Influence your audience.
Yes and no - blogging is just one of the tools we use. Content marketing is an opportunity to connect with your target market and offer them real value before they become a customer. It’s your chance to influence them in the early stages of their decision-making process, so when they’re ready to buy you’re top of the list.
When we use Google, we’re asking questions and searching for answers. Sometimes those questions can be particular and clearly show that the individual is ready to buy, like ‘buy grass seed online’, but often people first research, learn and look around at options before they’re ready to buy.
Content marketing provides value to your potential customers, regardless of where they are in the decision-making process. If you make your business known as a trusted source of information - an expert in the market - you’ll be rewarded with brand awareness, increased sales and customer loyalty.
New and unique
Provides real value
Produced for your audience
Not just serious, have some fun
Content can be anything - tutorial videos; podcasts; infographics; photos or software to name but a few. Going back to our earlier example, why not create a grass seed calculator that allows people to work out how much they need based on the type of grass and the area of coverage? Now that’s valuable content!
So we’ve got some nice new content, now we need to get it in front of people. In time, the content will rank in Google organically, but in the immediate future let’s get shouting about it on social media. The great thing with content marketing is that it gives you tons to talk about on social - no more scratching your head looking for things to post, you’ve got value!