7 Truths About Content Marketing You Can Use to Keep Your Brand Relevant and Useful
If your brand stays relevant and of use to its customers, they won’t ever leave your side. Marketing’s an ever-changing minefield but if there’s one thing that hasn’t changed about content marketing it’s these 7 truths.
Content can sustain a business
Every brand is selling something and to some, what you’re selling is all in the content. Buzzfeed utilized content to build a multi-million dollar platform where it now exploits different product sponsorships and initiatives to generate further income. Content builds an audience. If you grab attention and you’re good at holding onto it with consistent content, you can make a lot from that.
Grab audience that’s already there
It’s less expensive and carries less risk to tap into an existing audience than to build an entirely virgin one. Although content marketing plans work on momentum building and creating audience, you can tap into guest blogs, influencers, sponsorships, and other opportunities to popularize your brand and make people aware of your existence. If you want audience, don’t just rely on your own content marketing. Find a way to tap into others.
Most people don’t know what they’re doing
Content marketing initiatives fail usually not from a bad performance but because the value of this channel isn’t pre-established. A lot of content marketers don’t know what they’re doing, regarding both creating the content and then, measuring its success. If you’re pursuing a digital marketing strategy like this, identify its value, how to measure, and know how to achieve the targets you set for yourself.
Do what you do well better than anyone
We can’t be great at everything. When you’re developing content, focus on what’s working, eliminate what isn’t, and do what you do well really, really well. Using niche digital and content marketing strategies, you can build a sizeable audience. Even if you have multiple brands or product lines, it’s much more lucrative and momentum-driving to have a large small audience than multiple small audiences that you can’t turn into conversions.
Content marketing sales funnel
We focus a lot in content marketing on attracting leads, converting those into sales, and then moving on. This does not treat your customer with as much value as they warrant. When writing out a content plant, consider customers at different stages. How can you make a one-time customer into a return customer? What would keep a lead coming back to be re-converted regularly? These are questions that have answers which will strengthen your brand-customer connection.
Content sits on your own land
Platforms like social media and Google are always changing, with algorithms that are never set in stone. Developing content for these platforms, you exist on rented land. If these platforms eventually disappear, slowly lose favor, or run out of value for you, you don’t want to be stuck. High quality content marketing written well and hosted on your website provides your followers with a destination you have full control of. This is an asset and a platform you own. Build it.
Patience
It can be frustrating seeing how slow digital marketing or content marketing can be. For the momentum to build and to do it organically, it does take time – days, weeks, and months. Assuming you can get that snowball rolling though, or if you have a piece of content that goes viral, you may see a significant spike in numbers down the line. Today though, it’s about laying groundwork and putting in the effort to set yourself up for success.
