This week, several client meetings reinforced a vital truth:  Content marketing isn’t an arcane theory taught in expensive graduate schools that only billion dollar companies can use. In fact, great  content marketing is much more about brains than big bucks.

Those client conversations took me back to lessons learned from more than a dozen case studies we featured in Get Content Get Customers. What came through loud and clear was that content marketing requires discipline, patience, and persistence, but it doesn’t require an enormous budget. 

It’s particularly gratifying to watch so many small businesses and independent professionals putting content marketing to work.  Here in SW Florida, Dean Piccirillo of HBK Sorce Financial, realtor, Chris Griffith, and Simply Cupcakes of Naples are three inspirational examples. With minimal budgets and maximum creativity, they are executing content marketing strategies that deliver tangible results.  And, for the most part, they have bypassed traditional marketing and advertising.

If you haven’t read Get Content Get Customers, you can cut to the content marketing chase here with the following 10 top takeaways from our case studies. They may just inspire you to stop procrastinating and to kick start your content marketing strategy now. 

These takeaways apply to companies of every size, but will bring outsized benefits to small companies when they use marketing brains to outmaneuver marketing brawn.

10 Lessons Small Businesses Can Learn from Smart Content Marketers

1. Only content that is intrinsically valuable to your customers will work as a core component of your content marketing strategy.
2. You must have a thorough understanding of your customers and what is most important to them. If you do not understand the problems and challenges that they face, you cannot
   hope to create content that is truly relevant to them. Without understanding their problems, you cannot provide solutions.
3. A comprehensive content marketing strategy may completely or partially replace traditional advertising and marketing. Such a strategy can be both more effective and less expensive
   than doing things the old-fashioned way.
4. Print publications can be a powerful weapon in your content marketing arsenal. They enable you to reach out to your customers with precision, offering carefully targeted messages that are totally under your control.
5. Great design adds significant value to content marketing by making it more accessible, more appealing, and more actionable for your customers.
6. Your best content marketing investment may be in the creation of a dedicated internal or external team that understands how to produce great content and that lives and dies by the
   success of your content marketing program.
7. Drink your own Kool-Aid. Whenever possible, use your own company’s products or services to prove their worth to your customers.
8. Get your customers to participate actively with the content that you create in print and online. Begin a conversation and keep it going in order to earn your customers’ loyalty and
   trust.
9. Relevant and valuable content is just the first step in turning prospects or visitors into customers. You must then make it easy for them to buy.
10. Your small company can emulate most of the best practices from big companies in whole or in part.  It’s not the money. It’s the content marketing mindset that counts. Big ideas can trump big bucks.

The bottom-line: Content marketing is already working for smart small companies.  Now is the time to put it to work for your organization.  Don’t put off the decision any longer. You’ll find that learning from these 10 takeaways is a great way to begin.

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