If you run a young company that still needs to establish itself in the marketplace, content marketing should be one of your top priorities. By regularly creating and distributing content relevant to the people you’re trying to reach, you give yourself and your business the opportunity to bolster engagement and loyalty from your customer base.

The following are a few reasons why content marketing is so important to small businesses:

• It’s fairly inexpensive: Small businesses need to get the most out of their marketing dollars, and so the relatively low budget required of a content marketing campaign is attractive. Developing regular blog content for your website and establishing a strong social media presence are investments that can pay huge dividends in the long run—as long as you continue to produce content for these platforms.
• It helps create your identity: When you are competing against larger, more established competitors, you need to be able to find your voice and your niche to find success. Content marketing is a means through which you can better engage potential customers and demonstrate the character of your brand.
• It helps you call customers to action: You can develop web copy, articles and blog content that provide customers with all of the information they need to make a purchase. The importance of a good call to action at the end of a useful video or blog post cannot be understated.
• It creates natural word-of-mouth advertising: Once you’ve become established on social media networks, you make it easier for others to share your content. If the articles you’re developing have value, users will share them with their friends—essentially giving you free advertising. Word-of-mouth advertising is the most powerful form of marketing there is, so the initial investment can lead to higher-quality leads.
• It boosts your search engine optimization: Google and other search engines reward websites that regularly produce high-quality content. Having a stagnant website bores your customers and hurts your search rankings. However, blogging on a regular basis gives Google consistent new content to crawl and add to its index.

Working with a professional copywriting service

If you plan on launching a content marketing strategy for your business, it’s important to work with someone dependable and who can write well. Perhaps when you first get started that person will be you, but just about every business owner will eventually reach the point where he or she is unable to keep up.

Before you go out and hire just any copywriter, however, there are a few factors to take into consideration:

• What form writing do you want to do? This question applies both to the style you use in your writing and the format. Are you looking for someone who can write short, snappy blog content and social media posts? Maybe you’re after long-form articles and white papers. Or perhaps you just need a good press release writer. The format and style of writing will have a big impact on the copywriter with which you choose to work.
• How much writing do you want to do? If you’re only looking for daily or weekly blog content, you probably don’t need to hire a full-time employee to your team. This means either hiring a part-time employee or a freelance writer—or consulting a professional copywriting firm. Most small businesses do not need a full-time copywriter on their staff.
• What is your budget? You can fill your content needs affordably by working with agencies that charge you per piece instead of commanding a full salary.

It can be difficult for small business owners to let go of any aspect of their companies, especially copywriting—which is an area in which your voice is most clearly heard. But reputable copywriting teams work closely with you to make sure they are producing exactly the right tone throughout your content marketing efforts.