Your Guide to Content Marketing

Content marketing is about creating what your audience needs and providing solutions. It’s about inspiring action in your viewers and giving them something they’ll use. From worksheets and webinars to social media content and blog posts, content marketing involves the distribution of materials that educates your audience, instead of only highlighting your products and services.

This way your audience gets an amazing free educational resource, but what do you get? As a business, you get the opportunity to build trust with your potential customer or client. When someone downloads a worksheet you created or references a training video, they are getting exposure to your brand. They might even share it with their friends. Now you’re positioned as an expert and top of mind when they have more questions.

How can you create a content marketing strategy?

Start with knowing who you are writing to. Select a topic that you’re confident in talking about and focus on writing directly to your target market. A specific target customer is also known as your customer avatar. You don’t need to create more pieces for the sake of creating more. Instead, start with your most confident topic and develop a few different resources.

Post these on your blog, share in your email newsletters, on your social media accounts and even in a free webinar. Then, determine what your call to action will be. Maybe you want to drive traffic to your website, prompt viewers to buy a product or simply want more email subscribers. Whatever it may be, make sure you clearly explain what’s next for the viewer.

Example: “If you enjoyed this worksheet, be sure to check out all of the services we offer here.”

Finally, don’t forget to repurpose. It’s your chance to “slice and dice” the good stuff you have and make it go further. Divide up your content and figure out how you can use it in different ways. For example, the content in a training video could be used to create three blog posts, a worksheet and six social media posts. If it takes up to seven times for a person to see a piece of content and take action on it, we want to be hitting them with the message in as many ways and places as we can while providing value at every turn.

Now you’re ready to create your own content marketing strategy. Find out where your audience is in life and give them something helpful that solves a problem they’re having.