There is a sharp rise in the importance of content marketing and more and more business organizations are diverting their funds from conventional marketing to content marketing. Is it good for your business? Does it make things more difficult or easier?
It depends on how you look at it. As a small and as a mid-sized business it is perhaps one of the greatest marketing opportunities you have come across and in such a manner that you can compete with the big boys without spending big money.
Content marketing is all about quality and timeliness. Sure, a business with lots of money can generate tons of content in no time and consequently dominate traffic-generating sources like search engines, blogs and social networking websites, how much of that traffic actually converts is another matter. And this is where you can compete.
Of course realistically you will mostly be competing with businesses that lie within your sphere of influence but even that can be a big deciding factor. Then you can gradually move towards bigger, something like, Fortune 500 companies.
The moot point is, when it comes to content marketing, it’s very easy to initiate a strategy and then sustain it over a long period of time. All it takes is perseverance, a little focus, and an understanding of your market. Once you have decided that you are going to focus on content marketing rather than conventional marketing sources, you have to identify which channels you are going to focus upon. Initially, my personal recommendation would be the following:
- Business blogging
- Guest blogging
- Information articles under your own domain
- Information articles and opinion pieces on other publications
- Twitter, Google plus and Facebook
These are very easy things to achieve. You can easily set up a blog under your existing domain name and start publishing informative blog posts. You can also approach other blogs who would be interested in posting your opinions and insights.
Aside from regular blog posts, you should also plug content holes within your existing website. Are all the pages your website needs there? Have you described all your services? Have you published testimonials from your customers and clients? Have you listed all the benefits of your products and services? What about your FAQs section? Is it up to date? Carry out a detailed analysis of your existing business content and see where you can update and add.
There are many publications that would be interested in publishing your articles, especially if you can give some expert advice people can use. This is a great way of expanding your brand presence on the Internet.
Twitter, Google plus and Facebook, of course you might already be using. It is a good idea to keep separate accounts for your personal postings and business postings. This way your core message is not diluted. Remember that search engines have started displaying social networking content among normal search results, so you wouldn’t like to appear for unnecessary material.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, the rise of content marketing is definitely good for your business. It helps you reduce advertising and marketing costs. It improves your search engine rankings. It brings you more visibility. It helps you engage your audience. Above all, it significantly improves your conversion rate.