Many people often group marketing and sales into the same category. They have the same end goal — grow revenue. However, they are vastly different. Marketing is truly about one very specific thing: telling your brand’s story.
What differentiates the cash-cow Starbucks from your local coffee shop down the road? Starbucks has perfected their story in the eyes of consumers. Successful brands have learned that people do not buy goods and services, they buy products and services that make them feel something. Those feelings are crafted by the stories the brand tells.
Content marketing is the future of marketing. This isn’t because it is the “new kid on the block” in terms of digital/inbound marketing, it’s because you are reaching people at a moment in their lives when they have given you permission to market to them.
Here’s an example of how content marketing works. Let’s say you own a dog walking business. On your website, you blog about how to best take care of your dog (feeding tips, training tips, etc). You post your blog articles on Facebook and promote/boost those posts so that other dog owners in your town can read it. That is a small scale version of content marketing. Sounds too simple to work, doesn’t it? Here’s why it does. First, by creating this content, you frame how your business is being viewed. In the example above, by creating content around the topic of caring for your dog, you show the reader (who is a local dog owner) that you care about them and their dog. You’re providing free content that is helpful to them without asking for a thing in return. Of course, on your website, you will have a call to action and your contact information prominently shown. Secondly, by creating and promoting this content, you are framing your business and yourself as the experts in the industry. You become the teacher. This elevates you to a point whereby you can gain the readers’ trust. When it comes to marketing, trust equals loyalty and loyalty equals sales.
Content marketing is more than just creating and promoting helpful, informative content. It’s a science. Our years of experience have allows us to create a content marketing “playbook” which we’ve used to bring businesses of all sized (small, medium, and large) more leads and sales. Here’s how it works…
- Research/Audit: We start by examining your business, your industry, and your competitors. This allows us to better understand the content landscape in which we will be operating.
- Learn Your Demographic: In order to create content that resonates with your target demographic, we research their needs, wants, and desires.
- Craft Your Story: Once we have all the data, it’s time to make sense of it. Now is when analysis and creativity are blended to craft your brand’s story and uncover what content topics will be created.
- Create Content: Whether it is an infographic, blog post, or video, we have the right people for the job. Our experts work within the parameters set by the research and analysis phases above to create content that exemplifies your brand and informs your demographic.
- Promote Your Content: To reach your target demographic, your content must be promoted effectively. Based on our research, we will determine the best channels for promoting your content.
- Measure Results: In order to rate our success and improve future campaigns, we track and measure each moment of the campaign and give you full, comprehensive reports.
If you are interested in building out a successful Content Marketing campaign, contact us today for your free, no-obligation consultation. We’ll learn more about your business to give you a step-by-step Content Marketing plan you can use to grow your online presence.
Click play to learn how we utilize Content Marketing to help businesses connect with their target demographic.
Frequently asked Content Marketing questions.
I own a small business. Do I need Content Marketing?
Any business, big or small, can benefit from Content Marketing. At it’s core, Content Marketing is about creating helpful, informative content and getting it in front of your target demographic. This creates trust, which is the ultimate goal of successfully marketing any business. Even if you’re a small business on a shoestring budget, Content Marketing can help you grow.
My industry is boring. Will Content Marketing still help?
If you’re in an industry that isn’t that glamorous, you can still benefit from Content Marketing. The trick with creating this type of content isn’t to focus on the industry or product/service you sell, it’s to focus on what parallels you can make with them in other aspects of their lives. For example, let’s say you sell car tires. You know your target demographic is interested in keeping their car in good shape. So instead of endlessly blogging about car tires, you could create other, helpful content about how they could take care of their car — how to replace a flat tire, how to change the oil, etc.
How do you promote the content you make?
Depending on where your target demographic is will guide where we promote your content. However, there are main promotion channels that we focus on: social media, your email list (if you have one), and organic traffic from search engines.
How do I know that the Content Marketing campaign is working?
A Content Marketing campaign would be useless if it didn’t product results. That is why we take the measurement and tracking of our campaigns very seriously. To track a Content Marketing campaign, we create Goals in Google Analytics for actions that we want users on your website to take. For example: come to the site, read a piece of content, fill out the contact form. After creating these goals and letting our Content Marketing campaign run, we analyze how well our content and promotion did at boosting goal conversions. Based on these results, we refine our campaign even further to keep your ROI high and the Content Marketing campaign as successful as possible.
