When you know what you are doing, content marketing is a very fun game. However, if you don’t know how to do it properly and get results, it can make you want to scream loudly into a pillow.
Two thirds of marketers feel they are falling short with their content marketing efforts. They know that they could be doing better, but don’t know how. Not surprisingly, two thirds of marketers also focus almost single-mindedly on tactics, without considering the long game strategy of content marketing.
Ways to Increase Your Success with Content Marketing
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Ask the “Why Should I Care” Question
“Why should anyone care about what we write?” is a question you should ask yourself each time you create a piece of content. Everyone and their grandmother are creating content and blogging these days. With the competition for prospects’ attention so high, you must stand out. Use “The Big Idea” to help you.
The Big Idea is an idea coined from Michael Masterson aka Mark Ford of American Writers and Artists Inc. (AWAI) fame. Masterson has all his copywriters submit their work along with a one sentence summary of “The Big Idea”. If he doesn’t understand the big idea from the one sentence summary or doesn’t think it is a good “Big Idea”, he will tell the copywriter to re-do the work. Not in an obnoxious or rude way, but because if you don’t have a big idea, you don’t have a piece of content worth reading.
Spending just 5 minutes to craft a big idea can rapidly increase the quality of your content and hence, your results.
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Understand Your Customers Better than Anyone Else Ever Could.
Casanova once told of how he could win any woman's heart because he could explain her soul to her better than she knew it herself. You can win over your potential customers by explaining their problems to them in a way no one else ever could and then providing solutions.
Steven Covey, author of the highly successful book, “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, tells of how the deepest need of human beings is the need to be understood. If your customers feel like you “get it”—that you understand them and their situation fully, their trust in you will skyrocket and you will win customers for life.
How do you work to understand your customers? It’s simple; listen to them, talk to them! Read the comments they leave on your blog and Facebook. If you have an email address, see if they will reply to your emails. Ask them what their biggest problem is, their biggest dream, their biggest obstacle. The answers to these questions are worth gold.
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Make Your Content Marketing Part of A Strategy.
Business is chess—not checkers. There isn’t time to do everything. You and your staff only have 40-60 working hours a week, but there is always time to do the most important things. The most important activities are those that create customers and generate profit.
Content marketing can be a great way to create customers and repeat customers. OR it can be a great way to lose a lot of time and money! Don’t blog or do any other form of content marketing unless you know exactly how it fits into your business plan. Determine how you will make it work to increase visibility, brand awareness and audience engagement. Only then can you hope that it will eventually lead to customers and repeat customers.
Will you collect email addresses? Will your blog posts link to your services? How will you get conversions? Unless you know where the conversion from a cold visitor to a lead will come from, you will underachieve with content marketing.
As you internalize these mindsets and continue with your content marketing strategy, enjoy the exercise of adding value through quality content. Watch your reputation and your business grow.
If you feel like your content marketing efforts have not yielded the results you wanted, it’s not too late to course correct. Talk to our team of skilled and experienced copywriters at MintCopy. Call us at 888-646-8003 or send us an email.