We recently delivered some Content Marketing training for the cultural tourism sector in Cardiff and it occurred to us that this could be a refreshing and simple approach for the small business.
What is content marketing
Essentially, content marketing is about meeting the content needs of people rather than simply pushing your products. Traditional advertising suggests that you broadcast your offer to the masses, or a targeted audience, in the hopes that they want to buy from you. Content marketing focuses on solving the problems of your potential clients, rather than simply pushing your products. Of 100 potential customers that you get your message in front of, only a fraction of those are ready to buy from you. Content marketing tries to build relationships with clients buy solving their problems, their pains through the provision of content. Ultimately with the aim to acquire that person as a customer when they are ready. It involves the provision of entertaining, useful and enlightening information that solves the problems of potential clients and repurposing that content in different mediums, on different platforms, to connect with your audience.
Your audience does not care about you!
You may have the best product in the world and be very passionate about it. However, you must remember that your customers do not care about you! They care about their problems, their needs, their goals and you need to realise this if you are to be successful in content marketing.
People search for solutions, not services
Have you ever searched on Google for answers to questions, how to guides and solutions? Most people have. One possible content marketing strategy is to create content for every possible question that your potential customer may ask, giving you a chance of being found when they search and appearing to be knowledgeable.
Another example could be that if you are providing tourist accommodation, rather than pushing your special offers and gaps in bookings, you start to provide detailed information on what to do in the area. Be useful and the business will follow….
Re-purposing content
Another basic principle of content marketing is that you should re-purpose content. Re-purposing content means that rather than simply creating content in one platform, you then re-use that content in many ways. Perhaps you could make a video from a blog post, an infographic from some information. Could your content be created on Twitter and Facebook and also on Linked In.
Just an introduction…
This is just an introduction to Content marketing and we will give more information and advice over the coming months. Content marketing is something we are increasingly engaging with as part of our Total Digital Marketing service. It brings results and is much cheaper and effective than traditional advertising.
Feel free to contact us to see how we could create a digital marketing strategy for your business.
