Content Marketing Made Simple
Whether you call it “content marketing” “inbound marketing” or some other name, the basic idea is the same–to bring customers to you rather than the other way around.
First, a definition:
Content marketing is sharing valuable content with people and prospects who come to know, like and trust you. Videos, webinars, white papers, email marketing and more offer those valuable “touches” throughout the sales cycle until your customer is ready to buy. So, when they are ready, you’re the logical person/business to go to.
Inbound Marketing uses your on and off page SEO, social media and other content to encourage others to talk and share about you so you become the “go to” person in a particular field.
You have to have the content to have inbound work. Once at your site, your content marketing needs to answer questions and guide your visitors through your sales process.
Here’s how it works. Imagine you sell golf bags to golf course pro shops.
Scenario 1:
Mr. or Ms. Prospect find your website—through SEO, social media, other people talking about you or some combination—there, they learn that you sell golf bags. But they were looking for golf trophies instead. They leave your site, never to return. VERY COMMON!
A few months later, they need a new supplier of golf bags. While searching for the golf trophies, they’d happened on your competitors site and signed up for their email newsletter.
Over the months, she’s received several newsletters with helpful tips on your golf bags and how to sell them. Months later when she needs a golf bag supplier, it’s your competition who gets the business. Why? She’s not going to search for other suppliers when she has this helpful one in her inbox.
OR, you implement content marketing and you experience…
Scenario 2:
Mr. or Ms. Prospect finds your site while collecting information about widgets for a presentation she’ll be making to her team. She sees that you have a White Paper about your widgets so she downloads it to read later.
In exchange for the White Paper, she gives you her name and email address. Now you have a prospect.
The next day, you email her asking if she has any questions about the White Paper and inviting her to a webinar on the topic of widgets. She found the White Paper helpful and discussed it with her sales manager. Both of them attend the webinar.
Next, she gets a phone call from a sales person asking to set up a meeting and she agrees.
Meanwhile, she continues to receive emails every couple of days with quick tips showing ways your widgets can solve her problems.
When the sales person comes, she is ready to ask questions and see if your widgets are a good fit for her team.
She’s in a “ready to buy” mindset.
Do you see how this applies to all businesses? Even if you’re a staff of one, you can offer a White Paper or Special Report on your website and follow up the downloads with a series of emails, maybe even a phone call.
It just takes a bit of planning and preparation. The great thing is once it’s done, you can just keep adding to your arsenal of content marketing pieces. Unless it’s specific to a particular launch, it’ll continue to work for you to bring you leads.
In a nutshell, that’s the content marketing concept. Love to hear your successes in the comments below.
