Content Marketing Starts the Conversation, Email Closes Deals - iContact

• Updated on: 2017-12-29
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Content Marketing Starts the Conversation, Email Marketing Closes the Deal
Content marketing has caused more than a bit of a buzz in marketing circles over the past few years. Despite this, very few organizations understand the true value of this often-misunderstood marketing opportunity, and as a result fail to optimize their content marketing efforts to drive maximum impact.
When carefully executed, content marketing provides an excellent opportunity for small business owners and marketers to introduce their products and services to a carefully targeted audience, recruit social media influencers and brand ambassadors to drive social engagement, and ultimately encourage a greater number of registrations, purchases and other engagements.
What Is Content Marketing?
Before we explore the many benefits content marketing offers as part of a cohesive marketing strategy, we should probably first define exactly what content marketing is.
Content marketing helps organizations build brand, drive awareness, share ideas and ultimately generate leads and increase sales through the sharing of useful, engaging, timely and (sometimes) entertaining content. This content can come in many different forms, including blog posts, online videos, infographics, ebooks/whitepapers, webinars and presentations.
The great thing about content marketing is that it works with and optimizes virtually every other aspect of your marketing strategy. Most commonly, content marketing is employed alongside an organization’s SEO, email marketing, social media and wider PR efforts. In fact, if you are not actively producing great content to support these strategies, your entire marketing output might be misfiring and is certainly costing you more than it should.
Note: In recent years, SEO has transformed from a largely technical solution to an industry built around the provision of great content supported by SEO best practices. Because search engines like Google love fresh content, if your SEO agency isn’t providing content marketing solutions, it might be time to question their validity.
Why Do So Many Organizations Struggle with Content Marketing?
There are a number of reasons why so many organizations fail to harness the full power of content marketing. These shortcomings are often based on the following assumptions:
Content Marketing Is Difficult: Any successful content marketing strategy has to be built around a consistent flow of useful, engaging and timely content. Producing this content requires a lot of time, effort and resources from knowledgeable sources (who rarely have the time to focus on creating content). As a result, too many organizations rely on unskilled content producers such as junior marketers and office interns (who need time to build their knowledge) or outsource content production to “non-expert” help. This often results in less-than-optimized content. Content that falls short of being useful, engaging and timely may result in less engagement and damage your brand in the long run (as potential users consume rival content). This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use less-experienced staff or outsourced help to produce your content – but that content must always be informed by an “expert” source. Your content producers should think like journalists and learn to ask the right questions to the right people and document their answers. Outsourced help will almost certainly benefit from “embedding” themselves in the organization they are working for.
Content Marketing Is Free: It’s not (see above) – but thanks to this assumption (and the equally dangerous assumption that you get what you pay for), a greater priority is often placed on more expensive acquisition marketing techniques like paid search, technical SEO and more traditional print and broadcast marketing. While these will drive results, the cost of acquisition can be crippling and in many cases completely destroy any margin you have in a product or service.
Content Marketing Doesn’t Work: Content marketing is a long-term strategy. It’s not like paid search, which can drive instant results. Unlike paid search (which stops driving traffic/leads/sales the moment the budget is turned off), content marketing will continue to work for you as long as the content remains relevant. Remember, even though content is old to you, it will appear fresh to someone who has never consumed it before. I like to think of content marketing as a bit like a pulse – it should be strong, regular and beat for as long as possible. Too many marketers either stop their content marketing efforts after only a handful of (often poorly produced) blog posts or are too sporadic in their output to develop any real potential capable of building solid relationships. There is also a widely held belief that contact marketing is difficult to track (along with social media). This is a myth. Anything with a URL can be tracked for the purpose of attributing ROI – it just takes a little upfront effort, including setting clear objectives for each piece of content.
Note: If you don’t set clear objectives for any component of your marketing strategy, how will you know if it’s been successful or not? Objectives could include social media shares or follows, email marketing subscriptions, lead generation, downloads or purchases.
Why Should Small Business Owners Develop a Content Marketing Strategy?
People buy from people they like and trust and are inspired to buy by people they identify with. Content marketing gives small business owners and marketers the opportunity to engage with people, build relationships and become more “likeable” and therefore “trustworthy” enough for people to actively seek out their products or services in highly competitive marketplaces.
You should think of your content as social media fuel. Remember, because “birds of a feather flock together,” content that is shared across the social web will help drive social engagement and increase reach as it is distributed across networks of “friends,” actively driving traffic to your content, which in turn drives people to engage with your business. The average Facebook user has 155 “friends” – meaning you just have to encourage a handful of initial shares to send a piece of content “viral” – and with more than 2 billion active users around the world, the potential is almost limitless.
Solve Problems
The best content marketing actively goes out to solve a problem or explain a concept or an idea. It rarely focuses on pushing the sale (although every piece of content should have a call to action that enables the person consuming the content to take the next step, which may lead to monetization). The more useful, engaging and timely you are, the greater the impact your content marketing efforts will have. Further engagement, including purchases and orders, happens as a happy by-product of simply being useful or entertaining.
Introduce Yourself
Content marketing enables your organization to introduce itself to your potential users before they actively engage with your organization. This makes the process of transitioning a potential customer into an actual customer so much more efficient.
Consider how many places a single piece of content can engage potential users before they actively engage with your business. The following list is just the tip of the iceberg:
Your blog
Your email marketing campaigns
Your public relations output
Your wider network of social media followers and their followers (including users, social media influencers, bloggers, journalists, celebrities, etc.)
New media (including high-profile blogs, YouTube channels and podcasts)
Traditional media (including newspapers, radio, television, etc.)
Creative content marketing provides small business owners with marketing engagement opportunities that completely blur the lines between traditional and digital marketing and public relations techniques – ensuring your brand and your products and services are visible to the right people at the right time.
And the great news is that while content marketing isn’t free (time is money!) it offers the perfect opportunity to create potentially high-profile, high-impact campaigns for organizations with limited budgets. Many start-up organizations might be blessed with more time than cash – in the world of content marketing, this may offer a slight advantage where lack of cash forces greater creativity, whereas “cash-rich” companies can get complacent and tend to throw money at every problem (not always the best solution).
Content Marketing Heats Up Everything Else You Do to Market Your Business
Smart marketers think of their content marketing efforts in the same way a fisherman thinks of bait. Your blog posts, online videos, social media campaigns, etc. create “feeding” interest – while your email marketing activities act as the hook once your audience is familiar with your offer.
How are you using content marketing to enhance your entire marketing strategy? Share your comments below: