Content Marketing to the Small and Medium-sized Businesses

Content marketing has become an extremely important part of many successful marketing strategies, but there are still many small and medium-sized businesses that have yet to realize the full potential of this means of spreading the corporate message. It provides businesses with the opportunity of attracting customers without having to use traditional forms of advertising, but how does it work, and what are the benefits? Here’s a guide to what content marketing is and why it really does matter for SMBs

What is content marketing?

Content marketing can take many forms, but it can be summarized as the distribution of informative, useful and valuable information with the objective of gaining and retaining a targeted audience and, ultimately, driving that audience closer to becoming customers.

It can take the form of an information-based blog, being quoted on industry websites, the publication of white papers, and the publication of informed expert articles on news sites and in magazines or newspapers.

The primary objective of content marketing is to get the name of the business more widely known, but in a form that is informative and helpful, rather than in a form that requires any specific positive action from the reader in return.

What are the benefits of content marketing to SMB?

There are numerous benefits to be gained from a well-planned content marketing campaign that range from improving SEO rankings for the company’s website, to improving the company’s public image. The hidden benefits include increased brand awareness, brand authority, and brand trust.

Content marketing for SEO

Content marketing can have a direct impact on the position that a website achieves on search results. By including important keywords in the text of articles published on a company blog, as well as in articles published on third-party websites that contain links back to the corporate website, content marketing can strengthen and improve the position at which the company’s website appears in the search engine results for those keywords.

Content marketing for brand awareness, authority, and trust

At its basic level, it can be seen as a means of getting a brand better known, but well-written, authoritative content will also create more trust in a brand and infer more authority, and people will always be more likely to buy from a brand that they know and that they trust.

Content marketing Encourages subscription and sharing

A regular flow of high-quality content will encourage the sharing of that content and that will lead to more and more people becoming aware of the brand. If people find the content useful, they are also more likely to subscribe to feeds and email lists, which will open up the opportunity of sending them more traditional direct sales messages as well as future content.

Why Content Marketing Matters

Content marketing is a very effective way of increasing brand awareness and encouraging engagement with a business but producing a regular flow of high quality, informative content is not as simple as it may first appear.

The starting point is to develop a comprehensive outline of the topics to be covered and, for SEO purposes, identify the relevant keywords. This can then be translated into a strategically sequenced editorial calendar.

Producing high-quality content on a regular basis is a time-consuming task and it can be especially challenging for a small and medium-sized business that have limited resources. For many SMBs, outsourcing content creation is likely to be the best option.

However, it is an extremely powerful form of digital marketing that small and medium-sized businesses really can’t afford to ignore if they want to stay ahead of their competition. Content marketing matters as much to SMBs as it does to the major corporations.

30 Days Minimum Viable Product Wisdom

When anyone sets out to design and market a new product or system of any kind, their first inclination is likely to be to make the first release of that product or system the most functionally rich and complete that it can be. There is, however, a growing acceptance that releasing a minimum viable product (MVP) to early adopters is a far more efficient way to develop a new product or system and one that will ultimately lead to a much better deliverable.

What is a Minimum Viable Product?

The concept of a minimum viable product, which has been popularized by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Steve Blank, and Eric Ries, is a design and development process in which a new product, such as an app, is developed and initially released with only sufficient functionality to satisfy the needs of the early adopters. Further features and functionality are only added to the product after consideration has been given to the feedback that has been received from those early adopters.

A minimum viable product is a product that has sufficient value to make people want to use it and that has been sufficiently developed so that early adopters can see the future of the product. The aim of MVP is to provide a feedback loop that can be used to guide the future direction of product development.

The advantages of the MVP

Developing a product using the MVP model has distinct advantages over the traditional, all-in-one-go, approach. Here are the main reasons why an MVP produces better apps.

Removes uncertainty

A system spec can only be, at best, a guess of what users will do with an app, how they will interact with it and what functionality they will need from the app. An MVP takes much of the guesswork out of product development and allows time for the feedback of users to drive the development of the product.

Eliminates wasted time

If you attempt to develop a fully completed app-based only on system spec, it is virtually guaranteed that you will develop functionality that users don’t use or functionality that doesn’t quite meet their expectations. It is far more cost-effective, therefore, to develop an app that has all the basic minimum functionality and then lets the user feedback be what dictates the future development of the product.

Applies the 80/20 principle to the development process

The Pareto (80/20) principle is never truer than it is in software development. 80% of the most important requirements of an app are likely to be cared for by just 20% of the functionality. The MVP focuses early development time on getting the essential 20% right so that 80% of essential user needs will be met with the first release.

Improves development focus

The MVP development model allows developers to focus on the development of core functionality first, followed by the development of additional functionality. This is a much more efficient way of developing a product than attempting to develop many aspects of functionality simultaneously. It allows the focussed use of resources on fewer aspects of the app, which ensures that each element of an app is completed to the highest specification.

It allows a product to evolve

Evolution has created some of the most complex and efficient systems on the earth, so why not let a product evolve too? What begins as an MVP can evolve naturally, through end-user feedback, and refinement via subsequent development iterations.

The Wisdom of the Aezion Inc. 30 Days MVP Development Model

The 30 Day MVP model does not doggedly insist that any product can be delivered as an MVP in 30 days. Instead, it recognizes, and leverages, the realization that the 30-day constraint (when applied with carefully crafted and optimized facilitation, design, planning, development, and usability testing techniques) can sharpen focus and improve project and custom software development process efficiency.

These efficiencies accrue as a result of the following:

Greater focus: A 30 days development constraint can further sharpen the focus by forcing prioritization and squeezing out all but the essential aspects of the app idea.

More efficient project structure: In contrast to conventional agile MVP processes, the Aezion Inc. approach defines and validates the entire multi-sprint MVP deliverable at the outset during week 1. This process eliminates the uncertainty often associated with open-ended agile processes and provides the dev team with a highly actionable solution definition that can be implemented sequentially by one team or in parallel by multiple sub-teams to meet the desired timeline.

We concede that our 30-Day MVP Model is unusual and is not suited to everyone and every software project; but if our approach resonates with you or whets your appetite, please schedule an appointment to discuss your app requirements.