Content Marketing.
What’s the big deal? You spend enough money on marketing alone to fund multiple income properties.
How is content different from everything else you’re doing?
Think of Content Marketing like housing – you can either own or rent a place to live. There are benefits to both owning and renting, but it ultimately depends on your long term goals. Renting property works well for a season by creating less repair work and leaving you agile. However, owning ultimately provides you with an asset you can build equity in. YOU determine which bushes have the best curb appeal, and which roof will make potential buyers do a double take.
Advertising works the same way – you can either own or rent your content. Content Marketing is about creating messaging you own. Advertising is renting, or the paid placement of your messaging. Paid placement is necessary for a business to grow.
Content Marketing is messaging you create and distribute on channels YOU control!
Someone can’t Google a question and find your billboard, or stumble across your radio ad while looking up recipes for braised pork.
You may be asking, “How can she say that, she’s IN ADVERTISING?!” Stay with me…
Content Marketing is any valuable piece of information you create that you can drive traffic to. It takes many forms – webinars, blogs, podcasating, ebooks, etc. It can be created once, and repurposed into multiple different forms such as social media posts or an email. You can even spend money on advertising to promote your content beyond your current network (insert shameless plug: Hi, I’m Amanda, let’s talk).
So what? Who has time to create this stuff anyway?
Content Marketing helps your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
You will rank higher in search engines when people find what they are looking for in your content. SERPs, or Search Engine Results Pages, reward valuable content by making it easier to find.
If you create readable, high-quality content, your search rankings will naturally increase @neilpatel #SEO
Content Marketing is branding with significant ROI.
Content, and the right strategy to deliver it, drives target audiences to your site. Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates approximately 3x as many leads.
According to Aberdeen Group, content marketing users convert marketing responses to marketing-qualified leads (MQL) at a 7.6% rate vs. 1.0% rate of non-users. Non-users also require 2x the website traffic to generate a closed-won opportunity!
https://www.percussion.com/Assets/www.percussion.com/resources/whitepapers/Aberdeen-ContentMarketingROI-Report.pdf
Your customers don’t like ads!
Over 200 million people now use ad blockers! Content marketing eliminates the sell, sell, sell that makes your promotions sound like a money-hungry real estate agent.
(has the metaphor worn off yet?)
One of the top goals of content marketing is to reach people where they are looking.
How? One way to use Analytics is to view top pages and the path visitors took to get there. What were they searching for or engaging with that led them to your website? If traffic to those top pages comes from organic search, they are looking for what you have to say!
Google Analytics showed one of our customers had over 200 visits to their blog page in October 2020. They had not posted anything in over 2 years!
You bet offering our content services was an easy conversation after we proved it with data.
So, what is the bottom line?
Content Marketing is about providing value to your target audience. You need to know two things:
- Who do you want to reach?
- What do they want to know?
In an upcoming post, we’ll talk about the Content Marketing Circle and how to make content happen.
If you found this helpful, or you want a second date with us, click here:
We won’t ask you to buy real estate with us.
