![\"Joe](\"https:\/\/contentgarden.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/7942982406_aa028ba983_k.jpg\")
If you’re interested in content marketing for small business, you may be curious how it’s different than content marketing for larger organizations. Content marketing is all the rage these days, and for good reason. As Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute,\u00a0puts it<\/a>:<\/p>\n Consumers have shut off the traditional world of marketing. They own a DVR to skip\u00a0television advertising, often ignore magazine advertising, and now have become so\u00a0adept at online \u201csurfing\u201d that they can take in online information without a care for banners or buttons (making them irrelevant).<\/p>\n Smart marketers understand that traditional marketing is becoming less and less\u00a0effective by the minute, and that there\u00a0has\u00a0to be a better way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This better way for Joe and a host of other marketing gurus is content marketing, which he defines in the following way:<\/p>\n Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience \u2014 and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If you’re a small business like us, however, you may find this new type of marketing intimidating, to say the least. These are just a few questions our clients ask us when we introduce them to this relatively new approach to marketing:<\/p>\n To help answer these questions for folks that aren’t currently our clients, this will be the first post in a three-part series called “The Complete Guide to Content Marketing for Small Business.” In this series, you’ll learn:<\/p>\n Okay, let’s get started! Below you’ll learn how to find your content niche as a small business.<\/p>\n Heading back over to Joe, we find out that the first step<\/a> in developing a content marketing plan is to differentiate your content from what already exists. He advises to “either start telling a different story or don\u2019t bother at all.” What he means by this is that you need to identify what is unique and interesting about your business. Then you need to tell a compelling story about that uniqueness.<\/p>\n It’s important to\u00a0differentiate the story you have to tell from the stories already being told in your industry because that’s what makes customers fall in love with small business: they’re unique. Think about it: do you really care about a specific McDonald’s location? Or any other large chain? No, because they’re all the same. Large chains have multiple locations. Small businesses have to rely on being the best in their area.<\/p>\n This is why telling a unique story is even more important when doing content marketing for small business.<\/p>\n Small businesses that thrive know that they need to appeal to customers in their area, whether that is a\u00a0city, a state, or a specific niche online. That’s your value proposition as a small business: it’s what you do for your customers that no one else can do for them.<\/p>\nYour content niche is the story you tell your customers that keeps them coming back for more. <\/a><\/span>Share on X<\/a><\/span>\n The first step in identifying your content niche as a small business is to figure out what you’re really good at. And it doesn’t have to just be the product or service you sell. Maybe you treat your customers better than other people do. Or maybe you’re more honest with your pricing than others are. Maybe you know something about your industry that others don’t.<\/p>\n There’s some reason why people keep coming back to you. And it’s because they trust you. They think you’re an expert in doing whatever it is that you do.<\/p>\n And this is where a lot of our clients get hung up: you can tell a content marketing story about anything<\/em>. Many of our clients start out thinking that their industry doesn’t rely on stories. This is especially true if they’re in a highly technical field like healthcare<\/a>\u00a0or geography<\/a>. The assumption is that this highly specialized knowledge is only shared by other experts.<\/p>\n What many small businesses don’t realize, however, is that other people in their market do<\/em> want to hear their story. There are people that get excited about just about every topic you can imagine, and many of those people are potential customers.<\/p>\n Here are some things to consider as you develop your content niche:<\/p>\n After you have a rough idea of your content niche, it’s time to identify who you’re going to tell your story to. Who you’re trying to reach is as important as the story you have to tell. As we all know, the way you tell a story depends strongly on who you’re telling it to. You don’t tell the same story the same way to a grandparent as you do to a small child: you tailor it.<\/p>\n Content marketing is no different. You need to identify specific individuals that you’ll be speaking to. Consider the following questions when doing so:<\/p>\n You can answer this question by looking at your customer database or other sources of data (i.e., recent orders), but it’s more important to identify specific individuals that are like the customers you want to attract. Choose individuals that you think represent a specific customer segment and build a profile for each one that includes:<\/p>\n Your goal in your content marketing plan will be to attract new customers that are like these customers you’ve identified!<\/p>\n This is a step a lot of our clients who have attempted content marketing have skipped. As one past client put it when we brought up content marketing: “I kept a blog for six months. No one read it.” Besides figuring out your content niche and who your audience is, you also need to look at what people are actually searching for online.<\/p>\n This involves keyword research, which we’ve written a whole post about<\/a>. Without repeating that information here, you need to identify keywords that:<\/p>\n This is an art more than a science. The goal is to find the sweet spot between what people are currently searching for online, what you want to contribute, and what you think will appeal to your audience.<\/p>\n And you don’t need to figure this out all at once. In our personal experience, content marketing for small business is a process. It may take you some time to find your niche and that’s okay.<\/p>\n In our next post in this series<\/a>, which will cover all the basics of content marketing for small business, we’ll explain how you can take your content niche and develop it into a winning content marketing campaign for your small business.<\/p>\n If you’re interested in content marketing for small business, you may be curious how it’s different than content marketing for larger organizations. Content marketing is all the rage these days, and for good reason. As Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute,\u00a0puts it: Consumers have shut off the traditional world of marketing. They own […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"[New Blog Post] The Complete Guide to Content Marketing for Small Business, Part I: Finding Your Niche","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[79,14,33,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-content-marketing","category-digital-marketing","category-small-business","category-writing","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5lzBX-1qn","builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5479"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7299,"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5479\/revisions\/7299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n
The First Stage of Content Marketing for Small Business: Finding a Content Niche<\/h3>\n
Step 1: Figure Out What You’re an Expert In<\/h3>\n
\n
Step 2: Create Your Audience Profile<\/h3>\n
\n
\n
Step 3: Figure Out What Your Audience Is Searching for Online that Relates to Your Niche<\/h3>\n
\n
Next Post: How To Create a Sustainable Plan for Developing, Publishing, and Promoting Content<\/h3>\n
Need Help With Content Marketing?<\/h3>\nGet a Free 30-Minute Consultation<\/a>\n\n