Are you concerned that your content marketing efforts are not helping you to grow your business?
In my last post about Don’t get caught making these 4 WordPress mistakes, I briefly touched on building a website and mistakenly thinking “They will come”.
In this post I’m going to dive into why content marketing matters and how it is critical to the success of your business.
I truly believe that content creation and marketing should be looked at as the engine that drives your marketing efforts.
Done right and consistently, content marketing will drive traffic to your site and position you as the authority in your niche, as the person that your audience wants to work with.
Just what is content marketing?
It is actually a very simple concept, where you create a piece of content and share it across various social media platforms and to your email list.
That piece of content can be a podcast, a written article, an infographic or a video..
The important thing to remember is that you need to put your best foot forward when creating your content that you want to share as this is the first time many people may notice you and as we all know first impressions count!
With that in mind, you want to create content that is your best stuff.
Think of your content marketing as a first date – would you show up not looking your best? Probably not, unless you don’t really care about getting the second date!
Why does content marketing matter to the health of your business?
1. Gets you noticed
One of my favorite quotes: “You don’t want to be the best-kept secret in your niche”
I see lots of potential clients who come to me having spent a lot of time and money building a beautiful website and have no clients, no traffic.
Why?
Because they don’t understand that you can’t just build a site and think if I build it, they will come. Even spending time and money on SEO and keywords won’t guarantee the right traffic to your site.
You have to post your content on your website AND make sure it gets funneled out through all of your social media channels on a regular and targeted basis.
Here’s 7 content creation and marketing hacks that you might not be using for your business, but should. In this article I share 7 simple content creation and marketing hacks that will improve your content creation and marketing.
And when you create better content…you will attract a bigger audience and position yourself as the go-to expert in your niche.
2. Elevates you to expert status
Consistently writing and publishing on topics important to your niche and followers reinforces your expertise. Be sure to do some research and listen to what people are asking and talking about in your industry.
Being relevant and giving people tips and high quality content that helps them to accomplish their goals helps to build the know like and tust factor.
And you are seen as someone who is a reliable source of great information, thus bringing them a step closer to following you.
3. It gives you additional ways to touch people
Is your inbox full of emails from all of those lists you are subscribed to?
How many of them do you actually open and read? I’ll bet the number is pretty low. So think of content marketing as another way to get in front of your list, not just people who aren’t on it yet.
According to HubSpot State of inbound marketing, blog frequency does impacts customer acquisition. 92% of companies who blogged multiple times a day acquired a customer through their blog.
Now I’m not telling you to create content mutiple times a day, but comitting to 1-2 times a week does make a difference!
I’d recommend making a comittment to creating content weekly for the next 3-4 months on a weekly basis and measuring the results.
You need to remember that this is a process and it won’t change your business over night. However, you will start to see some cool things starting to happen after a few months.
- Your website traffic will increase
- You will have a clear sense of what your audience is responding to
- Your engagement with people on social media will be higher
If you are stuck trying to create a content creation strategy to get yourself started – read my post on how to Streamline Your Content Creation Strategy with 5 Easy Steps.
I’ve even created a downloadable content publishing guide in this article which should help you get the most out of your content!
Content creation and content marketing should be the center of your marketing activities. You don’t need to feel overwhelmed by thinking you need to create a ton of content to get great results.
Get started creating content gradually, one piece a week and applying the right content marketing efforts behind it is enough to get started.
Stay consistent and show up weekly at the same time and your efforts will pay off. It should only take you 30 to 60 minutes to create a piece of content and then about 10 minutes for your first round on content marketing efforts where you share it initially across all of your social media platforms and with your list.
Then put your content on auto repeat. Use a social media tool such as Meet Edgar or Hootsuite to get your content shared automatically again and again. That’s what successful content marketers do!
