Our Story

The Small Business Content Dilemma
(or Why We Exist, the Long Version)

By Adam Boyd,
Founder and Director of Content Strategy for Quest Content Marketing

I founded Quest Content Marketing simply because I saw a problem with the content being produced by small businesses both online and for events. The technology was out there to automate a complete marketing system at a low cost but the content itself needed to catch up.

In the 2010’s the internet grew up. E-commerce, social media for business, and Google’s ad networks, all lowered barriers of entry for small businesses to reach totally new markets and innovate their sales and operations processes. Over my entire professional marketing career I’ve worked exclusively with small local businesses and not for profit organizations, as with anything it’s an uphill battle but small business is in my opinion the canary in the coalmine for a successful economy, I was looking for any opportunity to make top tier professional marketing campaigns accessible to the smallest business.

Over time biggest hurdles to success started to make themselves obvious and once I happened upon an effective solution, I started mapping out the Quiz-Dev Complete Marketing System and Quest Content Marketing was born.

The Beginning

In 2009, I finally understood what marketing truly was. It’s not just advertising or logos or branding, but a science. Marketing, the study of the market. It combines sociology, communications, accounting, and economics to essentially “grease the wheels of industry”. It was then that I decided to pursue marketing as a profession.

I started by taking on the social media responsibilities at two businesses where I worked. One was a small businesses with 10 employees and 200 Facebook followers, the other was a non-profit with a nationally recognized brand and 10s of thousands of followers across several channels. It was obvious that the engagement with our audience was beneficial to both companies but the small business definitely benefited less (as is tradition). It didn’t get the same engagement because it only reached a few hundred people at most and any analytics gained had too small a sample to confidently base business decision on.

I ended up working there for years before moving to an agency that specifically helped small businesses with their online marketing needs. Specifically, I managed CRMs, databases, email marketing campaigns, and automated communications for over 40 small businesses. This technology had come so far in the past 10 years but it still needed a team of expert professionals to execute anything meaningful. Content writers, analysts, technical specialists and business development strategists were all a necessary part of a successful campaign.

The Realization

By 2018,  I was coordinated the complete online marketing initiatives of a dozen small businesses. Our team created content, distributed it, tracked engagement, and reported on analytics. All together it cost tens of thousands of dollars a month and as digital marketing blossomed into a majorly profitable industry the price point to effectively compete online was getting out of reach of our clients.

After a few years, I recognized the recurring dilemmas that small businesses were facing compared larger businesses online.

Smaller business have less money and less free time
• Content needs to be produced consistently to satisfy algorithms and maintain readership
• Unengaging content can be negatively impactful to algorithms and readership
• Engaging content creation is time consuming and expensive

Smaller businesses have smaller audiences
• Smaller sample sizes make basic analytics untrustworthy
• Advanced analytical analysis is time consuming and expensive
• Unreliable marketing analytics can’t be tied to business decisions

Smaller businesses rely heavily on building relationships
• Generic high level messaging don’t build trust in your expertise
• Targeted content requires even more content creation (even more time and money)
• Targeting your content shrinks your sample sizes even further (even less trustworthy analytics)

These are effectively the same factors that have held small businesses back since before the internet. They have small reach, need to pay more attention to their customers’ individual needs, and don’t have the resources to do anything about it. Online marketing was still the most level playing field and it was becoming a necessity for any functioning business to invest but it was no longer as even of a playing field as it had been a few years prior.

Interlude

An important element in this story I’ve failed to mention is my out of work obsession, writing and creating trivia challenges. I had hosted pub quizzes and trivia nights for bars and social events and wrote trivia challenges online for a website. I even used these skills in my career from time to time, asking questions is a tried and true method of soliciting extra engagement on a social media post or email or website call to action. Sometimes I used polls, but I preferred trivia, I had a knack for writing questions and it worked for me.

The Solution

It was 2019 when it all came together. I was checking a pub’s website, one I’d hosted a pub quiz for in the past, when I noticed their newsletter opt-in form on their site. As a digital marketer with a background in email marketing, it struck me that these venues could use my pub quizzes to generate extra leads with an enticing CTA on the answer sheets and if I made some additional content to promote the event through their email I could create real value for their company, suddenly my trivia nights were a real asset. At first the businesses were bringing in more contacts to their database and using the quiz invites and results as fun content for their emails and social but soon the real value became undeniable.

The quiz itself was a means to understand the clientele better. By uploading consenting participants’ quiz sheets to reporting software, I could determine what music genres the guests prefer, what sports they watch, what holidays they celebrate allowing informed business decisions. I could also segment them by their interests to create opportunities for personalized offers and targeted ads.

It didn’t take long to apply this theory to businesses other than bars, the smallest leap was creating trivia challenges for tradeshows and other live events but introducing online trivia was the key to helping all forms of business take advantage of question-based content marketing.

Every small or midsized business I’ve worked with in my career would benefit from using quest content in some form or another. The whole concept effectively counteracts each key dilemma holding back small businesses in the 2020s.

The Result

Quest Content requires less time and money than traditional content
• Creating quest content doesn’t require the client or an industry expert to dedicate as much of their time, this is because it uses facts rather than narrative to drive the user behaviour.
• A third party can take full responsibility for the content creation without sacrificing thought leadership.
• The multiple interactions involved with participating in the quiz provide clearer analytics that don’t take as long to understand or apply.
• Quest content is recyclable, adjustable, and remains effective for years giving it a longer lifetime value.

Quest Content increases your sample size AND relies less on larger samples
• Quest content psychologically solicits engagement by appealing to the audiences ego and curiosity resulting in more users to participate for analyzing engagement.
• That extra engagement can push the content to an even larger audience using algorithmic based feeds such as social media and ad networks.
• Even small sample sizes provide reliable data as the interactions with the quiz and each individual question is explicit information. When written with intent that information can be turned into market insights.

Quest Content makes it achievable to maintain strong professional relationships at scale
• Building a greater understanding of your market allows you to cater to their interests and preferences.
• Targeted content becomes easy and achievable when you have reliable data from explicit interaction with your content.
• Personalizing your content still shrinks your sample size but your data isn’t reliant on monitoring engagement for insights we are literally asking questions so the data is explicit at any sample size.

This was the solution to the dilemma. So the process began to perfect the system, set up the spreadsheets and formulas that tie quiz questions, answers, and results to analytics and CRM software and recreating the system for all types of businesses with different paths to success.

The content was so effective on its own, I was able to become focus on using it more strategically. At this point we’ve developed 24 profiles for small businesses that allow you to prioritize your marketing objectives to ensure the success of one of our campaigns results in the success of your company. We have dedicated strategies, recommended mediums and messaging strategies, and KPIs for dozens of models. Once you complete our discovery document we’ll have the info we need to create a path to success and growth and then our content does the rest.

We can’t wait to see where we go next.