We’ve covered the topic of content marketing extensively in this blog. To review, content marketing is exactly what it sounds like – marketing through content, or information, that is useful to the consumer but isn’t selling something directly. Some examples of content marketing might be:

• A candy company publishing a brochure with tips on keeping kids safe while trick-or-treating
• A medical brace manufacturer publishing an informational poster illustrating knee and foot anatomy for use in doctors’ offices
• A financial advisor publishing a blog post about the differences between a Roth and traditional IRA
• A fashion retailer posting a video on different ways to wear scarves
• A paint company creating an infographic illustrating how to choose between various types of varnish

Why use content marketing?

So basically, the point of content marketing is to position your company as knowledgeable, caring, and competent — making it more likely that a consumer will want to do business with you. It’s a very soft sell, and a long-term strategy.

Of course, this blog is also an example of content marketing, and represents a significant investment of this company’s time and energy over many years – just look at the list of topics to the left, and the number of articles available for your perusal. We generally publish one article each month.

The bottom line is, we wouldn’t do it if it weren’t worth it. Because of Google Analytics, it’s possible to quantify exactly how effective the Learning Center is for driving visitors to our website:

• Eight of the top 10 most popular pages on the entire site are Learning Center articles.
• The top-ranked page by far is a Learning Center article (in case you’re curious, it’s this one) — in fact, it typically has more than twice as many pageviews as next most popular page in any given month.
• A full 62 percent of all pageviews to this website come from the Learning Center, compared with 16 percent to our home page.

What this means is that an extraordinarily high percentage of people who visit our website find it because they were searching on a topic covered in our blog – that is, Google returns one of our blog articles in response to a search term. Try searching on “template and custom website” to see what we mean! And FAR more people visit our website than would be the case if we had no blog to attract them.

The benefits of this are multi-layered:

• The person who reads an article might be so impressed with our company that they might consider doing business with us or recommending us to someone who’s looking for an agency.
• Less obviously, the more traffic our website receives, the better our site’s SEO (search engine optimization) — that is, higher traffic means that search engines will prioritize our site in all searches, including searches that might result in sales. In other words, the traffic from, say, West Coast marketing students who are researching the difference between template and custom websites (and only read that article, and have no intention of hiring an agency) will help boost our website’s overall search engine ranking in searches by western Pennsylvania businesspeople who are actively looking for marketing assistance. The reason for this is simple – the more traffic a website gets, the more Google’s algorithm understands that people find that website useful.

We’ve discussed further benefits of content marketing extensively elsewhere.

 

Various forms of content marketing

We’ve alluded to some of the types of content marketing already, and have covered this in more detail in earlier articles. But as a quick recap, here are some of the most common forms of content marketing:

• Informational brochures, flyers, and other print collateral
• Infographics
• Blogs
• Advertorials
• Podcasts
• Informational videos
• White papers
• Memes

 

How to get the most out of your content marketing

Most forms of content marketing (including this article) take research, time, and effort to produce. So it makes sense to get as much mileage out of your efforts as possible by recycling your content.

By “recycle,” we mean find ways to reuse, repackage, repurpose, and rewrite the content you spent so much time on, with the goal of making it of more value to your customers – and to your company. There are several ways to do this:

Reuse:

• Share your content marketing through every appropriate avenue you can. Share it over all forms of social media, send it through your e-newsletter, post it in your blog, and hand out hard copies.
• Make sure everyone in your company reads and actively promotes your content marketing. Your salespeople or anyone on the front lines should be actively referring customers and prospects to your content marketing. Use that content marketing over and over.
• Continue promoting relevant content long after it was created. Many forms of content stand the test of time – so re-share your best blog articles on social media long after they’re completed, or reprint that really great informational brochure.
• Structure your website so that people are encouraged to read older blog articles. Blogs are one of the best forms of content marketing, because once they’re set up your only investment is time spent researching and writing articles. Talk to your developer about ways to encourage people to spend more time reading your blog. For example, this blog is structured with categories and sub-categories and “you might be interested in” article suggestions, and the most recent article (along with other “spotlighted” articles) is featured on the home page of the entire site.

Repackage:

• Use your work in more than one form of content marketing. If you’ve produced a blog post, can you create an infographic with the same information (that can then be posted in your physical location)? Does it make sense to put that information into a printed piece for consumers to use? Can a shorter form of the video on your website be used on your in-location monitor system? Can you create a blog post based on your podcast?

Repurpose:

• Create presentations based on your content marketing. A major goal of content marketing is to position yourself as a leader in your field. Many times, Chambers of Commerce or other economic development organizations hold educational seminars for businesspeople in your community. Volunteer to present a seminar, and use the research you’ve put into your content marketing to begin creating your presentation.
• Use your content marketing as the basis for articles or guest blog posts. Many trade and business publications or organizations have guest columns, blogs or other ways to contribute content. Pay attention to these opportunities – can you repurpose your content in a way that would add value to one of these outlets?

Rewrite:

• Rewrite your content as warranted when new information and updates become available. Things change in all industries — they certainly do in marketing, which means we need to revisit topics from time to time. Write updated versions of old blog posts when the situation warrants.