What is Content Marketing

Content marketing is the use of information to educate and inform your customers in order to convince them to buy your products.  This can be done in a variety of ways and through a number of mediums including video, email, and traditional advertising and marketing methods. The latest trends are the use of social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.

Customers no longer accept interruptive marketing nor are they interested in having the retailers decide what they need to know.  They are defining their terms and behaviors for information search and expect to interact with the information they retrieve.

Ways Content Marketing Can Be Applied In Promoting Your Business

Companies can begin to direct the flow of customers to their sites by becoming the informational leader in their niche.  To do this they must develop a content marketing strategy for their company and ensure every employee who touches the program knows what the company’s content management strategy is.

This starts with a mission statement.  Without a content marketing mission statement, how does anyone in marketing know what the goals are for the company’s content management strategy?

Small businesses have a distinct advantage to that as they provide services and products that their customers really use and use on a daily basis.  Articulate this as part of your content.  Inform and educate your customers on how your services and products help them perform their missions more efficiently, more quickly, with less cost.  This is why they will come to your business to purchase their products and services.

If there are services or information that you can provide via social media, website blogging, or tweets that will help your customers, even if it is not directly applicable to immediate sales, go ahead and do it.  It will reinforce your customers’ loyalty and the next time they need to purchase, they will think of you.

Think of questions that will help your customers, then answer them.  This is very simple to do, but so many of us do not do it.  Do you have a system in place to collect and analyze customers’ frequent questions and to post your answers online or on your website?  There are content marketing opportunities from these types of forums and FAQs.

Are your employees involved in your content marketing strategy sessions?  Hold some brainstorming sessions with key employees and get a good editor to make your employees’ ideas look great and your employees look like superstars.  When they get the recognition and the limelight, they’ll be twice as likely to keep coming up with the great ideas.  They’ll also be more likely to take up the programs down in the employee lounge, which is where more great ideas will be born.

There’s also a lot to be said for sharing ideas with others in the industry.  Talk with other leaders and see if they’ll do some guest blogging on your website and offer to do some on theirs.  Cooperation can generate some great ideas and it doesn’t have to be all about competition.

Consumers in today’s economy are smart and savvy. They take their time and do their research carefully and diligently nowadays.  Providing them as much information as you can and informing them can be exactly what it will take to get them to buy from you. When you have the best product or service, the education consumer can be your very best friend.

If you want to learn more about content marketing, click here.