Small Business: Content Marketing Tips
If you’re a small business owner, don’t get caught up in perfecting your content before you distribute. Focus on quantity to get attention and you will grow every day.
With today’s technology you have the market at your fingertips to produce content in numerous fashions (YouTube, live streaming, podcasts, articles, social, etc.), so why are you procrastinating? Perfection will hamstring you, and your message will get lost in the noisy digital space. Too often small business owners and marketers take too much time to produce one piece of digital content because they want to get everything perfect…but what’s the root cause of this behavior?
Potential Roadblocks
- Fear: You could be afraid that either the content won’t be good enough, the market won’t agree with you, comments from competitors will be flooding in, you don’t know how to do it, etc. Get over your fear and just produce something, you will be surprised at the positive outcome.
- Misguided Truth: You’ve watched too many YouTube videos of people that have “made it” and think that if you can produce the single greatest piece of content, you will blow up too. Overnight successes are few and far between, and typically don’t last too long unless a strategy is in place. You typically don’t see all of the trials and errors of content that flopped, the 100’s of articles/videos that didn’t get attention. Be patient and produce, your content will get better and eventually the market will respond.
- Time: You have convinced yourself that you don’t have enough time, you’re too busy, you have too much on your plate and not enough help. Do you make time for things of importance? Family/friends, events, sports, hobbies, TV, outdoors, activities? When you make something a priority, you make the time to do it. When it’s not a priority, you make excuses. Stop being lazy and add 60 minutes to your “working day” to produce 1 piece of content each day.
- Content: You may not think that you have anything worth saying, you can’t provide value, you’re not an expert, no one will care. How do you know this if you don’t give it a try? You are in the position you’re in for a reason, you have a skill so let the rest of the world benefit from your knowledge. You don’t have to give away all of “grandma’s secret recipe”, but you can give a lot of it.
Challenge: Within the next 4 weeks, produce 4 pieces of content. Don’t worry about length or perfection, just produce it.
Reality: It took me 36 minutes to create this article; from the idea of the subject, selecting a photo and writing the content. Will this make it to an Editor’s pick on LinkedIn Pulse? No, but could it possibly inspire 1 person who sees it to change their mindset…yes.
If you can’t devote the time, then don’t complain about lack of results.
Kyle Milan is a well accomplished Industrial/Manufacturing sales and marketing professional with over 20 years of experience. He is the CEO of MFG Tribe (Industrial Marketing Agency) and Technical Sales University (https://technicalsalesu.com) and is considered the leader of Sales and Marketing Strategy & Social Media Marketing for industrial companies. He has published several articles in major news media outlets on various topics of; Inbound Marketing, Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing & Advertising, Industrial Marketing, Manufacturing Marketing, and Entrepreneurship.
