SMEs must embrace content marketing for driving better growth

By using content marketing to increase footfalls or eyeballs, you can generate prospects and a good sales funnel.

The evolution of digital media and the proliferation of niche media have driven SME marketers crazy in their drive to show ROI (return on investment) for limited marketing budgets. The cost of mainstream media has driven most SMEs away from there. Besides, most SMEs fall into the B2B category where mainstream media cannot play a vital role.

Digital media, on the other hand, could be a good avenue for SMEs of all types to experiment with marketing. However, the attention span there is very low and here is where content becomes king for marketers. It is one of the critical components of driving marketing today for many large businesses. And the pandemic has accelerated its use by more and more companies.

So what is content marketing? It is a marketing approach for attracting, engaging, and retaining your target audience with the creation of relevant news, stories, videos, podcasts, and even metaverse talk shows. The aim is to project your expertise and build your brand. By creating and promoting appropriate content relevant to each target segment, you can get into the minds of the customers when they think of buying similar products and services.

There is enough research evidence for embracing content marketing in a big way: Enterprises that have blogs have seen 65 percent more leads than their competitors, more than 70 percent B2B marketers swear that they have increased customer engagements with content marketing, and more than 85 percent customers say they were positively inclined to buy a product after seeing some videos.

Blatant hard selling messaging will not qualify as content marketing. It addresses issues faced by your target customers and creatively weaves stories or solutions around them. At times it will not even refer to your product or service other than mere branding. It is not easy to always find the right content and a veritable industry of sorts has come up for this now.

The post-pandemic years will see a spiraling of content marketing activities. It is predicted that more marketing rupees will go into this than what was spent in the last few years. Here are some of the huge benefits content marketing will bring forth in the immediate future:

-     Increased brand loyalty. By promoting the right content, you can enable thought leadership for your brand and this can lead to boosted customer confidence in you and eventually lead to loyalty.

-       Wider online presence. When customers are looking for solutions to their problems, a good content strategy can get you more visitors to your website or stores. Providing insights into a problem issue and directing people to choose the solutions wisely will always attract more eyeballs.

-       Improve trust and authority. In order to build the image of a trusted partner or authority in the specific field, driving content that shows thought leadership will help. Trust is also when you provide information without asking for anything in return.

-        More leads. By using content marketing to increase footfalls or eyeballs, you can generate prospects and a good sales funnel. Building an engagement with such leads will help drive sustained sales growth.

Before I give guidelines on starting a content marketing initiative, it is important to discuss the various types of content marketing in vogue today. Unless you know the different possibilities you will not be able to decide on the right content marketing strategy.

The first and most prominent today is social media context. Combined with WhatsApp and Instagram, Facebook has almost 3 billion active users every month and this is a massive number no marketer can hope to reach out with ads. With the right content and defined target audience, some success can be achieved in reaching out to relevant target audience, region-wise.

Podcast is finding increasing popularity among content marketers, and in the USA, Spotify has led the industry with the highest reach. This medium requires smart content creation, preferably by the product expert or the CEO, and must be done professionally.

Pay-per-click is another popular type where the content is placed in social media for potential clicks by audience, and you pay a pre-decided amount per click to the media. In order to reach the right target audience at the optimum costs, you need to have a good content marketing team.

Blogs and email are two other types that marketers use for content marketing. While email marketing is really cheap and can be driven by tech tools, the danger of spamming and chances of target audience not seeing the mails are high. One reason for the proliferation of Nigerian scams offering you inheritance money is the low cost of sending emails at random. Blogs, on the other hand, require hard planning, consistent delivery and getting subscribers. Marketers also build personal branding with blogging sites such as Substack.

If you are like the average SME struggling to find growth avenues ever since the demonetisation and the pandemic, it is time to embrace content marketing in a big way. Take baby steps and in the next column, I will discuss ways to drive this forward.