Concisely put, content marketing is a strategic approach to marketing based on creating valuable and consistent content to appeal to a specific audience to achieve a profitable outcome.
Content marketing isn’t hawking your products or items nonstop. You don’t need to, or want to, feel like a sleazy salesperson pushing yourself or products. Instead, you are delving deep into providing relevant content to your prospective clients to help them solve a problem.
Content marketing is here to stay.
As a consumer, don’t you prefer marketing tailored to your needs? Take Nike, for example. Say you have special needs in a shoe for everyday use. You might need more ankle support, or larger instep supports, and Nike is trying to sell you flip flops with no support. Not relevant. Not only “not relevant,” more like “not appreciated.”
You’re probably not even wanting to see flip flops when shopping for an everyday type shoe. Eventually, you may become irritated with Nike for pushing their flip flops and stop shopping with them altogether.
Now, let’s take the flip side approach. What if you did a brief search of supportive casual shoes and Ecco Brand Shoes showed you three perfect pairs of shoes for you. You would feel they looked inside your head and showed you the most relevant (there’s that word again) shoes to you. You could then choose one of the three and be happy the search and purchase went so smoothly.
That was valuable time spent accomplishing exactly what you set out to do.
But how can content marketing help you as a coach, consultant, or solopreneur? The same concepts can be applied in your content marketing efforts. How?
There are a few key things you need to figure out first.
- Who is your ideal customer or client? In other words, who is your target audience? (This is a broad topic, but crucial for you to nail down.)
- Build a relationship with your client. Become a trusted authority in your area of business so that your customer is drawn to you or your product.
- Stay the course. Content marketing isn’t done overnight. (Rome wasn’t built in a day, right?!) You must have persistence, consistency, and patience. This often is the hardest step for most. In our world of “Now! Even faster!” we are accustomed to having instant everything. But that is not how content marketing works.
- Educate in various forms. Your product or services MAY be great, but how will anyone know? You need to touch in social media content, blogs, videos/podcasts, and website updates. Different people seek resources in different forms. Essentially, you should have fresh updates and information all the time. If you are purchasing a new Lexus, you don’t want info from 2008 on their website, you want current info!
Although many of the same components that comprise content marketing, i.e. social media management, email, blogs, podcasting, video, newsletters, etc. are the same for most businesses, how you find your “secret sauce” in what combination to use the many online tools is very much an individual journey.
Once you figure out a few key things, you’re off to the races. The wording is everything. The tone is important. Colors and logos need to be the same as your brand all across the board.
With everything figured out and written down, you can then decide if you will be doing your own content marketing or are ready to hire a team.
Content Marketing Should Have a Personal Touch
Remember, content marketing is a form of communication to make a genuine connection with your ideal audience. Making a connection to those who you can help leads to grow a following. Your following will want more of what you have to offer which leads to sales.
Because you are making genuine connections the online platform you build should be your voice. There will come a time when you will be at a point in your business to seek help to get all the tasks done when it comes to publishing your content.
Content marketing needs to feel like a personal touch, like it IS your voice saying, writing, doing the marketing. The better the company you choose knows you, the better your messages will be. Expect quite a bit of time during the on-boarding process to make sure they get to know you and you are ensured it’s a right fit.