5 Small Business Content Marketing Ideas: How to Create Clickable Content

When you’ve tried content marketing without getting much traction, it’s easy to get frustrated and proclaim, “Content marketing doesn’t work!” But before you give up, ask yourself whether you’re actually creating the content your current and potential customers want to see.

Small business content marketing ideas are hard for many people to develop. Alex Elsea of FlyLadyPremium offers this advice for marketing to small business customers: “Give them the content they want, not the content you want to give them.”

Well that’s easier said than done, you might say. So how do you figure out what your customers really want to see? These five ideas will help.

Review your competitors’ original content, including their blog posts, social media shares, YouTube channels, and more. Then, think of the biggest influencers in your industry, and look at the content they’re creating and sharing on social media.

Although you may not have insight into how well their content converts—in other words, how well it turns viewers into paying customers—the number of likes, shares, comments and other popularity indicators can show you which types of content perform well for them. You can also make educated guesses about what makes it popular:

Once you’ve analyzed what makes their content tick, start incorporating those elements into your work.

Navigate to Google and type in a search query for content that’s similar to what you publish. Then, take a look at the links that come up on the first page in the same way you looked at competitor and influencer links.

Even if you’re feeling depressed about the performance of your content as a whole, you can probably think back to at least one or two pieces that got more attention from your followers. Go back to those pieces of content, and build on them or make more just like them.

By enabling Demographics and Interests reports in Google Analytics , you can get information on the demographic characteristics of your visitors (e.g., age, gender, location, etc.) and information about their interests, which tells you where they explore and what they search for online. Then, develop content that matches their interests to your products or services.

If you own a landscaping company, for example, and you notice that many of your visitors are also interested in movies, develop a roundup blog post about movies that prominently feature gardening. You could list a horror classic like The Shining,  which features a chase through a garden labyrinth, or an action film like Kill Bill, Vol. 1,  where two characters have a sword fight in a garden. Let your customers’ interests jump-start your creativity so that you’re developing more entertaining content.

Customer feedback can be a great way to strengthen both your content marketing and your business as a whole. When your customers subscribe to your blog or email list, add some checkboxes to your signup form so they can tell you what they want to see.

Ask them about the subjects they’d like to read about (as long as they’re relevant to your company), or ask them whether they’d prefer to read articles or newsletters, or whether they’d like to watch videos.

When you’re just starting out with content marketing, “more attention” often means five likes instead of zero. Don’t let those initial small numbers get you down. With patience, you can build today’s small wins into tomorrow’s major content marketing victories.

Even if you imitate some of what others do, stay true to yourself and to building your personal brand. Your content marketing investment will pay off when you stop hitting “repeat” on the content you want to make—and start giving your customers the content they want to see.

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