• by Colleen Jones , January 2, 2019

Business today is digital, so content is critical. Products such as FitBit, Under Armour’s My Fitness Pal, and TurboTax are innovating content to guide and advise customers. Heck, even the Dollar Shave Club offers a handy magazine with each razor delivery.

But if you think content success is limited to big brands or a startup unicorn, think again.

My favorite spinning studio models the potential for content in a small business. I learned about the studio through a Google ad, which led me to a landing page that explained the studio and enticed me to try it. So I signed up for a trial.

Using the website, I registered for a class, then selected my exact seat. When I arrived at the studio a few days later, I checked in using a kiosk. During the class, my bike collected data such as revolutions per minute, calories burned, and more. I gave permission to display that data on a dashboard in the studio and compare myself to the rest of the class. Cool, right?

But what really caught my attention was this. After my first class, I received an amazing email within a few seconds. The email congratulated me and summarized my class rank, calories, power output, and more. I literally said, “Wow!”

This small spinning studio delivered a content-rich experience across many channels — and even a wow moment.

If you’re a small or growing business, consider these three reasons why you can beat big companies on content.

You’re more connected and responsive to customers.You can assess your customers’ needs faster and deeper than enterprises can. And that takes you a long way in planning content, especially the powerful details. The more specific, the more terrific, I often say.

Take the ride-sharing app for kids, HopSkipDrive. Created by moms for busy families, HopSkipDrive explains what the service is and how it works for specific scenarios like school pick-ups. Those details make the ride service stand out from Lyft and Uber.

So, as a small business, knowing your customers well gives you a leg up over enterprises. And knowing what you stand for will give you another content advantage...

You have more soul—so your content will, too. Small and growing businesses often have their founders still involved in the company and, consequently, constant reminders of why the company was founded. A recent Bain & Co study found companies with active founders perform 3.1 times better than other companies. And that goes for content, too.

Your “why” drives your company’s voice. Your voice makes your content unique, authentic, and influential. I love how the Instagram channel for Yumi, the baby food app founded by new mom Yumi Kumura in LA, expresses passion for delivering nutritious organic baby food and for growing a business. Just look at how her voice came to life in a recent post announcing the company's expansion into New York. And Yumi’s engaged 50,000+ followers seem to agree.

If these first two advantages surprise you, the third might shock you.

You can buy more powerful content technology than ever before. Automating. Testing. Personalizing. Sound like fancy schmancy things only enterprises can do? Think again. Small and growing businesses can affordably get quality technology with features that are as good as enterprise solutions—and often easier to use.

For example, you can often:

-- Create content quickly with templates and tips about best practices.
-- Make content work harder by creating content once, then using it on many channels such as an email, a landing page, a postcard, a social account, and an ad.
-- Create wow moments, such as automatically suggesting new products to your customers.
-- Test different versions of content, such as different headlines or images, to figure out what works best for your customers.
-- Use content that works well for your customers to attract new ones by promoting your best content with social ads.

And that’s only scratching the surface. If you haven’t checked out technology for small business in a while, it’s worth taking a look.

So, if you own or work for a small business and feel like an underdog as you play the content game, remember these three advantages. You can not only compete on content. You can win