Content marketing is a new term for an old concept. It’s the digital marketing term for writing interesting and engaging content that will deliver real value for the readers, and that brings them back to your site or your posts regularly. Search engines live this, of course, because it allows you to add lots of content to your site that will ultimately increase your chances of getting hits for ‘long-tail’ key words and phrases that people are searching for.
But more importantly, content marketing allows you to develop a relationship with your readers, to establish trust and to position yourself as an authority in your industry. This is important for any website or business, but if you sell a service or an informational product, this becomes absolutely critical.
How People Think Content Marketing Works
People have the unfortunate misconception that content marketing is useful for bringing short-term results. Their hope is that they will be able to create a great article or blog post, share it on their website and then see traffic swarm in as a result. Then they hope people will share their content around the web and that a good portion of their traffic will be converted into paying customers. They write their content, they press ‘submit’ and then they go to bed… hoping to wake up to thousands of new sales.
Not so fast!
How Content Marketing Really Works
Wouldn’t it be great if things worked as easily as that? But that’s not how content marketing really works. Instead, you’re likely to get just a few people reading your content to begin with. Of those people, some of them will make it to the end and hopefully they’ll think, “hey, that was interesting.”
Then, they will forget about you completely and not think to look for you again…
Until, that is, they stumble upon one of your articles again on Google or on Facebook and they recognize your branding. That’s two good articles they’ve read on your site now. But again they’ll leave, being impressed but not particularly moved.
Once this happens a few times though they might realize that you’re writing about the things that matter to them in a way they respond to and they might bookmark your page. Or better yet, they may subscribe to your YouTube channel/start following you on Twitter.
And then eventually there may come a time when they need someone to redesign their website/help them get into shape/provide them with online marketing… or whatever it is you might do in your business. And now they know they like and trust you, they will likely turn to you to provide the sale.
(Of course, having a system to capture their information and add them to your email list might not be such a bad idea. But we can save that for another time.)
Ultimately, content marketing is perfect for skill-based or informational-based businesses.
Ready to discover how you can use content marketing in your business? Get access to a complete audio series on content marketing here.
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