Tuesday, February 26, 2013

The Significance of Content Marketing

Creating brand awareness, new customer acquisition, lead generation and customer loyalty are all goals that content marketing can help fulfill. A successful content marketing strategy involves creating interest and conversation with your audience—influence them to become a loyal customer to your company—without directly selling them something. The following are a few ways that you can ensure your content is being shared with a relevant audience in the most effective ways.
Content is Key

Make sure that the content you are creating is going to resonate with your audience to make them actually want to read it. If you are unsure of what may generate interest, regardless of your industry, take a look at this infographic published by Content Marketing Institute.

Readers want something that will initially grab and hold their attention, entertain them, and potentially help them solve a problem. If you can do that, you're headed in the right direction. According to The InboundWriter, one of the top 3 reasons why people follow brands on social media is because of interesting content.

Create Partnerships with Other Sites, Bloggers, etc.

Creating mutually beneficial partnerships with other reputable sources who have relevant and quality content to share is a good way to reach audiences you may not have been aware of otherwise.

How to do this:
  • Begin following non-competitive companies and blogs that share a similar audience with you.
  • Share their content, link to their page, share your thoughts, and create a connection to their site.
  • Build a relationship via social media, etc. in order to build trust in one another. 
  • Once you have built a solid relationship with the site/blog, engage them in some type of partnership conversation. 

Share Your Content To Increase Exposure 

Once you publish an interesting and engaging blog post, don't let it live in only one place—share it. Sharing your content gives you the opportunity to reach your audience in more than one place and it can provide substantial fuel for SEO purposes. 

Where should you share?
  • Share it on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest)
  • Since you're already following relavant bloggers, share it with them. 
  • Include it in your company newsletter
  • Feature it on your website
  • Send out a press release
There are endless possibilities, but just remember: create quality content. Irrelevant content can end up being worse than no content at all.



by Samantha Warner
Marketing Extraordinaire