Be helpful or entertaining and people will be drawn to your brand!
Content is KING! It’s been the rallying call for internet marketers for years. Your website has selling pages dedicated to the products or services you offer. That’s great, you want that! But those selling pages probably don’t do a deep dive and answer all the questions customers may have. Content marketing gives you a chance to show you are an authority in your industry’s space. It gives you a way to deep dive into topics and detailed questions. It’s another way to draw customers to your online properties and be introduced to your brand or if they know you already, put you top of mind as an expert.
What is “content?”
Content can take on many different forms. Videos, newsletters, articles, blogs, podcasts, infographics, social media posts, charts and more are examples of content. Once you’ve created a piece of content, it can be distributed or promoted in many different ways to let your audience know it is available. All distributed content should be published using optimization best practices.
The trick to effective content marketing is your content needs to be something your audience is interested in. It needs to entertain them, educate or inform them and make their personal or work life better for spending time consuming your content. So you need to know your audience and what would interest them or the content you spent time and money creating may be wasted.
The elusive two-fer, three-fer or more
Many pieces of content you develop can be repurposed to another medium. For instance, an explainer video may be transcribed and made into a blog post. A static infographic can be repurposed into an animated video with a voice over. It still takes time to repurpose the content, but the repurposed content may be an opportunity to use your content in another medium and gain more exposure.
Even better, ever green content has a long life span
How do you develop a content strategy? Usually, I talk with sales people and discover from them what most customers ask. Another way to find good content to develop is through long tail keyword research. If you’re just starting with content marketing, your strategy could be to develop items that are constantly questioned in your industry versus short term trend topics. Content that can be relevant for a long time is called ever green content.
What’s the downside?
People get excited about new marketing opportunities, that’s great! You should use all your social, email and other customer lists to promote new content. Sometimes companies give up too early. They develop a handful of items and don’t immediately see the results they wanted. In some cases, their expectations are far too high. You can certainly use paid media to promote content you think is a MUST for prospects to see. That is a strategy frequently used on social media. If your strategy and content is relevant to customers’ needs, over time your content will get views and exposure for your brand. Like many forms of online marketing, big results may not be immediate. But relevant, credible ways you promote your brand can have huge upsides over time.
