Content Marketing Strategies: What Works For You?
In the online business world, there’s been a lot of talk lately about content marketing. It’s a fancy industry term that basically translates into generating sales by providing the type of value that your readers are looking for. Educate us, entertain us, provoke us, and then tell us what you want us to do with a strong call to action.
The world’s caught on to yesterday’s tactics.
If you’re going to keyword bomb your readers relentlessly, or write spammy content, you’re going to lose.
In order to make sales, you’ll need content that distinguishes you from your competition.
How do you get there?
It can happen through web copy, blogging, articles, white papers and other forms of online content. It also means photos, graphics and video.
Your content needs to be consistent and awesome.
If you’ve ever done a Google search in your industry, you understand that there’s typically hundreds or thousands of results. If you’re not publishing on a consistent basis at least a few times a month, your readers will forget about you. Content marketing is all about regularly providing value.
It also takes awesome content to stand out in that kind of crowd. It is often the first exposure readers have to your business. It’s a reflection of you. Put some punch into it.
You’ll also need ideas.
Lots and lots of ideas. In a content marketing world, you’re operating as your own publishing company. Think about the questions that your offline customers ask on a regular basis, and try to provide answers. Review industry books. Offer your take on ideas.
My friend Matt Mansfield at Matt About Business has a great opportunity for businesses looking to generate more content ideas. All you need to do is tell him what industry you’d want to see more content ideas for, before March 15. He’s providing ideas for the industries with the most votes.
It takes dedication.
What works for you may not work for other businesses. You have to figure out if your audience is more responsive to copy or graphics or video. It may take a mixture of content types.
Whatever recipe you come up with, make sure you are persistent. You won’t publish your first blog or article and all of a sudden receive 100 comments and thousands of new followers. Keep dreaming.
In the meantime, make sure you’re publishing appealing content.
What’s worked for you in the past? How do you generate the type of content that results in business?
Matt Brennan is a Chicago-area marketing writer and copy editor. He is also the author of Write Right-Sell Now.
