A Better Approach To Content Marketing:
Designed For SMEs, Not Big Business

It’s time to overcome your larger competitors with targeted and meaningful content.

How?

My approach is a simple one: combine data, insight and purpose to create content marketing campaigns which are smarter, creative and connect with your audience at a deeper level.

data+insight+purpose

Most SME content marketing advice recommends a scattergun approach.

In short, this means saturating the internet with hundreds of articles in the hopes that you can brute force your way to the top.

But this just isn’t a realistic approach for most small businesses. You don’t have the staff, time or money to churn out a constant stream of content.

Which brings us to your inevitable next question: What should my approach to content look like if sheer volume isn’t the answer?


What does an alternative small business content strategy look like?

If you’re one of 72% of business owners who don’t have the resources to take a volume approach to content creation (create loads of content, continuously), what can you do? 

For the majority of companies we’ve spoken with, many have opted for a low-volume approach (a few articles per week, or a couple each month) but this doesn’t get them anywhere close to their ambitions.

Which means that if you don’t have the resources to do content at scale, why bother?

Ask yourself the following question: 

What do you want your content to achieve?

In all likelihood, you want to drive your audience towards your business as the logical end-point of the problem you’re setting out. 

If that’s the case then how exactly will generalised articles that largely echo pre-existing popular content achieve this? Short answer: they won’t.

In contrast, key pieces of insight-led content will create discussion, increase sales, and establish you as an industry authority.


Aligning your content around intent

Surround Intent

Think deeply about what your content needs to do, your ideal customer, the conversations you want to have, and how to align your content to your business model.

To make that shift, you need to think about the following points:

  • What problem does your business solve?
  • What conversation do you need to create to drive sales?
  • Which audiences do you need to communicate to?
  • What data do you need to become the authority in your space?
  • How can you integrate all of the above into your marketing?

If you can answer these questions, you’ll have the beginnings of a content strategy that is focused on performance instead of guesswork.

Naturally, our content marketing strategies always start from this position. 

This approach evolved after working with dozens of small businesses who were struggling to achieve the high-resource strategies given to them by marketing agencies.

Want to talk about what an alternative content strategy might look like for you and your business? Then book in a content marketing review session with me and let’s work together to  make your content strategy smarter, creative and successful.


The key questions that will make your content better

key_questions

You didn’t start a business because you were passionate about content marketing. Nobody gets fired up by keywords, competitor research, and KPIs.

Focusing on them is a recipe for lifeless, uninteresting content that won’t even succeed on its own merits. And if your marketing is lifeless and uninteresting, people are going to think the same about your business. 

That’s why we put together some key questions to ask yourself about your content marketing: 

  • Is your content genuinely insightful?
  • Does your content drive customers towards your business as the logical solution?
  • Is your content geared towards generating backlinks?
  • Is your content optimised to be shared through as many channels as possible?
  • Is your content timely and relevant?

If you want to measure your content against these questions, check out our Unlocking Content Marketing Success Quiz.

We’ll assess where your content marketing stands and the areas that need improvement, as well as giving you a bit more insight into our thinking behind these key questions. We like to think of them as our core content principles.

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Is content marketing right for me?

Good question! It’s probably one of the first questions I’d be asking you, so it’s good that you’re thinking about it already.

If you’ve never done content marketing before, I can guide you through it.

Or if you’ve already got some experience under your belt, I’ll work directly with you to help you understand the what, how and why.

Either way, you’ll lead the charge with a plan that you’re comfortable with, tailored to fit your level of resources.


What are the nuts and bolts of
what you can offer me?

Nuts and Bolts

I won’t give you a specific quota of blogs that have to be churned out by a certain date. I won’t flood your site with new landing pages until your eyes stream.

Instead, every service I can offer will be targeted towards one single long-term goal. 

We’ll begin by conducting a deep dive into you, your competitors, and your audience before developing an overall strategy.

After that, depending on what we identify as your key needs, we’ll offer you a variety of content marketing services. From site structure to copywriting, PR and outreach, social media, and multimedia content like video and podcasts.

Everything we do will be backed up by data and laser-focused on the task at hand. Every piece of content marketing will work towards the bigger picture. 

But we won’t try to reinvent the wheel; if you’re doing something that’s working, we’re not going to tell you to change it.

You can be sure that what we’re offering you is exactly what we think you need. No more, no less.


Get in touch for a
better standard of discussion

You’re probably thinking that you’ve never read anything like this before. That no other marketer speaks like this.

We know. And we’ll be open with you: We don’t want to be like the other marketers.

If it sounds good to you, we’ll probably get on.

So why not get in touch with us today? We can begin with a thirty-minute conversation to work out whether we’re right for each other.

Best of all, it’s completely free. So there’s no risk and no obligation – just one conversation.

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