Everyone is talking about content marketing. Whether you are a Fortune 500 company or a small local business, it’s not enough to market your business through traditional venues. To find the right market for the product or service that your company offers, you need to use a different approach from what was expected in the past. Just a few years ago a business could order promotional materials, mail out postcards, put up some posters, splurge on billboards, or better yet put a commercial on network TV. Now, customers are checking their traditional mail and tossing everything in the shredder, they aren’t looking up at posters or billboards and they watch Netflix to avoid commercials. So much for attracting your target market. If your potential customer isn’t looking where you’ve spent your marketing budget, then it was not money well spent. The old model of blanket marketing is fading out. If potential customers are turning away from your message via traditional marketing styles, it’s time to look at the contemporary model of content marketing.
What is content marketing? 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. A content marketing plan helps businesses prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic and new leads. Your customer isn’t looking up and around. Chances are they’ve got their nose glued to a screen and they are clicking away at the next cool, interesting, informative, flashy or Zen-like link that catches their eye. Easily distracted by “what’s next”, content marketing allows today’s consumers an opportunity to find and establish a loyal connection to the businesses that offer content that keeps them engaged. If your business can create just one blog post that naturally gets a consistent amount of internet traffic, an embedded link to an eBook or another freebie will continue generating leads for you as time goes on. Content marketing creates a memorable trail and positions you and your company as an experts in the field. Additionally, it’s easy for your customer to share what they’ve seen with others, so they inadvertently assist your marketing efforts by “liking” your content and sharing it with their trusted network of friends.
How hard can it be, right? You’re probably thinking, I send email all the time. I can write a few words about what I do and what I offer to my customers. Think again. You might be an expert at your business, but that doesn’t make you an expert at telling others about it. Sometimes you just can’t come up with the right expressions to connect your customer with your product or service. What you need is someone with the ability to highlight your expertise while attracting your target market with a clear call to action. Even if your writing is not so bad, do you really want to spend precious hours away from your running your business? When you work with a content specialist you enhance your business by tapping into an expert whose sole responsibility is to write about your business and industry to attract and retain your most valuable asset: your ideal customer.
Leave content marketing to the experts. Their hard work will generate revenue for your business and set you on the path to developing a loyal client base that brings in more prospects who both know and like what you have to offer.