If you’re tasked with creating content to market a product, but your budget is limited or nonexistent, your task is undoubtedly overwhelming. It’s time to figure out your business goals, what content formats align with these goals, and where you can play to your strengths to lure potential customers and address their pain points.
In the age of social media, consumers still appreciate facts, verifiable information, and honesty. What they don’t always expect — especially from a small business or a startup — is complete, polished perfection in all forms of content.
Table of Contents
- Define Your Business Goals and Inventory Your Creative Assets
- Start With Your Ideal Piece of Content
- Explore Thought Leadership and Network With Thought Leaders and Influencers on Podcasts
- Enlist User-Generated Content and Work With Your Target Audience to Capture Testimonials
- Always Make Templates Learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Publish Case Studies
Let’s take a look at how you can work with the skills, resources, talents, and materials you have to produce new content for your small business.
Define Your Business Goals and Inventory Your Creative Assets
Instead of focusing on what you’re lacking when it comes to content creation, start from a place of abundance. As a business leader or marketer, you understand that quality content emanates from the established goals of your business.
What demographics are you trying to reach? What do your buyer personas look like? What is the best content type for the social media platforms your prospective customers populate?
These simple but fundamental questions can help you define your marketing efforts and put you on the path to creating high-quality content that is of value to your ideal customer.
Once you’ve defined your goal and optimal social media platforms, it’s time to take a look at the talent you surround yourself with.
Whether you’re a solopreneur or have a marketing team at your disposal, every team member has their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to content creation. One team member might be especially comfortable at hosting webinars, while another is full of TikTok marketing tips and fluent in video content creation.
Start With Your Ideal Piece of Content
As the small business owner or marketing team leader, the buck stops with you. Content creators don’t always start out thinking of themselves that way — most successful content creators have created brand awareness intentionally or unintentionally by being visible and stellar in their roles, whether as businesspeople or influential parents of people or pets.
The most relevant content is organic and plays to your strengths. Are you comfortable with visual content, or are you more of a LinkedIn post writer or blog content creator?
When you contribute a piece of content to the marketing tactics you’ve defined for your team, you’re also setting an example: you’re showing your team (or future freelancers) what great content looks like. By doing that, you’re automatically curating your future content.
Explore Thought Leadership and Network With Thought Leaders and Influencers on Podcasts
If you’re a natural public speaker, podcasting is one of the most inexpensive pathways to content creation, and there are many free tools to support it. Most computers and smartphones come with free recording software, and you can get a professional podcasting setup for under $75.
When you create a podcast, you’re not just creating stellar content: you’re networking with thought leaders in the industry. Your guests can help you expand your audience by sharing the completed podcast, and you’re doing the same for them. This is one type of content that’s inexpensive to create and edit, thanks to automation and some experienced podcast editors on sites like Fiverr.
Don’t forget to save your podcast’s transcript, which you can repurpose into blog posts, white papers, and more.
Enlist User-Generated Content and Work With Your Target Audience to Capture Testimonials
Do you already have a small but loyal group of super-users? If so, you know how important it is to keep them engaged, and you understand how much they enjoy being part of your process.
You can ask them for testimonials, opinions, feedback, and other user-generated content to get insight into your target audience. This can create product or service improvements, and with the right permission form, you can polish and present their words on your website and social media. They’ll be delighted to brag about it and share!
Always Make Templates
When you have excellent content ideas, it’s always great to have a place to immediately store and start working on them. Templates can help you here, and as your content team expands, it will save you time, money, and confusion. For every type of content you choose to create (we suggest starting with three), create a template, search for one online, or ask a program like ChatGPT to create one tailored to your business needs.
Every small business should have a template for marketing campaigns, a quarterly and yearly content marketing strategy, social media posts, and blog posts. Do what makes sense: if you’re big on email marketing, make an email template.
Learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Don’t create content for the sake of making content — instead, create content that people want to find and will find. By investing a weekend learning keyword research and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, you can use free tools to refine the topics of your content.
For example, do you know what questions people look up regarding your area of expertise? If not, you can use the free tool AnswerThePublic to find out, and then you can blog about it to position yourself as the expert and your service as the answer. While they are paid tools, Semrush and HubSpot have a variety of free instructional content to help you learn everything you need to know about SEO.
Publish Case Studies
Record client successes and other information as you go. Metrics are key, and the proof is in the results — which is why case studies are so valuable to your business and to the clients who have achieved success with you. Gather the appropriate data and create a visually appealing case study with the information. Infographics and free tools like Canva provide everything you need to create your first case study.
Case studies are an example of working smarter to create content, not harder — you’re already collecting these metrics to ensure success for your client. Why not do something else with them, something that benefits you both?
Limited resources do not mean sticking to an underfed content strategy. Instead of investing thousands of dollars in advertising, it’s actually possible to grow a robust email list and earn more eyes on your content by going live on social media, listening to your audience, and producing quality insights geared toward helping people solve their problems.
Remember: authenticity is the hallmark of great content and successful e-commerce, and if you’re in it for the right reasons, that costs nothing.
