Content is King
Content marketing is something we hear about all the time in all marketing channels and groups lately. Simply put, content marketing refers to the many marketing strategies you will use to build your audience. The key here to content marketing is sharing useful information with your target audience that they want while establishing yourself as an expert. Once you establish yourself, it’s easier to make offers that people will take you up on.
How Does It Work
First, choose a niche that you’re passionate about, one that you really enjoy. Spend some time getting to know people who are interested in that niche by joining forums and online groups. Learn more about what they want, how they think, and how you can help them.
The quality of your content is extremely important. If writing is not your thing, hire a ghostwriter to write high-quality, original and engaging content. Your content must provide value that benefits the reader, that could be information, problem-solving or even entertainment.
Next, you want to decide how you will publish your content, you have several options including blogpost, social media, video marketing or even article syndication (posting your articles on other sites). Whatever you choose, be sure each one has a link that links back to your main site.
A key point to remember is that content includes more than just written articles, it includes images/infographics, photos, videos, audio files and anything else that your reader can consume.
When to Use Content Marketing
Content marketing won’t get you quick sales. What it will do is nurture and build a long-term relationship with your market. Through this nurturing, your prospects will come to see you as a trusted and go to source for their information.
Content marketing works best for specific niches where prospects are hungry for information and the pool isn’t already full. To break into an area like weight loss, for example, it would require a large effort. It would be much wiser to choose a very specific area of the weight loss niche.
The Benefits
One of the greatest benefits of content marketing is that it is a great trust builder. It allows you to brand yourself and your business to be the go to place for answers in your niche. Once you are recognized as a high-quality source for the information people are seeking, your offers basically sell themselves.
I personally feel it’s great for people who don’t consider themselves sales-oriented and I enjoy content marketing for that reason. Content marketing doesn’t involve a hard sell, it’s merely an inbound marketing strategy where you put your content out there and it brings interested people to your offer. In other words, you become pursued.
The Downside
I’ve put some thought into this, and the only downside I’ve found to content marketing is creating the content. It’s not always easy or cheap. If you are creating content yourself, you really need to be a true expert and then it can still take a lot of time to write it. The other option for content is purchasing PLR, also known as Private Label Rights, however, this can become costly and of course, you still want to tweak the PLR to put your own voice to it, add your own examples and really make it your own.
How to Succeed at Content Marketing
To be successful with content marketing you have to embrace the spirit of giving and refrain from selling. You need to share the information your audience is looking for and focus on building a relationship with them all the while communicating with them. Remember the more value you give, the more recognition you get and your audience will likely want to buy from their expert source.