Content Marketing to Create an Irresistible Brand
Content is the cornerstone of modern marketing. Instead of forcing your message onto a reluctant audience, your business can use content to attract visitors, leads and sales. Better still, with its low costs and high rewards, content marketing offers an incredible ROI. So how can your business get started with content marketing?
What is Content Marketing?
For a succinct definition, we need look no further than Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute:
‘Content marketing is the strategic
marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and
consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience –
with the objective of driving profitable customer action.’
In other words, businesses attract customers, instead of
forcing their products and service onto a reluctant public. There’s less
of a need for expensive ad campaigns; no need for invasive phone, email
and web marketing; and lower costs and greater marketing efficacy as a
result.How does it work?
Content marketing relies on 3 core tenets: value, relevance and consistency.1) Value
For content marketing to attract people to your business, your content has to be valuable. It has to offer something – be it advice, guidance, interest, intrigue or controversy – that your target audience genuinely care about. Thankfully, value isn’t hard to create – and with a bit of effort, and a bit more strategy, you can create truly irresistible content.
- Problem solving content: Whether your website visitor is looking for advice, opinions or products, they’re trying to problem-solve. If your content manages to answer your visitor’s questions, and solve these problems, you’ve created genuine value.
- Market-beating content: Your content can improve upon existing content, adding greater depth and detail than anything that’s gone before.
- Emotive content: If your content can elicit an emotion, from delight to disbelief, you’ve created material that people care about.
- Convenient content: Most of the web’s useful information is spread across dozens, even hundreds, of websites. By compiling resources and information together, you create value through convenience.
2) Relevance
Value is completely subjective, and one man’s trash may literally be another man’s treasure. In order to attract the right type of people to your business, your content needs to be relevant to your target demographic. A ‘Complete Guide to Local SEO’
is a perfect piece of content for attracting small business owners –
but it’s no help if your website sells bespoke leather shoes.
3) Consistency
Selling requires trust – and most of the time, wowing a new
visitor with a stunning piece of content isn’t enough to ensure a sale.
Your business needs to regularly impress, and offer its visitors
valuable content time and time again. This consistency builds trust
between brand and visitor. It implies an understanding of a visitor’s
problems, and a desire to put their needs first. In other words, the
more value your business offers to a visitor, the more value you can expect in return.
Types of Content
‘Content’ can be a bit of an ethereal concept, with dozens of conflicting definitions floating around the internet. As Google’s Avinash Kaushik explains, the reality is much simpler:
‘Content is anything that adds value to the reader’s life.’
Virtually any medium can be used for content marketing – as long as
your target audience will engage with it. There’s no sense in creating a
technical whitepaper for a teenage audience, in the same way that blog
posts may be too casual for the technical director of a digital security
firm.Blog Posts
Blog posts are the heart and soul of thousands of successful content marketing strategies – and the stats explain why. HubSpot surveyed over 7,000 businesses, and reached the conclusion that blogging businesses generate 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages than their non-blogging counterparts. That means more traffic, more leads, and more sales.
Guides
There’s a lot of crossover between blog posts, articles and guides. Whilst a typical blog post probably clocks-in at 500 words, a guide might be more comprehensive and in-depth. Some subjects (like content marketing!) can’t be adequately covered in a short post, and may require multiple blog posts, or a longer guide. There are benefits to both approaches – and the ‘right’ choice will depend upon your target audience, and how they prefer to engage with content.
eBooks
eBooks allow businesses to show-off their expertise in the most in-depth and insightful way possible. Typically several thousand words long, an eBook acts as an authoritative resource on your chosen topic – often containing analysis, commentary, quotes, references, images, illustrations and statistics. Creating such valuable resources requires an investment of time and energy – but these efforts are quickly rewarded. By placing eBooks behind a CTA or contact form, you can trade your content in exchange for select details about your visitor – perfect for long-term lead-nurturing.
Whitepapers
Whitepapers tend to be super-technical, and require a relatively high
level of specialized knowledge and expertise. Whilst whitepapers will
offer low appeal to the everyday website visitor, they’re a powerful a
tool to use with more sales-qualified leads, and audiences from
specialized fields.
Videos
Sites like YouTube allow you to quickly create, share and embed videos. These videos are perfect for visually illustrating your content, and help to add variety to your content plan.
Infographics
Another visual medium, infographics make use of eye-catching design elements to create engaging and easy-to-digest content. Whilst infographics can’t contain as much information as a post or guide, they’re extremely easy to share and engage with.
Content Strategy
In order to attract the right people to your website, and engage with them in a productive and profitable way, your business needs to define its content strategy. This strategy will vary from business to business – but you should always address the following 4 elements:
1) Buyer Persona
Who are you targeting with your content? What are their ‘pain points’? How can your content solve these problems?2) Sales Funnel
Which part of the sales funnel are they in? Are they new leads, looking for basic information? Are they sales-qualified, and looking for technical information and case studies? Tailor your content according to their progression through the sales funnel.3) CTAs/Landing Pages
How can you tie your content into your own sales funnel? Which offers, promotions and CTAs will you use to nurture your leads?4) Distribution Channel
Which distribution channels will lead to the most productive engagement? Do your leads prefer social media, email or blogging? Choose a channel that resonates with your audience.
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About Paul Letourneau
I'm a Digital Creative Strategist with with years of experience working for entrepreneurs, startups and international brands.
Source : http://turny.co/use-content-marketing-create-irresistible-brand/
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