Providing informative, useful content should be the driving force of your marketing.
We all know that the face of marketing has changed significantly over the past several years. Sure, at its core the fundamentals and the principles of marketing remain the same. But how clients and prospects engage has shifted, thanks to the advancement of technology, and content marketing is the best way to reach them online.
Clients and prospects now, more than ever, have control over what they see. TV remotes and DVR’s have allowed us to skip advertisements and channel surf to find those shows that we find most engaging. Traditional cable is also suffering, as more and more people see the advantage of streaming the shows and content that they want to see, without being locked into packages and programming that is dictated to them by the cable companies.
Savvy marketers who have kept up with the times understand that they need to adapt to this ever-changing landscape to keep their clients relevant within their niches. And one of the best ways to do this is with content marketing.
Simply defined, content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. The purpose of content marketing is to attract and retain customers through the consistent creation of relevant and valuable content intended to sway or enhance prospects behavior towards your business.
Content marketing is not something that you do once and walk away. Just like the more traditional forms of advertising, repetition is important. By providing consistent, interesting and valuable information to your clients and prospects, you develop an engaged audience that learns to trust your authority.
But remember, content marketing is not about selling; it is the art of communicating with your clients and prospects. Rather than pitching your products or services, the focus is on providing information that helps make your prospective client more intelligent. This strategy is based on the belief that through the delivery of consistent, ongoing content that provides value to your prospect, you will be rewarded with their business and loyalty.
And history has shown that this strategy works! Content marketing is being used successfully by some of the largest global organizations. But the beauty of content marketing is that you don’t have to be a big player to implement this strategy successfully. Properly developed and executed by small businesses, content marketing has proven itself to work over and over again.
Content marketing represents the current and the future state of marketing.
Remember our earlier definition of content marketing?
The key difference between content marketing and other types of marketing is that content marketing is not focused on selling your “stuff”.
Keep in mind that companies are sending us information all the time. But is it relevant? Most of the time it’s not, so clients and prospects become conditioned to delete so much of this. What makes content marketing so in trading in today’s marketing space is that one key point of differentiation – relevancy. Good content marketing engages the audience, changing the way they think and behave in reaction to the materials they are being sent.
You just can’t market without great content.
I’m sure you are using many different types of marketing tactics. But regardless of what you are doing, be sure that content marketing is a part of these processes not something distinct and separate.
Indeed, quality content is a part of all types of marketing. Consider the following:
• Social media marketing: integrate content marketing into the posts on your social media profiles
• SEO: Search engines love businesses that publish quality, consistent content.
• PR: Successful PR strategies address issues that people care about. PR is not about selling.
• PPC: PPC is an expensive experiment that is unlikely to give you a proper ROI without great content behind it.
• Inbound marketing: to drive inbound traffic and leads, you need good content.
To be effective at content marketing, it is essential to develop, create and follow a documented content marketing strategy. We can help you with the development of this strategy.
Until next time…
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