Content Marketing Isn’t Stopping.

Do you have a blog you frequent? Or a publication you regularly read? If you do, you’re a consumer of content marketing.

As a business owner and entrepreneur, you shouldn’t stop at consuming content. You should also focus on creating content. That means blog articles, newsletters, infographics, images, and other mediums of communication that have your URL in the search bar.

You may have thought about content for your business, or you may not have. Wherever you’re at, it’s worth considering content marketing as an option to help round out your digital marketing.

Let’s dig in.

Content has 1 Major Goal:

A Subscribed Audience

The emphasis here is on loyalty, connection, and creating value. On average, opted-in audience members have a higher lifetime value to a business than other types of leads. Warm sales are typically easier to handle than cold sales, and the potential to upsell is significantly greater.

Within that Goal, Content has Three Purposes:

1. Increase Sales

Why do any marketing if it’s not to increase your sales? Content helps by creating more valuable customers, not necessarily more customers. Your ultimate goal should be to link your content to more sales for your business.

2. Create Marketing “Savings”

Marketing is an investment. There’s no way around that fact. Whenever you try to bring more people to your business, you’re going to incur some costs.

However, you shouldn’t have to bleed your company dry in order to be successful, and thanks to content you don’t have to.

Think about content as opposed to PPC or other forms of paid advertising. When you’re running an ad, you have a certain number of clicks that your budget can get you. After you max out your budget, you’re done until you put more money down. It’s a process of constant investment.

Content, on the other hand, is a one-time investment per piece. The price you pay to have a blog article written doesn’t reoccur every time you post that article on Social Media. As long as you’ve created evergreen content, you can recycle and repurpose content as often as is necessary.

3. Build better customers with greater loyalty

I mentioned for the first purpose that your goal is to build valuable customers, not necessarily more customers. That starts and ends with customer loyalty.

Consumers want to be able to come to a single source for their issues. When your customers have a pain point that revolves around a solution your business offers, wouldn’t you want them to come to you before they Google it?

Value-driven content helps create the loyalty you want from your customers like nothing else. When they come to you first, you’re doing your job well! 

How to Get Started

Every business is different, which means your approach is going to be unique to you. Instead of giving you step-by-step instructions on how you “should” do it, I’m going to leave you with a list of questions to help you progress. I use this method all the time with fantastic results.

Find your Purpose

• What will you be creating?
• What value do you want to provide?

Consider your Audience

• Who will you be creating for?
• How will they benefit from your content?

Craft your Story

• How are you unique and valuable?

Implement the Process

• How will you structure your content?
• Where will you share?

Measure Success

• How will you gauge the success of your content?

Success Takes Time

Successful content is not something that happens overnight. It’s a long-term endeavor that typically needs at least 12 months to see tangible results. That might sound like a long time right now, but two or three years from now you’ll be glad you did it. In the long run, it’s a minor investment for a major ROI.

I do want to make one final aspect clear: Content Marketing is not a replacement or “substitute” for other methods. It’s just a single method that compliments other aspects of marketing like PPC Advertising, SEO, and Social Media. Check out our Marketing Checklist below to get a better picture of how it fits into the overall digital marketing picture!