Creating Digital Marketing Content for Small Businesses

Digital marketing content is the central element in any digital marketing campaign and yet somehow it is often discounted and overlooked. This is due in part to the many supporting elements exclusive to digital marketing that hog the spotlight. These supporting elements include search engine optimization, advanced analytics, audience targeting, and lead generation, all of which make digital marketing such a game-changer for small businesses. However, none of those supporting elements will be effective if strategic content creation isn’t at the forefront of your digital marketing strategy.

What makes matters worse for small businesses is the real need to create and promote non-stop content in order to stay relevant to search engines and social media algorithms. Without the resources available to larger companies, small businesses fall into producing low-quality content with no clear objectives. This trend will inevitably create long-term problems that far outweigh any short-term benefits.

So how can a small business create digital marketing content that achieves their short-term marketing goals while setting up long-term success for their business?

In this detailed account, we’ll explain everything you need to know to create digital marketing content for small businesses and ensure the success of your next marketing campaign will result in the success of your organization as a whole.

Topics Covered:

1. What is Content?
2. Goals and KPIs for Digital Marketing Content
   • Gaining Visibility
   • Generating Leads
   • Making Sales
   • Building Relationships
3. Creating Valuable Digital Marketing Content
4. Engaging vs Engageable Content
5. Capitalizing on Digital Marketing Content

Part 1: What is Content?

To understand digital marketing content you first need to understand content in general. It’s is one of those things where you know it when you see it but when it comes time to define it, things get murky. Today, there’s a whole industry built around “content creation” and you’ve probably heard the expression “content is king” yet everybody seems to have their own idea of what it means.

So for clarity, we will define content using traditional journalism terms: the message, the medium, and the method. As a whole, these three concepts make up what we refer to as content.

• • The Message is the point you are trying to get across. It should be clear, at least to you, what the message is from the start.
    For example, the message of the piece you are currently reading is that content can effectively achieve your business goals when created properly.
    
  • The Medium is how you convey your point to the audience. In this piece, the medium is a digital blog/article. This medium is used to convey detailed and in-depth information with lots of subtlety and nuance. It is also effective at showcasing the breadth of knowledge the creator has on the subject.
    Other examples of mediums include images, videos, and case studies. If you look outside of the digital marketing sphere, sales pitches, brochures, and phone calls are also content mediums familiar to small businesses. Anything capable of transporting a thought from your mind to your audience’s mind is a medium.
  • The Method is harder to define but you can think of it as “how your medium is used to better convey your message.” For example, in this article, we’ve used full paragraphs separated by bullet points and clear headings to allow the reader to absorb the necessary information by skimming through and circling back to the points they want to follow up on.

The key takeaway is that content isn’t just what’s written or spoken, it’s also how. So if you’re going to effectively use moving forward we’ll review what your digital marketing content should say as well as how to say it effectively.

Part 2: Goals and KPIs for Digital Marketing Content

The first step in creating ANY marketing content, be it a cold call script or a social media post, is to establish a goal. It’s important that your marketing goals align with your business needs, otherwise, you’ll be wasting your time and resources for nothing.

To demonstrate how digital marketing content can impact your business, we’ve categorized marketing objectives into 4 groups that reflect the stages of a business development funnel:

We refer to these goals as VLRS goals. However, not all businesses are created equal and these goals will take a different priority depending on the key opportunities for growth in your company. To confidently prioritize your goals and cater them to your business, take our short quiz to determine your ideal marketing model.

Once you’ve prioritized your goals, you can use the following section to help you get started creating content. 

Tip: Bookmark this page to reference whenever you’re starting a new digital marketing campaign.

Goal 1: Gaining Visibility with Digital Marketing Content

Know the Audience: New to you / Minimal Targeting

You are trying to expose your brand to net new customers so you should cast a wide net to reach a large audience. Also, using some targeting is important to ensure you aren’t wasting time and money on unqualified leads but don’t pinhole these campaigns or get too specific in your message.

Key to Success: “Interrupt”

At this stage in the process, you need to get the audience’s attention. Stop them from skimming through their newsfeed or browsing the net by interrupting their flow. 

Messages: We exist / We solve a problem / We are like-minded

The first impression is very important. Whether you are giving the first impression of your product, your company, or your industry, you must keep in mind what your audience already knows, to not waste space on unnecessary information and bore your audience. 

• • • If you are in a well-known industry then focus on your brand.
    • If you’re in a newer industry focus on the problem you solve. 
    • If you have a well-known brand in a well-known industry focus on your values.

For example, in 2010 co-work facilities were entirely new so the early facilities focused their messaging on the generic benefits of flexible, low-cost alternatives to renting office space. In 2021, shared office spaces are common and their messaging speaks to their network security, amenities, and tenant success stories to differentiate their brand from competitors. In another 10 years, when co-work facilities are mainstream and market share leaders establish themselves, their visibility-oriented messaging will focus on whether they consider themselves to be casual or progressive or any ideology they’ve adopted.

Visibility Mediums: Graphics with tension / Animations / Taglines

Casting a wide net is easier than ever with online advertising. Social media, online display ads, and online industry publications are all excellent ways to reach a wide yet targeted audience. However, be mindful wherever you are promoting your visibility-oriented content that you stand out from the surrounding or competing content.

Visibility Methods: To the point / Creates tension / Memorable / Uncanny

To properly interrupt, your message and medium should work together to create visual tension. The content can also be uncanny, as in offputting, psychologically speaking this is one of the best ways to attract something’s attention. A common strategy is to take something that would be familiar and alter slightly.
Note: Click bait is a vile practice due to its tendency to abuse this kind of psychological manipulation with no value in the actual content. 

Visibility KPIs: Clicks / Interactions

“Views/impressions” is a tempting KPI to focus on. After all this is a visibility campaign plus it’s the biggest number in your marketing report. However, it is important to consider that your message needs to be seen and understood. “Views” as a metric is only reliable in evaluating your budget. Viewable impressions and other adjusted metrics give you a better idea of your content’s visibility but the data isn’t conclusive, shouldn’t be used to base business decisions on, and is therefore useless at a high level.
The only concrete evidence that your message was received is an interaction. So clicks, comments, likes, etc are the most important KPIs when measuring the true success of your visibility oriented-content.

Quest Approach to Gaining Visibility:

When our client’s business is in a position where prioritizing visibility is in their best interest our content plan reflects that.

We use the following guidelines: 

• • Question-based content designed to reach as large an audience as possible will typically have topics that are appropriately broad. 
  • The promotional material and splash page designed with tension and written to appeal to ego and curiosity which will elicit engagement. 
  • Simple trivia challenges and personality tests have low barriers and soft CTAs which makes them accessible to more.
  • Results pages would encourage sharing with friends and coworkers to continue the push for more visibility. 
  • Landing pages hosting the Quest content would have search optimized data and tagging.
  • Allocated budgets for promoted social media and display advertising ensure best results.

Goal 2: Generating Leads with Digital Marketing Content

Know the Audience: Some Targeting / Remarketing / Interested parties / Aware of your brand

You are inviting prospects to become part of your network but people don’t accept invitations from someone they don’t know. Remarketing is an efficient way to serve lead gen content to a familiar audience. Placing lead gen content at the end of other content also helps ensure you are serving the right audience.

Key to Success: Engage and Offer

You need to be proactive to generate a lead. Ask a question, invite an opinion, offer an opportunity. This is the stage in the pipeline where your interaction with the audience changes from a presentation to a conversation so any content you produce needs to invite engagement from your audience.

Lead-Gen Messages: We Add Value / We are Experts / We are a Community

If this is the start of a conversation, you need to be worth having a conversation with. This means leveraging anything that you have that your audience does not, this can be a skill, an expertise, a diverse network or attentive audience, or access to something or someone. Whatever you have that makes you and your audience different is the key to your lead-gen message.

Lead-Gen Mediums: Forms / Gates / Polls / CTAs

There are two parts to lead generating content, the set up and the delivery. The set up comes before the lead is generated and teases value, the delivery comes after the lead is generated and needs to have value. There is an interactive element that comes in between the two parts such as a form or a “like-gate.”

Lead-Gen Methods: Informative / In-depth / Interactive / Includes a strong CTA

The content needs to have legitimate value because you are trading it for contact information. The contact information you request needs to correlate to the value of your delivery and the set up needs to effectively sell that value.

Another approach is to have the “set up” content require an investment of time before contact information is requested.

An important element to lead gen content is that it is at its best when it qualifies a lead, you can ask a qualifying question in your form/gate but this raises the value of the contact information so you must raise the value of the “delivery” content.

Lead-Gen KPIs: Opt-ins / Qualified Opt-Ins / Marketing Consent

You can measure the success of a lead gen campaign by the number of leads you generate or, more effectively, by the number of qualified leads you generate. If they also provide explicit consent to receive marketing communications that is another win.

Quest Approach to Generating Leads:

When our client’s business is in a position where prioritizing lead generation is in their best interest our content plan reflects that.

We use the following guidelines: 

• • High value results for finishing a quiz/test
  • Optional opt-in gates to view the result
  • Leads become qualified based on results of the quiz and answers to specific questions.
  • Promotional material and splash pages tease the “delivery” content. 
  • Personality or categorization tests provide insights that are valuable and catered to each user. 
  • Results pages would encourage opting in regardless of whether it’s mandatory. 
  • Placing these on results pages of visibility quizzes, on your social feeds, and on your website.

Goal 3: Making Sales with Digital Marketing Content

Know the Audience: In your CRM / Multiple touchpoints accrued / Firmly within the research stage / Heavy targeting for personalization

If you’re serving sales-oriented content it means that your audience is ready to make a decision. They have done their research and need to be convinced not only that they need a solution to their problem but that your solution is the best suited to solve it. It’s time to get specific and personal.

Key to Success: Streamline

It’s about making it easy, quashing doubts, and reinforcing benefits. The final stage of the sales funnel is the most difficult to manage with marketing content but is in some cases the most crucial. This is the stage where a prospect needs to commit to the sale and is also where they are most likely to jump ship. Streamlining this stage is the most advantageous use of sales-oriented marketing content.

Sales Messages: Make a purchase / Request a quote / You won’t regret this

The message needs to convey that making a purchase is the correct decision. This can be a sales pitch accurately describing the features or a money-back guarantee. Both tell the audience that there will be no buyer’s remorse.

Sales Mediums: Check out pages / Email blasts / Newsletters

Sales-oriented content is for closing, if your audience is new and fresh it is unlikely this is the content for them so place it where you find an audience already thinking about a purchase.

Sales Methods: Personal / Solicited / Interactive

Sales oriented content should never be unsolicited, the audience needs to be looking for it or have asked for it. The best sales-oriented content will walk a potential buyer through the options available to them and reinforce how the product or service is a perfect solution for their specific problem.

To reinforce the impression that “this product or service” is the right choice for “this person” targeted content works best. In order to effectively pull off targeted content, you need to ask them a few questions first. Interactive brochures and questionnaires are extremely effective sales-oriented content types.

Sales KPIs: Revenue, New Customers, New high-value customers, Repeat customers

No surprise here. You’ll need to keep track of the sales that come through your sales-oriented content. You may find it more valuable to track the number of sales or the total dollar value. Tracking new customers and repeat customers will also help you better understand the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

Quest Approach to Making Sales:

When our client’s business is in a position where prioritizing sales is in their best interest our content plan reflects that.

We use the following guidelines:

• • Questionnaires and “personality” tests to reinforce that your company understands the prospect and their needs
  • Results pages that take the information submitted and guide the user to their ideal solution
  • Placement of splash pages on product and service pages, “online brochure pages”, and home pages.
  • Automated emails triggered cart abandonment or inquiry form submissions

Best results when salespersons are familiar with the content and use it in their process.

Goal 4: Building Relationships with Digital Marketing Content

Know the Audience: Customers / Clients / Hot prospects / Network / Following

The audience you need to build strong relationships with are usually already aware of your business, they are your customers or in your network. In some industries, building relationships comes before making a sale, in others it comes before even generating a lead but regardless of what business you’re in, building relationships is crucial to continued success post-sale.

Key to Success: Educate / Entertain / Endear

To achieve success with relationship oriented content the key is not that you get more business, instead, it’s that your customers will want to do more business with you. You can achieve this by educating your audience, entertaining them, and/or endearing yourself to them.

Think about these two questions when writing your relationship oriented content: 

If it came down to you and an identical alternative, what would put you ahead? 

Why would your customer brag about doing business with you?

Relationship Messages: We understand you / We’re there for you / We’re more than a business

Educational content positions you as an authority, reinforcing to your client that you can handle obscure problems and can be counted on to stay on top of new innovations in your industry. It says “we’re there for you.”

Entertaining content is more difficult and requires a deep understanding of your audience but if you can achieve this it builds relationships in a meaningful way, it connects you to your clients by showing a different side of your business. It says “we understand you.” Additionally, it will keep your audience engaged with your content. 

Endearing content shows that your business isn’t just taking their money and putting it in their pocket. You’re donating to charities or creating a good working environment for your employees.

Relationship Mediums: Thought leadership articles / Memes / Personalized emails / Post-purchase messaging / Amateur photography

As we’ve stated, building relationships can come in many forms, if you’re looking to educate your audience, thought leadership articles and videos that go in-depth are your best option. Entertaining your audience to the point of developing a bond is most efficiently achieved with memes. They are the epitome of relatable content as they use a quick statement and an image to communicate a complete thought or emotion in a split second. To truly endear your business to your audience you need to showcase the most human side of your business, your employees, and customers in candid and amateur-captured images.

Relationship Methods: Less formal / Personalized

Showing that your relationship is more than a business transaction means both letting down your guard and getting closer to one-to-one communication. Even in thought leadership content, if you’re looking to build relationships with your audience it needs to be less formal. This is because you’re speaking to friends, not customers. Personalization is more than auto-filling first names into your email; it’s also serving content to a segment of your audience that you know will be interested in it and not serving any content you don’t think they will be interested in. Serving personalized content requires creating more content which takes more time and resources putting small businesses at a disadvantage. To get around that disadvantage, relationship-oriented content needs to be short and sweet. Remember that you don’t need to over-explain your message to an audience that already knows you and your business.

Relationship KPIs: Testimonials / Survey submissions / Social media shares

As you may have guessed, measuring a relationship is not an easy task but as we stated in this objective’s key to success, if your audience is bragging about doing business with you then a relationship has been built. Occasionally, serving testimonial requests and satisfaction surveys with your relationship-oriented content is a good way to confirm this. Another, more straightforward metric is to measure the shares of your content, specifically, on social media. Shares show relationship building because your audience is taking your content and staking their own name and reputation on it, they trust you and they agree with you.

Quest Approach to Building Relationships:

When our client’s business is in a position where prioritizing relationships is in their best interest our content plan reflects that.

We use the following guidelines:

• • Fun quizzes that are fringe topics, not necessarily specific to your business and industry.
  • Short quizzes that take less time to create allowing for a more diverse array of content.
  • Targeted CTAs that speak to segments of your audience.
  • Results pages that encourage survey submissions, testimonials, and shares.
  • Tests that provide feedback and educate the audience on the subject matter more effectively than articles and blogs.
  • Questions that allow your audience to get to know your company better, specifically, the people that make your business work.

Bonus Goal: Gaining Insights with Digital Marketing Content

No matter what goal you are trying to achieve, it will become increasingly easier if you learn something along the way. You can’t build relationships, generate leads, grow your visibility or make sales without better understanding your audience and therefore your market. So including the secondary goal of “gaining insights” in all of your content should be compulsory.

Firstly, you need to ask yourself “what do I want to know?” and “what findings would affect my higher business decisions?” 

For example, you create content for a cat health product manufacturer. A question you may ask yourself that may affect your business is “Will our revenue increase if we start selling dog health products as well?”

There are many ways to use digital marketing content to gain insights into your market but it comes down to two high-level options: Monitoring activity and asking questions.

Which Option is Best?

If you have a large sample size of thousands or more readers each month then a significant spike in readership can’t be ignored. However, if you are like many small businesses and your content only reaches a readership in the hundreds or lower then the insights from monitoring activity are not reliable unless accumulated over years. 

The survey provides more explicit information with a lower margin for error even with a small sample size which is necessary as you are unlikely to reach a large audience with a survey. However the participation in a survey will usually skew towards individuals either extremely pleased with your work or extremely displeased resulting in skewed data.

Neither is a perfect approach to gaining credible insights you can base your critical business decisions on.

Quest Approach

Quest content was first created in part to take advantage of the best of both options. Our quizzes, tests, and questionnaires are more entertaining and shareable than blogs thus manufacture larger sample sizes. Participation in them generates the same explicit insights as a survey but in a quiz or test participants are answering the questions in order to access a result which lessens the possibility untruthfulness. 

In our example, a simple quiz on dog health vs cat health would identify the audience’s interest in cats and dogs. Each participants’ end results and their answers to certain questions would highlight their expertise and understanding of the cats or dogs. This would be conclusive enough data to factor into your business decisions.

Part 3: Creating Valuable Digital Marketing Content

Creating content for your audience is the same as doing business with your customers, the exchange needs to be valuable to both parties.

Ask yourself what does my audience get out of the content and what do I get out of my audience engaging with the content.

Creating Value for Your Audience

You can make your content educational or you can make it entertaining. Whatever you are lacking in one you need to make up for in the other.

Here is a graphic showing the common digital marketing content formats that naturally exhibit one or both of these qualities.

Takeaways

• Thought leadership articles make up for their lack of entertainment by being a highly educational format. 
• On the other end, memes are more inclined to entertainment than education.
• Blogs and questionnaires fall in the middle of both, they are both educational and entertaining, relatively speaking. 
• Videos and podcasts are some of the most valuable forms of content to your audience as they are both capable of entertaining and educating.
• Both surveys and testimonials are not inherently entertaining or educational to the audience but testimonials do impart a bit more knowledge.

Creating Value for Your Business

If you’re creating content on behalf of a small business you need to heavily factor in the content’s value to the business in addition to its value to the audience. By this we mean small business marketers need to consider:

1. How inexpensive it is to create the content. This includes the opportunity cost where a high-paid employee or third party is required to put time into creating the content.
2. How meaningful are the insights gained from analyzing engagement?

Takeaways:

• Surveys are undeniably important despite offering little value to the audience because they are cheap to make and the insights gained are able to influence business decisions.
• Videos are extremely expensive to make with a decent amount of insights gained
• Brochures are somewhat inexpensive but yield little in the way of meaningful insights for your business.
• Question based content will yield the most meaningful insights.

The Most Valuable Content Formats for Small Businesses

This isn’t to say that surveys cannot be entertaining or podcasts cannot produce insights. However, it can be said that those qualities don’t come naturally to those formats and additional effort is needed to make a survey entertaining or to pull real data from your podcast listens.

All of these formats play a part in a well-rounded marketing strategy. Both the audience and the business need to be considered when evaluating the value of a piece of content. 

When considering the value to both the audience and the business, question-based content including quizzes, tests, polls, and questionnaires come out on top. This is why Quest Content Marketing is dedicated to perfecting the creation of high-quality question-based content made specifically to achieve the objectives of small businesses.

Part 4: Engaging vs Engageable Digital Marketing Content

Now that you understand the value you can create with content we can look at how to ensure your content has value to you, your audience, or both. 

Engaging Content

Educational content and entertaining content have one thing in common, they are engaging. This means they grab and hold the attention of your audience. If your video is consistently watched to the end it means its educational and/or entertainment value was enough for you to consider it to be engaging content.

If your business creates revenue from selling ad space on your content then engaging is enough. All you need is eyes and ears on your content and the value to your company will come with the ad revenue.

However, if you’re like most small businesses and your digital marketing content is a means to an end then it’s not enough to simply be engaging it also needs to be “engageable.”

Engageable Content

This means your audience has an opportunity to interact with your content for tracking and analytics purposes.

It’s no coincidence that content creation from small businesses exploded with the introduction of social media. Suddenly if you were investing in writing blogs and making videos, a social media account allowed your audience to like, comment, and share your content providing insight into the market like never before. 

Posting a blog, video, or any content on social media makes it engageable and insights can be then gained. However, in the modern era, businesses need to create content that is inherently engageable to fully capitalize on their content. This is what allows question-based content to rank so highly on the “Value to the Business” spectrum. It is not only possible to engage with a quiz or test it is required. Additionally, the more points of interaction on your content, the more valuable the content becomes.

Part 5: Capitalizing on Digital Marketing Content

In summary, you understand what content is, you know what business goals you want your content to achieve, you’ve keyed in on the format that creates the most value for your audience and your business, and you’re focusing on creating the engaging and engageable elements that give it that value. Now, how do you impact your higher business goals like ROI, profitability, etc?

To finish this article, here are 4 ways you can ensure you are capitalizing on your digital marketing content:

1. Use a CRM – A CRM is a database of contacts that can be tied to contact forms to collect new leads but is rarely used to its full potential. Tagging and segmenting your contacts into lists is crucial to getting the most out of your CRM because it will allow targeted communication as well as allow your CRM to act as a sample of your entire market when performing a market analysis. With most CRMs, when a lead fills out a form tied or clicks a link in an email sent via the CRM their IP address becomes tied to their contact record. So, until they clear their cookies any site visits can be tracked and their engagement with your content is added to their record as well. This will provide you with invaluable insights for one-to-one communication.
2. Automate – One-to-one communication and content tagging can both be a lot of work unless you take advantage of automation. Engagement with your content can be deemed a “trigger” that can either kick off the aforementioned one-to-one communication or apply tags and segment your contacts into mailing lists.
3. Use Analytics – Some CRMs have analytics built-in which will provide a picture of your audience engagement. However, using Google Analytics on your website captures the data from all users whether they are in your CRM or not. You can’t tie engagement to a contact record using Google but the sample size is much larger giving you an even better picture of your market’s engagement. Be sure to create views in your analytics dashboard that differentiate engagement with different content topics and formats.
4. Integrate – Every aspect of your business can be streamlined with some form of software. When deciding what software to use for inventory, bookkeeping, CRM, automation, social media posting, etc. ensure that they can be integrated with one another to create a complete system with little room for human error.