Marketing your business online with content marketing is the ultimate way to bring busloads of traffic to your website. With content marketing you can use articles, newsletters, blog posts (which are articles really), social media updates, FAQs, Videos and more to help generate lots of traffic. However having lots of random traffic or followers isn’t indicative of success, in business it all comes down to earning money.
In order to leverage content marketing correctly so that it delivers visitors to your website that are interested in your business and what it has to offer you first have to define your target audience. This is true of all marketing but especially of content marketing, if you are like me you want to focus this right down so that you are generating content for just one person. This one person represents your audience and by producing content your aim is simply to engage, entertain and educate this person.
Once you have you know who your audience is, if you want to grow your business and improve earnings you have to know which resources to leverage.
Everything revolves around good original content. Content is needed for every aspect of your business, for your blog, social media, press releases, etc. If you create information products you need even more content. However, even if you sell other types of product or service you still need a lot of content in order to educate, engage, and encourage your connections to buy from you.
Forms of Content for Content Marketing
There are many different forms of content that you can use, such as blog posts on your website, guest blog posts and articles on other peoples websites, inside print publications and online newsletters. Content can be text, audio or visual in nature and having a combination of different forms of content will ensure that you reach more of your audience.
Have a Plan of Action
The other key to ensuring that you are leveraging the right resources is to have a plan of action. Don’t just create or have content created without a point of view, voice, and the goals for the content in mind. Look at it this way, content without a plan is just noise, with a plan your content has the sole purpose of pushing your point of view across, converting those that agree with you to customers.
Create a Publication Calendar
When you know what content you want to create, it’s important to spell it out in a calendar so that you will do first things first. For instance, if you are launching a new product in three months, you can start whetting the appetite of your list now and then more and more as the launch date approaches.
The Money is in the Email List
They say the money is in the list, and that’s as true today as it was five years ago. Social media marketing hasn’t replaced email marketing; it has created another way to lead people to your email lists. Leverage your social media to build your lists.
Develop Incentives to Collect More Email Addresses
The point of your blog posts, social media updates, and even webinars is to collect information from your target audience so that you can market to them within your email lists. Host webinars, ask for sign-ups on social media, and incentivize lists with free give-aways or low-cost entry products and services. Once you have a list, educate them further, give them value but also convert them from leads to customers.
All Content Should Work Together
Starting with the product, service or event that you want to promote, work your way back to today to decide the different types of content that you will use to get more email subscribers to whom you can market and promote your wares. Decide what type of content they need to become educated and informed about your products and services so that they will purchase.
Consider Drawing a Workflow
Looking at how all your content works together to bring in buyers as well as encourage the leads to become customers, may help you identify gaps in your content needs. Your content workflow might look like this: Email Subscription Bait > 3 emails of value > sales email >3 emails of value > sales email> sales email> Webinar > Close. You could also include things like ELearning, Short Reports, Long Reports, EBooks, Coaching, etc… Seeing it actually written out will help you decide what you need and allow you to fill the gaps.
By knowing what your goals are for the content that you create, you’ll be able to use it more efficiently to grow your business far beyond what you thought possible and you’ll truly be using content marketing in all its forms.
