Content is everything in small business marketing. Your future customers are online searching for your products and services. Most of them have the patience of an over-caffeinated squirrel monkey so your website—the visible part of it—better tell them what they want to hear. If not? They’re out.
But not everyone is a coffee-addled marsupial. Some people are searching with a tiny little thimble of patience. They are your more serious readers. They’re not looking for instant gratification. They assume your products and services are good enough to compete with all the other providers. They don’t need all cap braggadocio like WE’RE THE BEST LAW FIRM IN THE WHOLE WORLD. It won’t land for these people.
Which is fair. There’s something comforting about working with someone who really knows their job. Small business marketing experts refer to this as thought leadership. I think that’s a ridiculous phrase. Sounds Orwellian. What we’re really talking about here is experience.
You’ve put fifteen years into this work. You’ve developed your own methods, your own style, your own hacks and tricks for getting the job done right. These tricks and hacks are the hallmarks of your experience. They are your standards and you hold yourself and your staff to them every day.
You are. You’d never say it in front of people. You don’t brag. You don’t have to. Your work speaks for itself. Except…maybe not. While your experience is invaluable in the performance of your work, it’s invisible to the people searching for your services. I know why you don’t like to talk about it. Your dignity and integrity are essential to your character. Bragging is for insecure low-class bloviators with a serious case of diarrhea of the mouth. Your work speaks for itself.
Not online. The people searching for your services will pick you only when they are assured you know what you’re doing. You can’t just tell them. You can’t plaster your front page with I KNOW WHAT I’M DOING. SERIOUSLY. It doesn’t work. You have to prove it. Which brings us back to your experience. The only way to prove to potential clients that you’ve got what it takes is to show them.
You need a blog. Think of your blog as your experience made searchable. Each of your particular skills merits a blog post. All of your methods for the various problems you solve are potential blog posts. When they are published, your potential clients can read them and gain a sense of your experience. When they see just how many posts you’ve published and on which topics you’ve written, it becomes a network of your unique history and ability. It becomes proof of your experience.
If your company is called Jim’s High Performance Lawn Care, then your potential customers make a lot of assumptions about what you do in the first nano-second after they read your name. Their first question is never What do you do? It’s always why are you the right choice?
Go look at the website for your nearest competitor. Chances are, it’s all about WHAT WE DO. It seems natural. But go to the website of a leader in your industry. The kind of business owner who not only does the same job as you, but is five times bigger and owns half the jobs in your city. They aren’t starting with WHAT WE DO. They’re leading with WHY WE ARE THE RIGHT CHOICE.
Back to this ridiculous phrase. And you might think it’s reserved for the CEO of Nike or Apple, but it’s not. Jim at Jim’s High Performance Lawn Care is just as much of a thought leader as Tim Cook. Only the size of their industries differ. The thing is, you should be recognized in your niche. It’s just good business.
So let’s first get rid of that awful meme-level phrase, thought leader. We’ll call you an experienced industry adviser. And that’s exactly how to develop the foundational point of view for your new small business marketing strategy: you’re advising potential clients.
You do it every day. In the field. On the phone. Through email. Why not use that experience in developing a content marketing strategy. Every time you answer a question, think of it as a blog post. Every time you compare equipment, apps, or SaaS for your business, think of it as a blog post.
Visitors to your site aren’t looking for your services. I know that sounds like the kind of thing some idiot would say when they’re trying to sell you on a new website app. But trust me. They aren’t. They don’t even know you. Your visitors are searching for answers. Nobody opens Google and types in TRIM BUSHES. They type in “Why do my hedges look terrible?” Half the time, they’re not even looking for a service. They just want to solve their problem. They have an ugly hedge. They don’t know why. They don’t know what to do. Their neighbors are giving them insufferable side eye.
Imagine if they called Jim? He’d tell them “hedges need to be maintained. You do it by trimming them twice a year—which is one of our services.”
That’s the voice of an experienced adviser. And that’s the root strategy of effective small business marketing. By adopting their point of view, and by considering which problems your potential clients are trying to solve, you can develop a robust, effective content strategy for marketing your small business.