[eBook] This is what SMEs need to understand about content marketing and how to get it started

“Mamma let’s do an interesting cake this time. It’s needs to have a good design”.

That was my 10-year-old’s demand for her birthday. She was bored of our usual bakery shop which had been baking her birthday cakes since she was 3. I listened, frowned and then gave in on the logic that she at least said “better design”.

So I sat hunting for a cake shop on Google – one that could do “awesome” designs and also bake yummy cakes too. Google pushed me to Zomato, which showed several bakeries that served my area. There was, however, one that stood out with its designs and location (was near my house). Shuga, the name of the bakery, seemed a perfect fit and so I decided to actually visit it since I didn’t find much about it online.

To cut it short, I found Shuga in the middle of this really chaotic market. It was a pretty-looking chic bakery shop where the owner offered her design suggestions to my little one, a clear departure from earlier experiences. We closed on a beautiful designer cake that also seemed pretty reasonable and I was happy to have found a business that understood my exact needs.

I wanted to understand how such a great bakery shop had missed my attention for so much time. And also how did Shuga manage to drive in people to its little café since it was pretty difficult to locate.
When I started asking the owner how she promoted her cakes and how she got her leads, she said it all came through Zomato and she was tired of all other online stuff since they never worked.

Small business she said always had it tough. You always had to manage costs and offer better products than larger brands to win customers.

Even though Shuga had been growing at a good rate, it would be great to get more organic growth, she admitted. “But I am not sure how to get that going since its very confusing. I once was approached directly by Google who ran Adwords for me and that did nothing for me. So now I don’t really do anything,” she said.

As I offered her to reach out to me whenever she needed to ask anything about content marketing, a term she was not really aware of, I realized there were several businesses like Shuga, which offered great services and super products but were not reaching out to the masses or the target audience.

This was mostly because these SMEs were either confused which way to go or didn’t know how to plan their content marketing.

On the other end were customers like me who were looking for the business like Shuga who would offer customized services, listen to their customers and meet their exact needs.

Q: But what was keeping us from finding them?
A: Online presence.

Q: What was keeping us from finding them and giving them business?
A: Good content marketing.

SME content marketing – points to remember

So here is what we have done. We created this really concise ebook on “SME content marketing – How to understand content marketing and do it yourself” to help small business owners market their services to the target audience and maximize footfall and traffic.

Before that, here are a couple of things small business owners should know about content marketing.

• You don’t really need a huge budget to get started. Start small by getting your website in order and making it SEO-friendly, making your Google My Business listing visually informative, investing in a Facebook page (best for B2C businesses) or a Linked In profile (If you are a B2B business), starting a blog with one post in a fortnight.
• If you hire an agency, ask them to show you the sort of content they will use. Crappy content written by thousands of digital marketing agencies will hardly get you results even though your money will be spent. Infact, it will hurt your brand and website’s Google’s rank. Also ask them to show you a list of content they will be producing for the SEO and SMO activities, and how do they plan to market your brand’s content. If they dither on this, its best to look elsewhere.

Apart from this, we want every business owner to read through this handy and short guide on SME content marketing. This eBook has been designed to help every small business owner gain an understanding of how to launch their own content marketing campaign.

Here is a peek into what this eBook covers –

Conclusion
There are two things that most small business owners struggle with

• Getting more clients/traffic
• Keeping the costs low

While both are important, I feel as an entrepreneur that focusing and solving the first challenge is of primary importance. And in order to achieve that you need to create better content and use that content to drive up traffic and get more leads. The combination of techniques or marketing strategies you use is to achieve the above results will vary from business to business, but finally this ebook should help you understand the basics of how to use content in marketing your business better.

Happy reading.

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