Learn how content marketing helps local businesses grow by building brand awareness, establishing trust, and driving word-of-mouth referrals. Actionable tips and real-world examples included!
At Launch Kit, we describe content marketing as the consistent, active effort to share your business's story through relevant mediums.
A fancy way of saying: creating photo, video, and written content for your social media, website, newsletter, and ads.
The key takeaway here is consistency. Consistency is the difference between businesses that succeed and those that fade into the background. Content marketing is a lot like health and fitness—there’s no “winner.” It’s an infinite game. Business works the same way. You could make it to the top of the Inc. 5000 list, but there’s no finish line. As a community, we’re all here to contribute and help each other live more meaningful lives. Whether that’s selling a cup of coffee on the corner or fixing someone’s plumbing, business is an opportunity to provide value to one another.
So, why should your small business make an effort to do content marketing?
This article is for my local business friends—the smaller players, the community contributors. As a small business, we need to help people know we exist. The fact of the matter is we’re not household names like Nike or Verizon, and that’s okay.
What we do need, however, is to actively raise brand awareness and build brand authority. These two ideas are essential for small business success, so let’s break them down.
Brand awareness is simple: people need to know we exist. Your small business could have the best product in town, but if no one knows about it, they’ll never have the chance to experience it.
The good news? Content marketing is your tool to solve this problem. Awareness starts with putting your business in front of people—consistently. That means creating photo, video, and written content and sharing it in the places where your audience spends their time.
At the time of writing, we’ve found the best platforms for small business content marketing to be:
Brand awareness is step one—people knowing your business exists. But brand authority is step two. It’s the process of earning trust and respect for your brand. When people engage with your content and enjoy it, they start associating your business with positive feelings.
In other words, brand authority is positive awareness.
If brand awareness is about “getting your reps in,” brand authority is about “dialing in your form.”
To establish brand authority, focus on measuring and improving content performance. Metrics like impressions, average view duration, and clicks tell you whether your content resonates with your audience.
When you produce higher-quality content, it performs better—and that performance builds your authority. Over time, you’ll see two key indicators of success:
Word-of-mouth referrals are the gold standard of small business marketing. Positive recommendations from your audience are invaluable, but they don’t happen by chance.
To increase word-of-mouth referrals:
Think about your favorite restaurant. You probably recommend it to friends because you trust it and enjoy what it offers. That trust is the result a great product/service and effective content marketing—whether it’s an Instagram post showcasing a special dish or a behind-the-scenes video of the chef at work.
Let’s look at how we apply these strategies for one of our clients, Green Shield Deck Builders.
Green Shield uses multiple marketing channels to ensure people know they exist. These include:
Each of these tactics helps Green Shield generate awareness. For example, a potential customer might notice a Green Shield bus wrap on their way to work. Later, when they’re scrolling Instagram, they’ll have the awareness to search for “Green Shield Decks.”
Once potential customers land on Green Shield’s Instagram profile or website, the next step is to build trust and authority.
We curate their content to create a positive impression. This includes:
By presenting this content, we help Green Shield position itself as a trusted, high-quality service provider; because they are, we're just letting people know.
As long as your business exists, it has a story to tell. Content marketing is the opportunity to share that story with your community.
The beauty of content marketing is that you’re in control. It’s your story—you get to decide the narrative and take on the role of the hero. Content marketing is simply the medium for sharing that narrative.
If I were writing this article in the 1950s, we’d be talking about newspapers. In the 1960s, it’d be radio. The 1970s? TV. While the platforms change over time, one thing remains constant: businesses providing great products and services and sharing their story.
At Launch Kit, we help you focus on running your business while we handle your content marketing. From photography and videography to social media management, graphic design, and digital ads, we’ll create the content that tells your story.
If you’re a local business in Grand Rapids, Michigan, let’s connect. We’d love to hear what you’re working on and explore how we can help you grow your brand.
Each year, we take a fresh look at the various marketing efforts a small business can make. We've built this framework to get started optimizing your business's online presence.
