“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
But why all the fuss?
You and I as consumers have shut off the traditional world of marketing. We are savvy to the manipulation: we make a cup of tea in a TV ad break, ignore magazine advertising, and shut off banners or buttons on our favourite websites.
Smart communicators understand that traditional marketing is becoming less and less effective by the minute and that there has to be a better way – enter content marketing.
According to a great summary by the Content Marketing Institute “Content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content, with the intention of changing, or enhancing consumer behaviour.
Content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling.
*Good *content marketing will create interest in your business, attracting traffic to your website and hopefully, sales or conversations as well.
*Great *content marketing will position your business as a thought leader in its industry and it will also educate, inform, entertain and inspire.
So, how do we create interesting content that will get traffic and ultimately get leads and sales?
1. Aim for quality not quantity- Millions of pieces of content are created every day. We are spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing content to read. Creating an interesting title will definitely be effective in getting a user to click on your article rather than the next person’s article, but a poorly written, uninteresting article will just get scanned and then discarded. This means no social love and definitely no enquiries or sales.
2. Know your audience– Rely on statistics and figures to a degree but never underestimate your own experience and knowledge of your customer profile. Are they on Facebook or LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram or Google +? Do they respond better to infographics and beautiful images or text heavy content? What about ebooks and whitepapers? Or is it video that pushes their buttons? Whatever it is, you need to know about it.
3. Inform (and entertain) rather than sell– Provide genuinely useful information on a topic which would allow you to mention your product or service along with some of its merits. A well written article will make the reader come to a conclusion without sounding like a sales pitch.
4. Get social – Once your content has been published, get as many people to see view it who may be interested in your business. Social media is an excellent place to start in order to achieve this. Posting content on your social media accounts will bring your content to those following you. If these people like your content, they may choose to share it with their followers and a snowball effect is created which may possibly result in your content going viral.
Final word of advice – good content marketing is an ongoing process that is best integrated into your overall marketing strategy. This will take you to #awesome.
Need any help of want to continue the conversation? Get in touch!
