Nobody likes pushy sales tactics, do you? Do you enjoy seeing adverts for products or services of no benefit to you?
It is one reason consumers worldwide have tuned out of traditional advertising and progressively linked to their social networks to guide their purchasing decisions.
Instead of being pushy and trying to force customers to buy from you, intelligent business owners and marketers use content marketing as part of their marketing strategy to drive brand engagement, build brand loyalty, and boost sales and marketing.
You need to use your content as part of your marketing strategy to connect your brand and target audience. You must provide valuable content to your target audience at the right time and through their preferred channels.
However, no matter how awesome, your content cannot do all the work alone. This is why connecting with influencers on social media is essential for business owners.
Who’s an Influencer?
Influencers are individuals with significant networks who can talk about a wide range of services and products with the capability to sway the opinions of people in their favour.
However, it would help if you were cautious about the influencer you connect with because not all influencers will suit your brand.
Each Influencer has a unique audience that they can influence, but that does not mean that their audience will suit your brand. Be cautious of so-called social media influencers.
For business owners to succeed in connecting with the right Influencers, they must first have a clear description of the influencer that will be a good fit for their brand.
Describe Influencers to reach out to in your industry. Follow them on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to see where one can start a conversation.
See the discussions they carry out with their followers and target audience on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the choice and tone of words they use.
Does it resonate with your brand? Does your brand fit in with the content the Influencer shares and promotes to their followers? Is their target audience the same as yours?
Take all these into consideration before you commit to anything. For best results, I suggest you discuss with a reputable digital agency to help you find the right influencer.
Drive Content Marketing Leads to a Funnel
Creating or curating high-value articles is one thing. However, if you do not have an efficient content strategy, then you are in trouble.
Suppose you are not building an effective content marketing strategy that carries on building a rapport with prospects in your target audience in the appropriate manner using your content ideas. In that case, target the audience using your content ideas appropriately, and then you are not leaving money on the table.
If you’ve invested time and resources to produce a great piece of content for your content marketing campaign, don’t just sit back and let it go to waste. You need to promote your content when and where appropriate to yield results.
Let’s take B2B brands as an example. Promoting your content and other marketing messages on LinkedIn or Google, for instance, is a good funnel for attracting quality leads in the form of professionals and business owners.
When your content is doing great organically on search engines like Google and Bing and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, that is a good signal for you to invest in promoting that piece of content to reach a wider audience and improve your chances of getting good returns.
Even though the CPC for advertising on LinkedIn is considerably higher than on other platforms, the quality of the leads you attract is better.
How Content Marketing Builds Your Business
Okay, let’s get practical. Let’s say – for instance – you wanted to get a new pair of running shoes. You do a Google search for running shoes. Google returns a tonne of results of running shoes for you to select.
However, what strikes you about the brand of shoes that ranks in the top ten positions on Google’s search result page? You’ll likely find famous brands like Nike, Adidas, Puma, etc.
Why is this so? It’s just because these companies have spent many resources on building their brand and marketing strategy over the years. Customers know and trust them to make great running shoes.
They have also invested a lot in their marketing and content strategies, particularly creating great content with running shoes on their websites. Look at their sites and Facebook pages. They don’t just slap on a picture or video and the price of a pair of running shoes and call it a day. For these brands, content marketing is not a joke. They don’t joke with their content marketing strategy.
Instead, they invest a lot of resources into content creation. They give you plenty of content about each pair of shoes. They focus their content strategy on helping inform, educate and entertain you and creating brand awareness. They have mastered the art and science involved in content creation.
You get a pleasant experience from exploring the content they have on their site. The content you consume empowers you to select the best pair of running shoes that you can afford.
What can business owners learn from this? Focus on building your brand. No, I’m not just talking about a fancy logo or business card. Although, these are a small part of it.
I’m talking about building a brand that people know, trust and love to associate with the brand. A brand that fits resonates with the ideals and lifestyle of its customers.
I’m talking about building your reputation in the minds of your customers as the best source for your chosen product or service.
“Traditional marketing talks at people. Content marketing talks with them.” ~Doug Kessler Click To TweetAnother thing that business owners can learn is that these brands all have lots of content on their sites. Yes, content that informs, educates and entertains their prospective customers.
You must understand that content marketing is vital when building your brand as a business owner.
These days, information is critical, and knowledge is power. Position your brand as the number one source for content in your chosen niche.
Everyone in your organisation has to understand your brand culture fully.
Everyone in your organisation builds your brand, not just the management staff or those in the marketing or advertising department alone.
All employees need to understand that it is their collective effort to provide consumers with a beautiful experience that helps to build your brand.
Using content marketing to build your brand is not a walk in the park. Remember, you are not just creating content for content’s sake.
Instead, you’re creating content that will add value to your consumers and position your brand as a thought leader in your niche. Your content needs to satisfy the needs of your consumers for information, education and entertainment.
How Can You Create Such Great Content?
To create great content, business owners need to take the following steps:
Know Your Customers
To create content that resonates with customers, you need first to know your customers. Do you know your customers? Can you describe your ideal customer?
I don’t want to go into using extreme marketing or tech jargon that may be over your heads. However, at the elementary level, you need to know the demographics (age, gender, legal status) and psychographics (likes, interests, challenges, motivations) of your ideal client.
Use data from your website and social media analytics to create a customer persona of your ideal customer. Then use the same data to create content that will resonate with your customer persona.
Use your analytics, surveys, polls and so on to know what your customers like to find their pain points. Create content that is trustworthy and provides solutions to those pain points.
Do Your Competitor Research
Check out the customer experience with your competitors. How is their customer service? Is there any room for improvement? Learn what gaps exist regarding their customer service and see how you can fill those gaps. No, I’m not suggesting that you copy your competitors. I’m saying, see what is available in the market and make yours 100% better!
A Comprehensive Review of Past Efforts
Review your past marketing and advertising campaigns and results from previous years. This review can help you see what was most effective and what wasn’t and develop a program to improve for next year.
Use Benchmarks to Determine Future Campaign Success
Business owners have limited financial resources and are often in haste to see results. It would help if you remembered that building a brand takes time. The likes of Coca-Cola have been at it for over a hundred years! There’s no silver bullet.
How To Measure Content Marketing Success
Marketing takes time. It is critical to comprehend what you want to accomplish and what it will look like. Know what KPIs you’ll use to measure the success or otherwise of your content marketing campaigns. Every metric practicable can measure the success or otherwise of your content marketing efforts.
Metrics include video views, the number of emails opened, the number of tweets retweeted, how many of your posts were reacted to or shared, the ranking of your posts in search engine results for your topics or keywords, and content syndication and the all-important quantity of products and services sold! We can combine all these to show how well (or not) your content marketing efforts are performing.
Associate each piece of content you create to a particular goal and have a call to action. This association makes it easy to know if your content is yielding the desired results and measure them.
Do you want more tips on content creation? Read this article. It would help if you also learned how to avoid making these common content marketing mistakes.
The mention of tweets and posts above brings me to another vital piece of your content marketing. As a business owner, you need to understand that social media has a crucial role in your content marketing.
There’s no point in creating content if no one sees it. Since your potential customers are on one social network or the other, your content must be there too.
How Can You Use Social Media Effectively in Your Content Marketing?
You need to give your brand a face and voice on social media. As a business owner, your audience should associate your face and voice with your brand and content on social media.
Be sociable. Don’t be afraid to show your brand’s human side and quirks. Learn what to post and how to post on various social networks.
These are the things that will make your brand resonate with your audience. Engage with your followers on social media. Please give them a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes.
Have you noticed in some Hollywood movies how at the end of the film, after they show the credits, they also highlight some clips of the actual making of the movie? These types of behind-the-scenes clips help the audience relate more to the characters in the film and get a glimpse of all the hard work that the cast and crew put into making the movie. It would help if you adopted this strategy by using social media to give your audience a glimpse into your brand.
Over to You
Content marketing is challenging. It requires a serious investment in time and money.
Do you need a specialist in digital marketing to show you the ropes or guide you in your content marketing campaigns? Alternatively, do you need someone to handle the burden of creating a robust content marketing strategy and good content on your behalf?
Contact me. I love helping business owners to use digital and social media marketing to grow their businesses.
Let’s explore the possibility of Mauco Enterprises helping you craft your content marketing strategy to grow your business and become more successful.
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