5 Content Marketing Strategies Every Small Business Should Know
Content marketing advice tends toward the abstract. These five are concrete: each is a specific kind of piece, with what it does, who it is for and how to make it. Most small businesses could build all five in a quarter and would notice the difference in their sales conversations.
1. The honest pricing page
"How much does it cost" is the most-searched question in almost every service category, and most businesses refuse to answer it online for fear of scaring people off or tipping competitors. The result is that the one business in a market that publishes real ranges wins the traffic and the trust. Publish ranges, explain what moves a job to the top or bottom of the range, and give one or two worked examples. Prospects who call after reading it are better qualified and easier to close. See the content marketing hub for the question-first thinking behind this.
2. The how-to-choose guide
"How to choose a [your service] in [your area]": what to look for, what to ask, warning signs, what a proper quote includes. Written honestly, it positions you as the expert and sets the criteria in your favour without saying so. It is also the piece a prospect forwards to a spouse or a business partner when they are deciding. Building a content strategy shows where it sits in the buying path.
3. The process explainer
What happens from the first call to the finished job, step by step, with photos. Fear of the unknown stops a lot of purchases; a clear explanation of the process removes it. This piece also cuts the time you spend explaining the same thing on every call. Video works well here, even rough phone video with a voiceover.
4. The customer story
Not a testimonial; a short narrative. The situation the customer was in, what you did, what changed, in the customer's own words where possible, with photos and a first name. Three to five of these, one per core service, are the most persuasive pages on most small-business sites. They also double as social posts; selling on social without selling depends on them.
5. The maintained evergreen piece
Every business has a handful of questions that never go away: the seasonal checklist, the common problem and its causes, the mistake people make when they try to do it themselves. Write each once, well, and then revise it every year. A page that has been improved annually for five years outranks and outperforms five new posts on the same subject, and it costs a fraction of the effort. Setting benchmarks shows how to know which pieces deserve the maintenance.
How the five work together
Link them into one path
The evergreen pieces and the how-to-choose guide get you found by people at the start of the path. The pricing page and the process explainer move them through comparison. The customer stories close. Link them to each other and to the relevant service pages, six or more links per piece, so a reader can move through the whole path without leaving. That structure is also what search engines reward, as the SEO hub explains.
What to skip
Industry news commentary, generic tips lists, anything you could not write better than the top result already on the internet, and anything written to hit a publishing schedule rather than to answer a question. The pros and cons of content marketing makes the case for restraint, and outdated strategies explains why generic content has flipped from harmless to harmful.
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