If you are running a business, and do not engage in Content Marketing, you are missing out on numerous opportunities. However for this to be a successful marketing strategy, you need to either become an expert in content marketing or hire someone with expertise. Content marketing done correctly leads to positioning yourself as an expert in the eyes of your target audience, branding your business, and controlling your company’s image by regularly sharing a consistent message. Done well, this marketing will keep you top of mind with current clients or customers, attract potential leads, and entice all of them to engage with you, resulting in higher sales revenue.
“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
~Content Marketing Institute
“A clearly defined audience” is the first step in creating a content marketing. You first need to identify your ideal customer before you can determine the type of content to create for them. The more specific you can be, in regards to sex, age, income, interests, and desires, the better. Once you have identified your target audience, you need to then focus on issues that they face, their frustrations, or struggles. The best content would be a solution to the things they struggle with.
There are many types of content including blog posts, infographics, white pages, e-books, video, podcasts, or graphics. They can be distributed on a website, used as a lead magnet, sent to an e-mail list, shared on social media, or used as a product. Many times you can create one piece of content that can be used in many different ways. For example, a podcast can be transcribed into a white paper. That white paper can be broken up into several blog posts that can also be emailed out.
Content marketing is a time-consuming process and consistency is critical for a successful content strategy. The most successful businesses who use this marketing strategy outsource some or all of the components. Your focus should be on running your business and following up with the leads your PR & marketing bring in. You can either hire a full-time person, hire a company that does done-for you marketing, or plan your own content and hire from places like Upwork to patchwork it all together.
If you are interested in learning more about done-for-you marketing programs, schedule a consultation. During this brief call, we will discuss if and how it can benefit your business.