 |
||
|
||
Content Marketing – How to Attract, Acquire and Retain More CustomersAfter reading that headline, you are probably saying to yourself, “Here we go again, another marketer with a hyped up headline that’s big on promise but thin on delivery.” Please, humor me a little and let me present my case for content marketing. According to the Custom Publishing Council and Roper Public Affairs:
Next, let me quote you some statistics from the 2010 Content Marketing Spending Survey done by Junta42. More than 250 marketing professionals from leading small-to-large companies participated in this survey.
What is content marketing?Wikipedia defines content marketing as “an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases.” That sounds a little too academic for me. I prefer the more real-world definition from Junta42, “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience - with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” What’s the difference?You and your company probably have created loads of marketing collateral, so what’s the big deal with content marketing? Here’s the key difference, the old ways of pushing out content is no longer effective. Now, B2B content marketing’s agenda is to educate and inform customers and prospects. Content Marketing or some prefer to refer to it as Inbound Marketing, flips the traditional b2b marketing model on its head. Instead of interrupting people with television ads, inbound marketers create videos that prospects want to see. Instead of buying print ads in trade journals, they create their own blog and build an active community around it. Cold calling is replaced by useful content and tools that help people find and instead contact them for more information. Content marketing is not…… Talking about yourself, your company and its great products. There the focus is on you with very little attention to the customers’ pain points. Sure, some sites have a whole page dedicated to “solutions” and some case studies but those are not enough. In the words of David Meerman Scott, the author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, “No one cares about your products except you.” Effective content marketing is…… Understanding and following content marketing’s new slogan – “Don’t pitch. Don’t sell. Don’t interrupt. Educate, inform and provide value to customers and prospects. Your business will grow.” (From Content Marketing – The Ultimate Cheat Sheet). The key here is to create separate pieces of content that are relevant to your prospects and customers and engage them appropriately depending on where they are on the buy cycle. In general, website content is very important throughout the purchasing process, and successful marketers leverage their website’s content effectively to move buyers forward. Here’s a chart from Enquiro’s white paper, “Building Business Online: Your Digital Persuasion Portfolio” that shows how specific content from your website plays a role at different stages.
I understand that the hardest part about content marketing is finding the right resources for creating custom content. Tiecas can help – learn more about our B2B and technical copywriting, marketing with white papers and social media marketing services. Thanks for taking the time to read Marketing Matters regularly. Best regards, Let’s connect: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook P.S. We have renamed, redesigned and relaunched our blog as Industrial Marketing Today. Contact Information: |
||
| © 2010 Tiecas, Inc./AMA Interactive. All Rights Reserved.
|
