When putting together an overall customer communications/marketing strategy for your biz, a few things come to mind. Let’s see….start a new website—check, develop marketing materials—check, create a Facebook business page and set up a Twitter account—check, check. But have you considered adding content marketing to the mix?
Not aware of the concept of content marketing? It is basically a way of communicating to your existing and potential clients any information (relevant to your products or industry) that helps them in any way to make their life better or easier. A successful content marketing campaign can:
- Engage customers
- Build brand awareness and customer loyalty
- Help reach SEO goals to get a higher search ranking
- Drive traffic to your website and Facebook page
- Increase sales
Content marketing is not a new concept, as a matter of fact it has been around for more than a century. For example, did you know that Jello brand published a recipe book in 1904 that showed customers how they could use their product in recipes and the company was able to track 1 million in extra sales as a result?
The graphic below shows a brief history of this concept. Content marketing can include everything from a recipe book, to regular blog posts, to how-to articles or snippets on your website of what is trending in your industry. In fact, when you start a new website, consider including a separate page just for your content.
The criteria for your content should be that it is interesting, valuable and engaging. A great way to do this is to start talking more to your customers and get stories from them on how they use your product and how it helps them in their lives. From there you can take that information and develop content ideas to share on your website.
As the graphic shows, the first step to successful content marketing is research—talk to customers, look into what is popular now and also recent research results relevant to your industry. Second, after you have developed the copy, you need to optimize it with SEO words and ways to subtly promote your product or service and third, connect with your customers by making the content available in a variety of ways. For example, post any visual components on Pinterest, ask relevant questions on Facebook and Tweet about it on your Twitter account and of course post it on your website.
For inspiration on some ideas to get started, check out this article on some addictive types of content marketing. Or for more information on this subject, there is an informative website dedicated to this topic entirely.
So when you are ready to start a new website, consider content marketing along with other important elements you are including. And if you need help with any aspect of your website, social networking, brand identity or customer communications, we have a staff available to help you at The Savvy Socialista.