investment (ROI).

Google ranks according to authority

In its Search Essentials rules, Google notes that it wants to host websites that are authoritative. It wants its users to come across the answers they’re looking for, without needing to compromise on their search terms.

Described as ‘people-first content’, Google wants to see websites create new, unique, and interesting copy that has intrinsic value.

When you’re writing as a business, this means offering more than just a product promotion. You need to write as the expert in your field you truly are. The more you write such content, the higher Google will push you up the rankings.

If you’ve got unique insights into certain problems and processes, you’ll even score plenty of backlinks. This is another tactic Google uses to establish just how much authority a website has. If someone links to your content as an authority, you become a well-known name within their search algorithm.

You can showcase your style, tone, and personality

People connect with people. They will like someone who has personality and is human. These are two core values to creating a brand that people like.

Creating content is the best way to come up with a brand style. Your voice can be heard through what you publish. And when you’ve got a unique tone with plenty of nuance, your audience will come to recognise you through the written word alone.

What are your business values? This is a question content marketing allows you to explore. If you want to reach the masses with a specific message, you can do so via content production. The more your content sounds like you, the better it will be received.

Content offers so many opportunities!

There is always something to say, and that something will be interesting for your potential and existing customers.

After all, content exists in many forms. Video, images, and the written word are just three of the big ones. You can also add podcasts, live streams, emails, and online classes to that list too.

Content marketing allows you to be varied, which gives your audience more to get involved with.

How to make sure your content marketing succeeds in growing your business

It’s an involved process, but it’s one that works.

Here’s our quick guide to using content marketing to grow your business:

Know your audience

You can’t market content to anyone outside of your target audience. This means you need to find out who they are before you do anything else. This is where you can create marketing personas based off of previous research.

You can also create a marketing persona for your average customer using select key questions. For example: What does your ideal customer look like? What do they do? What problems do they live with? And how can you best address their concerns?

Research your keywords

Now it’s time to do your SEO research. To do this, you need to identify the right keywords that fit your business image and target audience. Many online tools can help you to create a good keyword bank to pull from.

Your keywords need to be related to your business, have a high search volume, and be relevant to the kind of content you want to create. Similarly they shouldn’t be vague or misleading.

Create your content plan

Sometimes known as a ‘calendar’ or ‘schedule’, your content plan will tell you what to publish and when. You can plan out months in advance to consistently deliver great quality content. Then you simply follow your roadmap.

In creating your content plan, be sure to diversify the kinds of content you’re planning to publish. You should also think about the cost of each content piece, who is going to make it, and when the deadline for editing is.

If you’re not sure what kind of content plan would work best for you, we at TJ Creative can help you to decide.

Get advice on how your content marketing should look

We’ve been content marketing specialists for a long time. We’ve seen it all and how it works, and we know what is best for businesses looking to head to the next level. If you want to perfect your content to market in the online world, we can make sure the cost is worth it.

Working with a tight budget doesn’t have to hold you back. A good copywriting and SEO strategy isn’t far away.

If you want to work with a professional, our experts can provide the insight you need into using content marketing to its best effect.

Email me, Tom, and let’s discuss what content your business should be publishing!