The Compound Effect Of Content Marketing

I'm strong believer in the core principle that every business needs to become a content marketer. A business owner needs to take control and not reply on a third party to write about their company. Yes it's great to search on your company name and find a glowing Google or Tripadvisor review, but what happens when a real prospect searches on a question they need answered or a problem they need solving. Wouldn't it be great if each time a prospect entered a question into the search engines, your company provided the answers.

Do You Think Over Time They Will See You As A Trusted Advisor?

Of course they will and this is why now is the time to see your business as an authority and educator in your marketplace. Critically notice how I said "your business" and not "you" because this is an activity a large percentage of your workforce should be involved in. Ultimately anyone who has ever answered a question about your product or service is a candidate for being on your content marketing team.

Here Are My Hopes For Your Business

You become the company that's eager to share your knowledge. You empower your staff to showcase their talent and teach others. By the way it's a great way to improve staff moral as they see the direct impact they are having on the company's bottom line. It will become abundantly clear to everyone in your workforce that prospect and customer centric content published on the company's website, will naturally generate more prospects. Quite simply content marketing is highly effective because it relies on pulling in leads and prospects on their own terms. At the moment when they have a question about a product or service you provide, you are there to answer it at a time when your competitors aren't!

Content can come in the form of blog posts, videos, photos, podcasts and slide presentations. Thus if you have employees who are out in the field, make sure they are taking photos with their phones or digital cameras. Equally the same tools will enable them to record short videos. These photos and videos can typically be before and after shots, a product demonstration, a customer testimonial or answering a specific customer question.

Content marketing will enable you to dominate your marketplace. Quickly your business will become a trusted authority, a credible source people can turn to with their problems.

How You Can Start Your Content Marketing

To begin with I urge you to make the time to start writing about the problems you are solving on a daily basis. This is the way prospects will truly resonate with you. When you have taken the time to show you care about them, they will take the time to listen to you. Compare this to how you currently push out your marketing, where much of it is landing on deaf ears. Let's be truthful it's now a very noisy world we live in and we are all playing the how to gain someone's attention game!

I'm sure you will agree we are living through a technological revolution. It's crazy what we can now do with our phones! Expect a Google self driving car on your forecourt sooner than you think.

Am I right in saying you have embraced this change?

Of course it's very difficult not to, though there were companies Blockbusters that never got it, where Netflix did. Equally Tower Records never embraced the impact of Apple and iTunes.

With this in mind I also want you to embrace the changes happening in the world of marketing. This technological revolution has had a major impact on why a business should market themselves. As a result I can't overemphasis how important it is to see your business as a content publisher. This is as important as submitting your quarterly VAT return, hiring a new member of staff, or completing your corporation tax return. Granted you won't immediately have the authorities knocking at your door if you don't deliver, but in time the effect can be just as devastating.

Make Sure Your Business Doesn't Get Left Behind

Long gone are the days when you could place an advert in the Yellow Pages and smile to yourself safe in the knowledge your marketing was ticked off for another year. Marketing along with everything else has changed and I honestly don't want you to get left behind. Call it what you like, the Internet Age, the Information Age, the telecommunications revolution, your future business success will be dedicated on how well you embrace some of the major shifts in how, we as human beings, get the solutions to our daily problems.

It's important to take that first step and commit to putting a content marketing strategy in place. Do you feel awkward when I ask you to consider when was the last time you published a really useful piece of content for your prospects and customers? To clarify I don't mean anything that would be considered company news. I mean where you have specifically answered a question your prospects ask you on a regular basis.

You Need To Understand The Compound Effect Of Content Marketing

If you delay now, you lose out on the compound effects of content marketing. If you regularly provide Google with unique and relevant content, they will index you for more keywords and keyphrases over time. This means more people will read your content and naturally more will contact you because they see you as the solution to their problems. Imagine the power of truly helping people from today when you publish your first piece of content, compared to putting it off for a year. It's unimaginable in this age that a business would continue to spiel out one sales pitch after another on their website, but unfortunately they still do.

Hopefully you can see why it's very important to provide information that gets ranked well because it isn't a sales pitch, but instead teaches the reader something valuable about your product and service. Each piece of content you publish is a business asset. It will serve you for many years to come and continually bring in new business. As with every asset it does take time and effort to create, but the payback is immense and worth it. I want you too to enjoy the delight when you search in Google on a typical prospect question and see a post written years ago still ranking high and generating web traffic for you everyday.

It's Imperative Your Business Buys Into Content Marketing From The Top

Finally there is only one thing that will stop your content marketing efforts becoming a success and that's buy in. It needs to be driven from the top. The CEO, the owner, the board of directors all need to completely understand the value of content marketing and buy into it, better still they are also writing content.