The Ultimate Content Marketing
Strategy
T
hroughout the years we start to hear certain
buzzwords and phrases often enough until it
sounds like “the next big thing.” By now most
people understand the importance of email
marketing, social media, search engine optimization,
etc. Over the last few years people have spent a lot
of time buzzing about content marketing. My goal
is to show you a powerful content marketing
strategy today but first let’s talk about a challenge
that gets in the way of many marketers. The truth
is that many business owners wear many different
hats- especially small business owners. They’re
always juggling, trying to figure out what they
should spend their limited time and energy ondropping one thing to pick up another. So when
they hear that they should be using email marketing
but they want to get more social, they don’t know
what to do with their time because they know that
it’s all important. Instead of treating these different
marketing activities as the new shiny object to play
with, dropping the old one, this article will teach you
how to put all of these marketing efforts together so
that you are strategically maximizing the
effectiveness and benefiting from the compounded
effects.
First let’s start with content marketing to understand
what it is, what it’s not, and how it will serve you
the most. Content marketing is not the practice of
just writing blogs or creating content to spam the
internet with as many pieces as possible. Because
most marketers do not really understand content
marketing, they end up spending time, energy, and
money on creating things that no one cares about,
no one shares and these content pieces do not serve
them in any way.
Imagine that you had the best kept secret in the
world.
You had a piece of knowledge that would impact
the world and you wanted to share it. That piece of
information would spread like wild fire and if you
were the originator of thought then you (or your
business) would get credit for shedding light on this
topic. The more important the information or the
bigger the impact that the information has, the faster
and wider this message spreads. This is the
foundation to content marketing. Great information
is shared and spoken about. Your goal is to use your
expertise to create content based on that topic giving
your perspective to solve real problems that people
have. The more original the thought, combined with
how useful the information is, the more people will
engage.
To understand how this turns into more business,
just think about the first thing that you do when you
need a solution to a problem- you go to the Internet.
The odds are you probably go to Google but we’ll
discuss that in a minute. The Internet has given us
the ability to get answers to just about anything! So
whether you need specific answers to a question or
just some ideas of solutions to a problem, you’re
looking on the Internet.
For example, let’s say that your sales team wasn’t
closing enough deals. When you analyzed it you
noticed that they weren’t as polished as they should
be so you were looking for tips that you can give
your sales team in meetings.
Strictly Marketing Magazine March/April 2016
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