16 content marketing ideas for small businesses

Content marketing means winning customers by giving them something useful, such as advice, inspiration or answers to their questions, instead of advertising your products directly. Each of the 16 ideas below comes with an example, and after them you’ll find advice on which ones to start with and how to plan them.

Content marketing suits a café as well as a healthcare clinic or a small online shop, because it lets you tell your company’s story, share what you know and build trust with the people you want to reach.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing works through trust rather than a sales pitch: you give people good advice, inspiration or guidance, and they come to know and trust your business along the way.

Take a bakery that shares recipes and baking tips on a blog. Readers learn something new, and the bakery shows what its team knows. The posts don’t push the bakery’s bread or cakes, but the next time those readers want a birthday cake, they already have a bakery in mind.

What are the benefits of content marketing?

Useful content helps a small business get found, attract the right visitors, keep its customers and sell more, and each of these builds on the one before:

• You’re easier to find in search engines: Google’s own guide for site owners says that content people find compelling and useful will likely do more for how a site shows up in search than any of its other suggestions. Each useful article gives potential customers one more way to find you.
• You attract visitors who are interested: content that is relevant and valuable to a clearly defined audience attracts those people and keeps them coming back, and they are the people who care about what you offer. An online clothing shop that shares fashion tips attracts people who like clothes and may well buy some.
• You gain loyal customers: sharing useful content regularly builds trust and keeps you in your customers’ minds, which improves your chances of winning their loyalty.
• You sell more: people who trust you are more likely to choose you when they’re ready to buy. As more of your visitors buy from you, subscribe to your newsletter or book an appointment, your conversion rate, the share of visitors who take one of these steps, goes up.

16 content marketing ideas

Create your content with your customers in mind: the right ideas for you are the ones that fit the questions and interests of the people you want to reach. The ideas work for B2C and B2B businesses alike, as long as you adapt each one to your own customers.

1. Attract more visitors to your website with a blog

A business blog brings people to your website who are looking for help with something you know about. Write about the topics that matter to your industry and your customers: step-by-step guides, recipes, comparisons, reviews and lists of favourites all make good ideas for blog posts. When each post answers one question well, your blog slowly becomes a library your customers come back to.

2. Create engaging video content

Video works for almost anything you want to show, from tutorials to product reviews. A yoga studio, for example, could share short exercises on its fitness website that visitors can do in their own living room. If you sell a technical product to other businesses, make video content that shows how your product makes a work process quicker, or new ways to use it.

3. Start a podcast

Record a podcast that people can listen to while they commute, cook or walk the dog. Almost any topic works, whether you share beauty tips, talk about graphic design, geek out about coffee beans or explain the features of an accounting tool. Pick a topic that the people you want to reach care about, because their interest in it is what keeps your listeners coming back.

4. Interview experts in your industry

Interview experts, suppliers or other well-known names in your industry, and share the interviews on your website or blog as text, or as text with free images or video. A bookshop could interview authors, publishers or book reviewers to attract customers who love reading. If you interview another local business, you can both share the interview, so each of you reaches the other’s customers.

5. Showcase your expertise in whitepapers and e-books

Longer formats such as whitepapers and e-books show customers that you know your field, and they can help you generate leads. Offer the e-book as a free download on a simple landing page where readers enter their name and email address to get it, with one clear button that asks them to do so.

6. Offer ready-made templates

A template saves your customers from starting from scratch. Create templates that visitors can copy or download to get a task done faster. Spreadsheets, invoices, CVs, flowcharts and meal plans are popular examples, but you can make a template for almost any task your customers repeat.

7. Invite your customers to webinars

Webinars give you time with your audience and a chance to take their questions live. Run one live or record it in advance, and use it to share your expertise, talk about your products, go through a process step by step or show something new. If you’re planning a live webinar, promote it well in advance through email marketing or on your website.

8. Give your audience new skills with online courses

Online courses let people learn something new at home, at their own pace. A cookery school could offer short online courses on its website to give potential customers a taste of its classes. If you want to earn from your courses, charge for them or make them available only to customers who already have a membership with you. If you have a WordPress website, you can create an online course with an LMS plugin, an add-on that gives your site course pages and lessons.

9. Write newsletters that are good reads

A good newsletter is one your readers look forward to, not a wall of text. Share one thing that is useful, surprising or entertaining in short paragraphs, and break up the text with pictures or illustrations. Give every newsletter a subject line that makes people want to open it, because the best content does nothing in an unopened email.

In the UK, you can only send marketing emails to individuals who have agreed to get them from you. The exception is existing customers who bought something similar from you, or asked about buying it, as long as they could easily opt out when you collected their details and can do so in every email since.

10. Answer your customers’ questions on an FAQ page

An FAQ page saves you time on customer service, because customers find the answers to common questions, such as your opening hours or delivery times, themselves. Answer questions about returns and shipping costs there too, so customers who are about to buy don’t have to leave your site to find out.

11. Create buzz with product news

Make it easy for customers to keep up with your new products, services and features by sharing them on a page of their own. Update it regularly, so returning visitors have a reason to check back and see that you listen to what customers ask for. Our own product news page shows one way to set it up, if you’d like some inspiration.

12. Strengthen social proof with customer testimonials

Social proof is the trust people take from seeing that others have bought from you and were happy. Share stories in which customers tell how they’ve enjoyed your product or service, and put them where people who are still weighing up a purchase will see them. That stage is the consideration phase of the marketing funnel, and stories from existing customers show the people in it that you deliver what you promise.

Collect customer reviews on your website and use them the same way. A beauty or hair salon could share before-and-after photos with comments from happy customers. Testimonials work as text or video, and a photo of the customer or a short clip makes them more personal. Always ask the customer’s permission before you publish their name, words or photo.

13. Create infographics based on your own data

An infographic shows information and data in an easy-to-understand graphic, which helps when a topic is complex. Base it on your own data, such as the production chain behind your products, your best-selling products or how a customer’s workflow improved with your help. With a design tool such as Canva, you can create an infographic even if you have no experience with graphic design, so the format suits almost any business.

14. Be easy to love on social media

Social media marketing gives you a direct line to your audience. Use platforms such as Instagram and Facebook to remind current and potential customers of what you do best. A café could share videos from its kitchen, introduce its staff or post pictures of new dishes to keep its followers interested and tempt them to drop by. Be personal and try new things, but stay true to your brand and your tone of voice.

15. Create an industry glossary

Industry jargon can confuse your website visitors, so make life a little easier for them with a glossary that briefly explains the terms and concepts of your trade. An online shop that sells bean-to-bar chocolate could explain terms such as “conching” and “tempering”. A glossary can also help your SEO, because it covers both the trade terms and the everyday words people might type into search engines.

16. Repurpose existing content

Don’t start from scratch whenever you share something new. Save time and get more out of the content you’ve already made by giving it a new format. You could turn one of your blog posts into a video, share a customer story on social media or add an infographic from your website to your monthly newsletter. Any piece can get a second life this way, as long as it’s still useful to your audience.

Which content marketing ideas should you start with?

Our advice: start a blog and an FAQ page first. Add new ideas one at a time rather than all at once, and pick formats that suit the time you have and the way your customers like to take in information. For most small businesses, a good order is this:

1. Use your blog and FAQ page to answer the questions your customers already ask you.
2. Add a newsletter once you have a few posts, to share them with people who have signed up for it.
3. Plan bigger formats such as webinars, online courses or a podcast once the first ones run smoothly.

How to plan your content marketing

The ideas work best as part of a simple content marketing strategy, and it doesn’t need to be long: know who you’re writing for, write for the way they search, plan what you publish and check what works.

Know your target audience

It’s hard to create good content if you don’t know your target audience and what they need, so start there. The questions customers ask you in the shop, by email or on the phone are a good source of ideas. If, for example, many of your customers struggle with the same problem, write a post or make a video with tips that help them solve it.

Write about what your customers search for

Use the words your customers use when they search, answer one question clearly per page and give each post a title that says what it covers. SEO-optimised texts like these help your content show up in search results, where potential customers can find it.

Create a content plan

If you want to share new content regularly, a content plan in the form of a content calendar gives you an overview and helps you prepare in good time. Write down in it what you’ll publish on each channel, such as your blog, your newsletter and your social media, and when. Publish only as often as you can keep up, and hold that rhythm. A short template you can fill in quickly makes the plan easy to use. For each new piece of content, note its title, its format (such as a 40-second video, a blog post or a webinar), the channel or platform, the person responsible, the release date and where it stands, from idea to published.

Check what works

Look regularly at which posts get the most visitors, which newsletters people open and which content customers mention when they get in touch. A tool such as Google Analytics shows you this, because its reports show your website’s traffic and how visitors use your pages, and your newsletter tool shows the open rate of each email. Do more of what works and drop what doesn’t, but give a new idea a few months before you judge it.

Put these ideas to work on a blog on your own website, where your posts, guides and FAQ page live in one place. If you’d like to run your blog on WordPress, Hosting for WordPress gives your first posts a home.

Describe your business, and Aida AI Website Builder creates a complete website with pages, text and images that you can keep refining through chat.