Cost-Effective Content Marketing Tips to Help Your Small Business Grow

(Updated 2-25-2022)

Limited budget for marketing and advertising is commonplace among many small businesses. This makes it challenging to compete, especially if you’re new on the block and just trying to break into the market. That’s where content marketing comes into play.

If you focus on developing and executing a strong content strategy for your small business, you can put your brand on the map and earn a major boost to your revenue.

Content is a great way to build authority around your brand and create lasting relationships with your audience. If executed properly, content marketing can be significantly more cost-effective than paid advertising. And by giving away free, amazing material, content marketing can actually have a bigger impact as well.

Why use content marketing for your small business?

Content is the cornerstone of any effective marketing plan. The key is to create content that fits the following mold:

  • Answers your audience’s pressing questions and solves their most challenging problems
  • Engages, inspires, and helps your audience grow
  • High-quality, relevant, and authoritative
  • Adds tons of value, thus becoming easily shareable
  • Easy-to-understand so your audience can apply what they read
  • Applicable and actionable

For the most part, the content you produce should also be free. The most important part of successful content marketing is that you aren’t selling your content. You’re giving your content away free with the genuine intention of helping members of your audience improve their status in some way.

By approaching content marketing in this way, you build a bond with your audience, and you create a level of trust. People want to buy from brands that add value, solve problems, and truly care about them.

Content helps you get over that hurdle of people looking at marketing as a way to trick them into buying your products. The content you give away free creates goodwill and leads to lasting relationships.

Content marketing is more affordable

Studies have shown that content marketing is approximately 62% less expensive than traditional marketing. As a small business owner, your ears perk up when you hear numbers touting savings like that.

By producing high-quality, relevant content, you not only forge lasting relationships with your audience, you also save money in the process. If you could generate new business at less than half the cost, you’d jump at the chance, right?

Content marketing can help you increase your lead generation at a much lower cost. Content can also help your small business build a community of loyal followers, leading to postive word-of-mouth and other benefits. But just how can your small business leverage the impact content marketing can have to grow? Let’s take a look.

How can you leverage content marketing as a small business?

While Coca-Cola’s ambitious Content 20/20 campaign still serves, after all these years, as an excellent content marketing blueprint for major corporations, a campaign of the same magnitude likely isn’t in the cards for your small business. That’s not to say, however, that content marketing can’t still be effective.

The most important thing to consider, as a small business, is how to get more bang for your buck.

Should you focus on social media, work on generating high quality blog content, create fun and informative infographics or do any number of the other myriad content options available to you?

When determining how to approach content marketing for your small business, keep the following tips in mind.

Know your audience

Small businesses typically operate in niche areas. This inherently means that your target audience is seeking specific types of content.

Before you spend your entire marketing budget on content that doesn’t connect, talk to your customers and find out what they want to see.

To save a little money, collect customer names and email addresses at the point-of-sale. Compile a database of the info you collect and then use a free survey program to glean feedback as to the content they want to see.

I recommend using Google Forms. This is a free survey/form creation platform available through Google.

  • Collect your audience’s emails
  • Create a form with a variety of question types
  • Ask for demographic, psychographic, and other information
  • Inquire into your audience’s problems, their content preferences, and their preferred online channels
Image: Example of how to create a Google Form – Source

100 responses should give you a good statistical sampling of your customer-base from which to gain insight. Take that insight and learn what types of content your customers want to see most.

Limiting the scope of your content marketing will not only help you connect better with your customers, it’ll help you save tons of cash that would otherwise be wasted on content that doesn’t resonate.

Understand your resources

Once you’ve got an idea of the type of content your customers want to see, it’s important that you understand what resources you have at your disposal.

Let’s say, for example, that your customers want to see infographics and blog articles. You’ll have to determine whether you’ve got that type of talent in house or whether it’ll be necessary to outsource.

Either option can work out in your favor.

If you’ve got a team of writers and graphic designers in house, by all means, use their talents. However, if you don’t have the budget to hire full-time or part-time team members to manage these tasks, outsourcing the work can be an affordable, effective option.

Hiring an agency or contractor to do the work can save you money by only requiring you to pay for the work you need done, rather than paying a salary, benefits, and all that other stuff.

Make sure you ask for samples of work before you hire anyone. It’s important to know that the person or agency you hire knows what they’re doing. Anyone can say they do something well. Ask them to prove it.

Have a promotional plan

If never seen by its intended audience, even the best content ever created is worthless. Don’t let this happen to you.

Your budget is limited as it is, so it’s important that every piece of your content serves its intended purpose.

Try these effective, affordable methods of promoting your content:

  • Collaborate with your stakeholders, employees, suppliers and others to share each other’s social media posts to gain more traction
  • Write a blog article summarizing the content you’ve created
  • Use a free version of a service like MailChimp to email the content to your customer-base in the form of a newsletter
  • Create a contest where customers are entered in a drawing to receive a gift card or other prize for sharing your content

You can use a variety of channels to promote your content. And while we are heavily promoting free content, don’t be afraid to dabble in a bit of advertising as well. Paid media mixed with organic media and social media can be highly effective. You can limit the amount you have to spend on paid efforts if you have a powerful content strategy in place for your small business.

Blog like you mean it

Did you know that studies show the more you blog, the more the leads roll in? A recent Hubspot study uncovered that businesses that blog see, on average, leads rise by 126% more than their non-blogging counterparts. If that doesn’t give you the incentive to launch a new blog on your small business website and start posting content, I’m not sure what would.

Hubspot blog lead generation stats
Image: Hubspot study showing the impact of blogging on lead generation – Source

Blogging is a powerful tool for growing your small business for a number of reasons.

  • Boosts SEO
  • Builds industry authority
  • Adds value for your audience
  • Builds a loyal following
  • Adds content for sharing

These are just a handful of the benefits of adding blogging to your content strategy. In fact, blogging should be the core component of your content strategy.

Understand your audience. Think about the problems they face and how your business can help them. Then, craft blog articles that answer questions, help solve problems, and add value. This helps forge lasting relationships with your target audience.

Give away the blog content for free. This generosity will not go unnoticed and will ultimately lead to loyalty and business growth.

Post strategically on social media

Social media is a great way to level the playing field and get your brand noticed. It’s free to sign up for accounts on channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and most other popular social media channels.

Just make sure your audience actually hangs out on the channels you target. Don’t waste your time trying to post on every social media channel just because you heard it’s popular. Focus on a limited amount of channels to ensure you stay within your resources. You’ll be a lot more effective, since your efforts are much more focused.

Run campaigns to promote your products and get your audience involved. User-generated content is a great way to spread the word as well.

At The Cabin Coffee launched a coffee subscription service, aiming to grab a share of of growing market. The quality of the product was there, and the quick delivery and other beneifts were in place as well. The only issue was, the established brands in the space had a foothold.

Rather than shying away, At The Cabin Coffee set up a plan to leverage content and social media to boost the brand’s presence in the market. After updating the website, focusing on SEO and content marketing, and building out an active Google My Business page, the brand launched a photo contest.

The contest hinged on encouraging social media users to share photos of their favorite coffee mugs with the brand’s hashtag #MyCabinMoment. It was simple. Share a photo of you favorite coffee mug and you could win six months of free coffee.

The sharing was on, and the word about the brand spread…for free.

User-generated content, mixed with a social media contest, is a great way to drive brand awareness and spread word of mouth. When you find ways to get your audience talking about your small business, you position your brand to compete and stand up to the larger, more estabilshed brands in your space.

Don’t let budget get in the way of growing your small business

These are just a few ways you can promote your content without dipping deeper into your budget.

The above tips will help you save money and be successful in your content marketing.

Remember, just because you don’t have the budget of a major corporation doesn’t mean you can’t do content marketing effectively. As these tactics take hold, and your content begins to circulate, the additional revenue you’ll generate will allow you to increase your content marketing budget each year.

So start here, and then plan accordingly as you begin to see success from your efforts. Please feel free to share examples of small business marketing that you love in the comments section below.

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Anthony Gaenzle
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10 thoughts on “Cost-Effective Content Marketing Tips to Help Your Small Business Grow”

  1. One of the greatest benefits that really shows the importance of “content marketing” is the reputation-building qualities of great content. In today’s busy digital marketplace, it’s vital that businesses work to build trust with their leads and customers. Building trust can help your business establish a positive brand reputation.

    Reply
  2. Hi Anthony,
    Just discovered this post. It’s really difficult for small businesses to do all kinds of content marketing, and I have seen that they have a hard time prioritizing.
    Though blogging is an excellent way to boost SEO and drive traffic to the website, some businesses really don’t want to invest in it because they get more traffic through social media like Instagram. Plus traffic from blogging and SEO take time to show.
    Think visual-heavy businesses like bakeries, florists, fashion retail.
    Social media is a good traffic driver for such businesses in the short term, but a long-term, sustainable strategy is important as well.
    In the end, the most important thing is to really understand your audience, and see which is the best way to engage with them consistently, given the resources available.

    Reply
    • Prioritizing is definitely one of the major issues for small businesses. Many understand that content can help them grow, but they push it off because they don’t know where to focus and get overwhelmed. Thanks for reading!

      Reply
  3. Blogging with meaning can have such a powerful effect on your content marketing campaign. Being all in becomes challenging but the rewards are well worth the effort. Super post here. If content marketers could grasp the almost miraculous effect that blogging and content marketing can have on their small business, all of them would dive in with both feet to create and connect their way to online success.

    Reply
    • It’s truly a powerful medium. Sites that aren’t focused on blogging miss out on so much. I’ve run blogs for many clients as well as companies I worked for, and each time, as we applied a strategy, focused editorial approach to blogging, all the right stats began to rise, and as they rose, so did the sales. We ramped blogging up from 1 post every two weeks to 4-5 posts for per week for an agency I worked for years back, and within a few months, the leads started rolling in. We ultimately ended up generating $500k – $750k annually via the website after we started blogging more strategically. Before that, the number was $0. It’s such a critical component of content marketing success.

      Reply
  4. Also, for those service providers that want to get some exposure to small businesses, you can get a free listing in a variety of directories.

    Reply
  5. These are all great tips. I believe that social media is definitely a big help for the company in promoting the business. Thanks for sharing this.

    Reply
  6. Good tips Anthony Gaenzle, especially for New Year when we are looking forward and setting goals for the new year. It seems overwhelming for small business and you’ve broken down good steps to take stock of where you are and how to move forward in by taking small steps and with inexpensive options so that anyone can get started. Good steps to start the new year right!

    Reply
    • Thanks, Patt! Hope the New Year is starting off well for you! Hopefully these tips help out at least a few small business owners in determining what’s an effective content strategy for them.

      Reply

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