B2B content marketing: the great leveller

It's tough being a small business, especially in B2B. There is never enough time in the day to manage the day-to-day business, let alone think about promotion, so making a foray into social media marketing is the last thing on many small business owners' minds.
 
But when I read Diana Huff's discussion on LinkedIn that small businesses may not be able to compete with large companies because of the difficulty of creating content, I thought the opposite was true: social media is in fact a great leveller.
 
The reason is, as has been discussed on these pages before, that the impact of content does not depend on the money behind it. True, if you have a big budget and people to organise it, you can produce highly polished videos, and beautifully designed ebooks, compared to the hastily-compiled Wordpress blogs that the time-pressed entrepreneur may have to make do with.
 
But if the content itself is valuable - if it is useful, original, thought-provoking, expert - it will work as well as the big-budget productions of the blue chips.
 
The beauty of content marketing is that it does not carry a crippling media buying cost. Small businesses cannot compete in advertising terms with the big boys, because they cannot afford it. So, in the past, when brand presence depended on advertising in the business titles, the small players found it hard to compete. But in the brave new world of content marketing, media is not paid for, it is earned - by usefulness, by creativity, by expertise.

If the small business has an interesting, valuable, expert, useful angle, it will be spread by others and posted in lots of other places.

If they have the creativity, they don't need the spend.

 

Image courtesy of the great iPhone app, iHandylevel - available for download at all good AppStores.