Brands have to tell valuable, relevant, and compelling stories to attract and retain their customers.
You need to start thinking about how your company can create content on a consistent basis to stand out from all the noise online and become the go to resource in your niche.
Biggest Mistakes in Content Marketing
No Consistency – Companies that have a one off campaign mentality, usually fail with their content marketing goals. Creating this content is an ongoing process and takes time.
Sales Pitchy Content – Trying to jam too much sales jargon into the content is another huge mistake companies make.
Avoid the jargon and answer questions and be helpful in the content that you create. This will help build up your authority in your niche and help foster business along with it.
Focusing Only On One Channel – Connecting with customers in the places where they consume content is key. Have a multi channel approach and make sure to repurpose or re-imagine your content for different mediums.
Content marketing is thinking about the needs and pain points customers and creating content to help resolve those issues.
How to Get It to Work
You can create or hire an internal team to start creating content or outsource the content creation through a variety of channels.
It really doesn’t matter how you source it. What matters is are you are committed to doing it? Does your C-level marketing team buy into it? And then, are you going to be consistent in doing it and integrate that with the rest of your marketing?
Where Is the Content in Your Company?
Leverage your customer service teams and your sales department. They are on the front lines on a day to day basis and are treasure troves of content!
Reach out the people in your company who share links frequently via email, find your employees that are active in social media. Pull these people together and start talking about different pieces of content that you can produce.
Collaborate via a shared Google spreadsheet and leverage a content calendar to help facilitate this process.
Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing Start the Same
Just like everything else. Content marketing, inbound marketing is no different than any other marketing strategy or philosophy.
You have to start with what are my objectives? What behaviors do I want to see out of my customers? How am I going to measure success? You’ve got to at least start somewhere. You might change it along the way, but if you don’t start with where am I going to go with this thing, and what are our ultimate expectations, you’re going to fail.
Attraction Content vs. Retention Content
Most content produced by marketers is geared towards prospective customers not the existing customers. This makes sense to a point, but there is a huge opportunity to start creating retention content to build customer loyalty.
Attraction content is different than retention content. So with attraction content you’re doing all these things. You want to be found on search engines for the right keywords. You’re going to be sending out blog posts. You’ve got content that is being spread through Facebook and Twitter. That’s fantastic.
Retention content is also a great opportunity to up sell to existing customers.
Producing Content is Hard!
Where to start? With your customers. You need to discover what your customers major pain points are.
Do a survey of current customers, talk to the people in your company on the front lines.
Listen in to social media and do some research.
Editorial Calendar
Create a content calendar and have it stocked with at least 3 months worth of ideas moving into the future.