How To Tackle Content Marketing — From A to Zika
Following several months of meeting with many startups, dozens of phone calls and interviews I came to the following conclusions about content marketing:
A common misconception about content marketing, is that it is basically spamming people on social media. This is far from true.
A lot of hard work, effort and money goes into good content. In fact, content marketing is about providing value to your customers and sharing content that will genuinely interest them. It’s about building trust and reaching your audience.
Content marketing is not about simply making a sale, it is about selling without selling. The goal is to get people excited about your story, to trust you as a source of valid and reliable information and to enthuse your audience. In other words, it all about building your brand.
Eventually, there is far more value in people’s excitement with the story of your brand and the purpose behind it, than with a ‘one hit wonder’ video that went viral.
Start early and build a strategy — it takes time to build the trust and gain followers, therefore the sooner you figure out your audience and connect with them, the better. But you need to also be flexible and willing to change your strategy as you go along.
The case of Marcus Sheridan:
Marcus Sheridan is the owner of River Pools. He brought himself from the brink of bankruptcy to a leading competitor in pool sales within 48 hours. His solution was a simple yet powerful one.
Marcus asked his readers questions on his website. He put himself out there, he was honest and genuine and so, built the trust he needed to salvage his company and exceed expectations. You can see here an interview with Marcus where he explains just how he did it.
Be engaging — what is your company all about? What question are you answering? Answer the why.
You can do this by giving attention to back to your followers, for example;
Someone reacted positively to your post, replying with a video message is engaging and allows for the opportunity for your audience to get to know who sits behind your brand!
Quality trumps quantity — Reach your audience in many ways and with content and pieces that are relevant to them.
The case of the simple hook — In many cases, content marketing is about simply writing a superb piece that people simply enjoy and just move onto the next wonderful piece. It’s a nice catch to simply use this every so often.
Use keywords — This means using Key words and phrases in your online content. The more the better. By doing this you are allowing people to find your content through the use of search engines.
Listening and learning from others, I can tell you that taking SEO into consideration sooner rather than later can save you a lot of time and effort.
Make time to write content — This seems to be the biggest obstacle for any startup. It’s all about quality and quality requires time.
If you want to gain your audience’s trust, or you’ve already got a following — you want to give them what they came for: Good quality, trustworthy information.
Building a startup certainly takes a lot of time and energy, but it is important to prioritize some time to writing content. Whenever you see a free window, it never hurts to build up content for your archives!
Keep track of your content — Find platforms and analytic tools to track your content and it’s success. If you don’t follow who your audience is, how they are getting to you, as well as if and when your content lead to an action (for example, became a lead or signed to your newsletter). Then your efforts are all in vain. You can never know how to improve, what is popular, what is not and how to cater for your audience. For a good example of a useful analytic tool press here.
Build a momentum — Be consistent and reliable with your content.
Content marketing is an investment, it takes time and a lot of energy, but like any other investment, it pays off in the long run! In order to create engaging material and maintain the attention of your audience, you need a constant flow of high quality content. This plays a huge role in building trust as a reliable source.
As we understand by now, trust and quality brings in more leads and faithful customers.
The most important thing to remember is perception is everything:
The case of the Zika virus:
This case, is a very good example of the power of perception and ‘branding’. Perception is everything — The Zika virus was an epidemic, the way that it was tackled was by releasing a genetically modified mosquito to tackle the virus in other mosquitos. The problem was, that the public viewed the terms “genetic modification” and the term “virus” as a negative brand — they were scared by this perception they hold. Therefore, the name was changed to ‘the friendly mosquito’ and it worked.
The term ‘friendly mosquito’ was adopted and began a strain of posts educating and attracting people’s curiosity, it is now largely far more accepted than the concept has ever been.
