Content Marketing Blues: Why Small Businesses Just Don’t Get It?

Content Marketing
The transmission and consumption of information has changed over the years, and the fact that most of us carry our worlds in our pockets on our smartphones is a testament to that.

With social media taking the center stage, everybody has a voice today and small businesses should seize this opportunity to have them heard.

Unfortunately, statistics paint a dismal picture. Most small businesses have not yet been able to establish the importance of good content marketing.

The North America Content Marketing Institute’s 2013 B2B Small Business Content Marketing Trends have some shocking things to report. Only 5% of Small Business Marketers rate their content marketing efforts as very effective. Most content marketers would baulk at these figures.

This, however, is the stark truth. Small businesses often struggle with their content marketing and here is why.

#1. Starting Problems

Jonathan Rick believes that a lot of businesses make the fatal mistake of marketing themselves wrong from the word go. Not choosing the right business marketing strategies can render the content marketing completely moot. This means, that if you have a garbled URL, a bad website, wrong branding, or a complete lack of understanding of online marketing; even the best of content strategies would not be able to help you.

Who would read or circulate your content when no one can really find your website? So before you begin marketing your content, get your basics right.

Have a good website, with a sound URL and a good marketing strategy before you begin concentrating on your content.

#2. Lack of Vision and Direction

Small businesses, with all their good intentions, are not always able to use their content to their best advantage.

Why?

Most of the times they lack the direction and the vision to utilize their content perfectly. When you launch new content, you have to plan it and see how it would work for your business specifically. Fail to do that, and you would have wasted your time and effort in creating content for your business. Ideally, small businesses should first create a content strategy with clear objectives and direction.

Try to have measurable goals so that you can measure the success of your strategy and tweak it if and when required.

#3. Lack of Consistency

Another big mistake small businesses make is that they ignore the importance of consistency. For instance, if they have a blog, they may not update it very frequently. This kills the purpose of having a blog altogether.

Consistency is very important in the quality of your content. If you have great quality content on your blog or your Facebook page one day and mediocre content the other day, you will quickly lose interest of your readers. Consistency is something that most small businesses fail to maintain and then lose out on marketing opportunities.

#4. Inability to Fully Unleash the Power of Social Media

Social media marketing is another area where small businesses often lose out. They may have the intention of using Twitter and Facebook to the best of their abilities, but a lack of vision and the ability to utilize the media well can really foil their marketing plans.

Now that Facebook is very popular as a marketing tool, everybody wants to be on it. However, setting up a Facebook page and then forgetting about it won’t get you anywhere.

So make sure you are putting relevant, interesting and marketable content on your social media pages and that you are doing it consistently.

So What Do You Do?

Small businesses often have a lot of content peeves. Where they fail is in recognizing the problem. Since most of the time, they are clueless about what they are doing wrong; they often end up giving up on content marketing altogether.

This is nothing but a vicious cycle and unfortunately it means that small businesses are not able to utilize one of the most important marketing tool available in the online world today. If you have a small business and want to know what you are doing wrong, maybe there’s a lesson or two that we could pick from Mark Burgess, President of Blue Focus Marketing.

Marketing your business with high quality content is not optional anymore. Small businesses that do not see the value of content marketing will eventually lose their way in the world of communication.

For those businesses, which are struggling to get their act together, it is time to call in the professionals and use their expertise. For those, who already have a plan, it is time to get the wheels turning on them.

Finally, for those who have not yet considered content marketing, the clock is ticking and time is quickly running out. If you wait long enough, there may be no redemption for you.

Do you get it? What are your thoughts?