Content marketing strategy on a small budget

Content marketing does not need a studio, a team of writers or a big budget. It needs a clear audience, a short list of topics people care about, a format you can keep up, and a way to get each piece in front of the right people. Small businesses often have an advantage here: they talk to customers every day and know what those customers ask.

The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) defines content marketing as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience”. Each part of that definition shapes the plan below.

Start with a one-page strategy

CMI recommends writing your strategy down, and keeping it short. Its guide to writing a one-page content marketing strategy sets out seven steps:

1. Name the business goal, such as more enquiries for a particular service.
2. Decide what content should do to support that goal.
3. Define the audience: “Pick one primary audience and, possibly, a secondary audience.”
4. Choose a few broad themes, each with sample topics.
5. Pick formats the audience likes and you can realistically produce.
6. List channels and a publishing frequency you can sustain.
7. Set measurable goals: what the reader should do next, how you will measure it, and by when.

The value is in the choices. One page forces you to drop audiences, channels and formats you cannot serve well. CMI’s advice on frequency is direct: “Don’t be overly ambitious. Pick a frequency you can realistically meet.”

Know your audience well enough to help them

CMI contrasts content marketing with pitching products. Instead of selling, you help prospects and customers solve problems in their work or lives. That only works if you know what those problems are.

Write a short description of your primary audience in plain words: who they are, what they are trying to get done, what worries them and what they already know. Skip invented personas with names and hobbies unless they help your team make decisions. A good test is whether the description tells you what to leave out.

Find topics in customer questions

The cheapest source of topics is the questions you already answer. Collect them for two weeks from these places:

• Emails, enquiry forms and live chat.
• Sales calls and the objections people raise before buying.
• Support tickets and returns reasons.
• Reviews of your business and of competitors.
• Comments on your social posts and questions in community groups your customers use.

Group the questions into three to five themes. These become your content categories. Questions asked before buying make good articles and guides. Questions asked after buying make good help content and emails. Each piece should answer one question fully, from your own experience, which is something a generic article cannot copy.

Choose formats you can keep up

Pick one main format and a few smaller ones. A useful rule is to build around the format you can produce well every time, then cut it into smaller pieces.

The effort column is a general guide, not a measured figure. Your own skills matter more. If you speak well but write slowly, record a conversation and turn it into text.

Plan distribution before you publish

A piece nobody sees has no effect. For each piece, decide in advance where it will go. On a small budget the usual order is:

1. Owned channels. Your website, your email list and your own social accounts.
2. Search. Pages that answer real questions can be found for months or years, if they are useful.
3. Sharing by others. Partners, suppliers, local groups and industry newsletters that serve the same audience.
4. Paid promotion. A small boost for pieces that have already proved useful, not for every post.

Use your sales conversations as a channel too. A clear guide sent after a call often does more than a social post.

Get more from each piece by repurposing

CMI’s article on getting bigger results with a small team makes a blunt point: “Some of your content delivers big, but most of it does not.” Its advice is to plan a central piece and its spin-offs before you produce it, and to update and repackage the pieces that perform. It also suggests writing headlines, meta descriptions and calls to action while the original is still fresh, and keeping one tracker for the whole process.

An example (illustration only)

A small garden design studio collects customer questions and finds the most common is “How much does a garden redesign cost?” It writes one detailed guide with price ranges from its own past projects, the factors that change the price and a short checklist for a first meeting. From that guide it makes:

• a newsletter issue summarising the three biggest cost factors,
• three short videos filmed on site, each explaining one factor,
• a downloadable checklist offered in exchange for an email address,
• a reply template the owner sends after enquiry calls.

One piece of research produces a month of material. The studio spends its small paid budget promoting only the checklist, because that is the piece tied to its goal of more enquiries. The business and its choices are invented to show the method.

Measure what matches the goal

CMI’s article on matching metrics to content goals puts it simply: “You wouldn’t track your height to measure your weight loss.” Choose metrics that fit each goal.

• Awareness: views, reach and new followers, accepting that these are signals rather than proof of results.
• Engagement: who comments and shares, and whether they are the people you want to reach.
• Lead generation: clicks on calls to action, sign-ups and how many leads turn out to be qualified.
• Sales support: whether leads who receive content convert faster or more often than those who do not.

Review monthly. Keep a simple sheet with each piece, its topic, its format, where it went and what happened. After three months, patterns appear: which themes bring enquiries, which formats get read and which channels are worth the time.

Common mistakes and when it is the wrong fit

• Publishing on every platform at once and burning out within a month.
• Writing about the business instead of the customer’s problem.
• Copying generic articles that add nothing from your own experience.
• Measuring likes when the goal is enquiries.
• Stopping after six weeks because results have not appeared. Content usually takes months to build up.

Content marketing suits businesses with a considered purchase, where people research before buying, and owners willing to commit for at least several months. If you need sales this week, or your product is an impulse buy with little to explain, offers, partnerships or paid ads may serve you better while content builds in the background.