Sharing my Content Marketing Ideas

When I think about what marketing means to me, I automatically think about Content Marketing. I use this form of marketing to help authors increase their visibility in the marketplace, and connect and build a relationship with their target audience.

Marketing is the Jelly in a Sales and PR sandwich

Marketing, Sales and PR all go hand in hand, and I can’t single marketing out without first laying the groundwork of how this trio of activities work together:

• PR is the bottom layer of your sandwich, and focuses on making consumers aware of your product.
• Marketing is the middle layer of your sandwich, and focuses on hooking your consumer’s interest.
• Sales is the top layer of your sandwich, and is all about getting your consumers to commit to a purchase.

But what’s missing from this sandwich? The peanut butter of course! And to me, the peanut butter is Content Marketing. It goes hand in hand with the jelly, but it’s distinct and different.

Content Marketing isn’t Sales

A common mistake I see online is authors bypassing Marketing altogether and jumping straight to a sales technique:

“Buy my new book.”
“My book is on sale for a limited time only.”
“Free shipping if you buy my book during Black Friday.”

This constant sales pitch, especially on social media where the emphasis should be on the “social”, will turn potential customers off. Nobody wants to see the hard-sell in their social streams, just like nobody wants to live on a diet of dry bread.

Content Marketing grabs attention

After a while, it’s easy to become blind to online adverts. We recognise them as advertising, and if we don’t think we want the product we just scan over them. The role of Content Marketing is to attract the attention of our target audience by providing them with engaging online content. We want to get them to stop scanning and scrolling and read what we have to say. In order to get them to stop and read, we have to know who we’re trying to target. Unless you’re selling toilet rolls, your target audience can’t just be everyone.

When I work with authors the first step in the Content Marketing process is to identify who we’re trying to get to read our content. When you have a clear vision of what your ideal customer looks like, then you can create content that has the potential to be inspiring, educational, informational, or entertaining to them.

Content Marketing is about giving not taking

The key difference between Sales and Marketing is your perspective. When you’re in Sales-mode you’re looking at it from a “what’s in it for me?” angle. You want to make sales and make money. But when you’re in marketing mode you’re approaching the customer relationship from their perspective. You’re putting yourself in their shoes and trying to imagine “what’s in it for them?”. Why should they be interested in your product? What are your product benefits? And how will your product solve their problems or meet their needs?

If you can be empathetic to your potential customer, and identify how to meet their needs, you’ll be able to attract their attention. Then you can create content that speaks to each of them individually.

Content Marketing relies on PR

You can’t start to build trust unless you have an initial level of awareness, and that’s where PR comes in. Then we need to build on that awareness and develop it into a level of interest using content. Our content needs to show up where we know our customers are looking, and generally that means we need to feature it in social streams, and on websites, so that it shows up in search engine results. But there are other platforms we can utilise.

Take Amazon for example. Each product has a sales page where the product is displayed and described, which has the sales aspect covered, but one of the major benefits of Amazon is the PR aspect. Anyone can leave a product review, and as long as it’s a good review these are great PR fodder. What better way to market your product, than to get customers to do it for you? They’re your brand ambassadors, and their input can carry more weight than your own sales pitch.

These reviews help prompt buying decisions, but people are only seeing them if they visit your product page. So an example of a powerful Content Marketing strategy is to share excerpts from these reviews on your website or in social media posts.

Content Marketing is the top of the Sales Funnel

The primary goal of Content Marketing to is to grab attention and hook interest, but once you’ve done that you have to lead them somewhere, or you run the risk of losing them. So all your content should have a URL that leads your potential customer deeper into a relationship with you.

The best way to do that is to lead them to an email sign-up form to subscribe to your mailing list to receive something for free. But you can also lead them to an engaging article that will help to convince them that your product is just what they’re looking for, and then make it easy to get to your sales page to buy your product.

These paths that lead customers from your content to your sales page are called Sales Funnels and the funnel can one or multi-step funnels. Content Marketing is what retains your customer’s interest until they find their way to your sales page. Sometimes this is a quick process, and sometimes it takes a bit of nurturing.

If we can go back to my sandwich scenario, without marketing, you’re just trying to feed your customers two slices of dry bread. But add Marketing and Content Marketing and suddenly you have something that makes your bread look appealing, taste good, and keep them coming back for more.

What does marketing mean to me? Find out here. #guestpost #contentmarketing Click To Tweet