There is no getting away from the fact that, in business today, content is key. Content marketing is where it’s at: educating your audience, sharing and engaging with them and creating a platform through which your target market sees that they can’t live without you.
Not convinced? Here are four other reasons why you should engage in content marketing:
- It will enhance all your other paid marketing strategies, boosting awareness of your brand and building you up as a subject matter expert, worthy of investment.
- It will drive traffic to your website by enhancing your SEO position and keep your website consistently fresh and new.
- Content that can be shared because it is appreciated WILL be shared, bringing new eyes to your business.
- Educating your customers is low risk but high return, as it content encourages action from customers.
Okay, now that you’ve convinced, let’s move on to what kind of content will work best for your business.
Who is your target market and what do they need?
In order to market effectively, with content or otherwise, you need to know what your customers are asking themselves so that you can answer their questions. It’s like the butler who knows what his employer wants even before the latter says anything. Anticipating the questions that your audience has, the needs that they want to fulfill and the ways that they might go about finding those solutions is how you will decide what medium will work best.
Maximizing different types of content.
Does your target market prefer to watch a video, read a post or listen to a podcast? Or maybe a combination of the above? It’s certainly positive to engage in more than one medium, but just don’t try and be everywhere, on every sharing platform, and engaging in all the content types because it’s simply too much. You can get caught in the dilemma of spending too much time creating and sharing content and not enough time actually doing the work that makes money.
Evergreen content—that is, content that is not restricted to a certain time/date period—can be repurposed in different ways and across different mediums. Your expertise can be shared in a variety of ways, to maximize your reach, without re-inventing the wheel… or the content! Whichever medium you choose to move forward with, you can create your content so that you can reuse it and re-invent it, again and again.
For example: You might have created a Facebook Live event with tips on getting kids into yoga because that’s a question you’ve had from customers, time and again. You could take those tips and create a blog post from them, for those who prefer to read. You could also take several of those posts and turn them into an e-book or a presentation for yoga studios. Do you see where I’m going here?
After you’ve created your content, the key is to find out how and where your audience consumes content regularly, so that you can be right there too. If your audience tends to be on Facebook, there’s no point spending the bulk of your content sharing time on Twitter.
Make sure the content provides value to your audience.
The idea of giving away information might seem counter-intuitive to you. Why should customers pay for it if you’re going to give it away? But that’s not what you will be doing at all. Sharing information and proving your expertise through content creates trust. Bottom line: if people trust you, they’ll buy from you.
Customers, or potential customers, can’t decide that yours is the company they want to deal with if they have no understanding of how you work and if you really are the right fit for them. Getting answers to their questions, relating to a story that you’ve told and in general feeling like you ‘get’ their needs will land you sales more often than not!
If you aren’t sure what it is your customers will be interested in knowing about / reading about / hearing about, ask them! It’s a form of engagement that will wow customers, as they feel that their interests are synonymous with yours.
Content in day to day operations.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed with feeling like you constantly have to be churning out new content to keep people engaged, and while it is important to be consistent and persistent, don’t freak out! Take a topic that you’re interested in blogging about and break it down into small, manageable chunks. It will be easier for you to produce the content and a series will give your customers yet another reason to come back again and again.
Whether your customers prefer video, audio or the written word, or a combination of those, you can stay in front of your customer’s needs and wants by sharing your knowledge with them! It’s a great way to grow your business and your credibility, at the same time.