Secrets to Impactful Content Marketing
Traditional outbound marketing is on a respirator. Caller IDs, DVRs, and spam filters have largely made cold calls, commercials, and non-permission based e-mail blasts ineffectual or marginally effective. It is time for a paradigm shift. Instead of trying to reach the masses who don’t really need what you have to offer or just don’t care, you need to attract like-minded people to come to you. You need a content marketing strategy.
Content marketing’s #1 secret is developing and disseminating compelling content that your potential customers find valuable. The idea is to be seen as a thought leader or even a thought provoker. Providing valuable information that attracts the attention of customers who appreciate being fed information that makes them more knowledgeable or better at their jobs. They look to you as someone worthy of paying attention. There is a strong intrinsic human desire to reciprocate. They will buy what you are selling.
It has been said that outbound marketing is a better short-term solution with higher long-term costs, while inbound marketing is a better long-term solution with higher short-term costs. Both should be considered but the playing field is severely tilted towards outbound marketing. Marketing trends and consumer behavior are screaming for change.
The task at hand is to develop a rigorous and doable content marketing plan. One cannot develop content when they feel like it or when they have time. Your business success depends on it and it deserves your seriousness and commitment. This means developing matrices and grids of procedures and processes and developing an infrastructure for a sustainable and scalable content marketing program.
The 5 Ps in Content Marketing Strategy:
Plan:
- Identify your business objectives. Ask yourself what are you trying to accomplish. Is your focus on building awareness? Or you feel certain differentiating characteristics of your product are being under-appreciated in the marketplace and the class is being judged as somewhat of a commodity? It could just be that you want to shorten the sales cycle.
- Write a mission statement and get buy-in from team members and management.
- Determine what value you can provide that is difficult for others to replicate. This differentiating quality must be valuable to your audience. Be honest with yourself. This can be a difficult exercise which can involve self-reflection, even soul-searching but if you don’t know what makes your product or service superior to others, you will never convince others to take you seriously.
Process:
- Do we have people with desired skill-set and processes in place to produce such content and sustain over long-term?
People:
- Create a persona of core audiences you are trying to engage. We would like every male east of Mississippi to buy our product is not good enough. Develop detailed demographic and psychographic characteristics of target customers.
Publish:
- Determine what type of content is needed? Do you have such content? How much content do you need in your vault to get started? Can you re-purpose certain pieces you have on hand?
- Define a workflow to get tasks accomplished. Develop an editorial calendar which shows frequency of delivery, topics to be covered, and responsible parties.
- How would you do quality control? Who are subject matter experts who can check for tone, suitability, and accuracy?
- What channels will be used to publish your content? It could be social media, a blog, your website, or webinars among others.
Performance:
- How will you identify roadblocks and measure success?
Content marketing is the future of marketing. Actually, we think it is also the present. Being stuck in the past may have dire consequences. Download our Content Marketing How-To Guides to help you with your content marketing or call us.