Content marketing is nothing new, but with the growth of social media and web content, your brand needs to incorporate content marketing into your daily lives now, more than ever before. Here are five actionable, start-as-early-as-now content marketing strategies you must start implementing today.
1. Make the Customer the Hero
Tell a customer story in a way that makes the customer look like they saved the day, came up with the solution, and reaped the reward. It’s not about you. We love to hear stories that appear to be about us. If you can see yourself in the story, you are more likely to buy into the message.
2. Mobilize Your Entire Company
You are an expert in your industry, your department, and your organization. Use your expertise to teach others. You’re not the only expert, however. Your IT department, HR, C-Suite, engineers, etc. all have great advice to share as well. Ask them to provide content and suddenly, generating content can be a way of life at your company. RELATED CLASS: Business Blogging: How to Leverage Business Blogging for More Traffic, Leads, and Sales
3. Stick to Your Business Goals
Determine why you’re creating this content. It all goes toward your marketing goals. This means understanding the people that read your content and creating more of it for them. Have strong calls-to-action so your readers do what you want them to do and constantly optimize your content based on your metrics and results.
4. Create a Content Engine
Start with the content you already have, such as a case study or ebook. From there, transition your existing content into other content mediums. For instance, take that customer case study and make an ebook out of it by telling the whole story and include takeaways, interviews, additional stories or insights. Then read the ebook aloud and record that for an audio book. Make at least five blog posts out of key insights from your ebook. Shoot a video with the customer and put that on your YouTube channel. Strip out the audio of the interview and turn that into a podcast. The list goes on! RELATED CLASS: Real-Time or Die: Feeding the Content Beast
5. Take Intelligent Risks
If you’re willing to be transparent with your stuff, you will be successful. We don’t have any secrets, especially with social media, so don’t be afraid. Intelligent risks include sharing pricing info, competitor comparisons, or your recipes. We tend to fear failure, but those that succeed keep on trying, no matter what. Try new things. Who cares if your blog post had zero retweets? The only person who saw that failure was you.
Join me November 18 at LEARN, the virtual event for digital marketing.
During my session, 10 Advanced Content Marketing Best Practices, I will share 10 actionable strategies to get fuel your sales pipeline in 2014. You will learn:
- Content marketing strategies you can implement today
- What has worked for big brands including Salesforce.com
- How to measure your content marketing efforts
- Clear, straightforward approaches to content marketing
Event Date: November 11-22, 2013 | Location: Virtual | Register now!