Want a sneak peek at my new book?
I just published my very first book, Content Marketing Made Easy. I wrote it because I kept hearing people talk about content marketing and SEO as though they were insurmountable hurdles to getting found online, when the fact is you just need to know how to play the game.
I’ll admit. I, too, was afraid of SEO when I first started blogging professionally, but the more blogging I did, the more I found SEO to be a natural extension of blogging for business and vice versa. Far from finding SEO to be intimidating or tedious, I found it to be enlightening, and now I use it to spark creativity when I’m lacking inspiration.
So, without further ado, here’s the first chapter of my book, in which I break down the difference between content, content marketing, and content marketing strategy:
Table of Contents
What Is Content?
At one point, early on in my career, when I was playing around with different social media strategies and hashtags, I decided to use #content because what am I if not a content creator?
But when I looked at what other people were posting when using that hashtag, most of them were not writers. A lot of them were graphic designers, videographers, and there were even some web designers. While those are all great people for me to know and collaborate with, if someone is using #content to search for something, I don’t want them thinking I provide something I don’t know how to do (I am not a web designer, a graphic designer, a photographer, or a videographer), so I stopped using that hashtag.
I often see people online saying the key to success is to “create content.” I’m sure you’ve seen it too, which is probably why you picked up this book. But “content” is a very broad term. It encompasses, not just written content, but images, videos, and all their different iterations, including memes and infographics. It can even include content that’s not marketing content at all. For example, if you provide a user guide or instruction manual to go with your product, that’s content.
Even if we just focus on written content, it’s still a broad term. You have your website landing pages, blog posts, newsletters, social media posts (which can include images or video, sometimes in addition to written content). That’s not even getting into white papers, books, how-to guides, etc.
This book focuses on written content, because that’s my specialty, but I absolutely recommend taking advantage of all the other types of content whenever possible. If graphic design isn’t your thing, get a good graphic designer to create custom images and infographics for your business. If you can’t afford to hire someone, learn the basics so you can DIY it without looking like an amateur. Canva is a great resource for DIY graphic design, and it’s reasonably priced.
Use videos to your advantage, too. While I, personally, have always been a reader, there’s no denying that most people out there are more likely to watch (or at least listen to) a video than they are to read a blog post, so I recommend taking advantage of that medium. You can get pretty far with even just the DIY video option, but at the very least, I recommend hiring a professional to edit your videos. That way you can get that professional look without paying a fortune for someone to come into your home or office with all their expensive equipment and record your presentation.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is using content to promote your business: blog posts, ebooks, social media posts, blog post banners, infographics, videos, podcasts, white papers, etc. Any time you create content designed to position you as a thought leader in your industry and explain why people need your product/service, you are engaging in content marketing.
What differentiates content marketing strategy from content marketing is the planning that happens before any content is created.
I see a lot of small business owners trying to do their own content marketing. The biggest problem is the lack of strategy. They publish a blog post whenever they find the time, and for those who don’t like to write, it’s always easy to find something else that needs to get done in order to avoid writing that blog post.
The same goes for their newsletter and social media posts. They might blast out an announcement about their new blog post, but other than that they’re largely silent on social media and that is no way to build an audience.
What Is Content Marketing Strategy?
I often compare content marketing without a strategy to shooting in the dark and hoping you hit something. It’s the strategy that allows you to turn on the lights so you can see the target you’re trying to hit. It might take a little extra time to set up before you start shooting, but it makes your shooting much more effective and ensures you’ll waste fewer bullets/arrows.
The same is true of content marketing. You can waste a lot of time and energy on content marketing if you try to do it without a strategy to guide you.
On the other hand, when you take the time to put a plan in place to make sure your approach to content marketing is strategic and in alignment with your overall business goals, that’s when it becomes a content marketing strategy.
A content marketing strategy involves researching and understanding your target audience before you create any content for them. What problems can you solve for them? What questions are they asking that you can answer? What content can you create that will allow you to be of service to your ideal client before they hire you?
You also need to understand where your audience is in the buyer journey when they encounter each piece of content so you can make sure to include a call to action that leads them to the next stage of the buyer journey.
Additionally, you need to incorporate a calendar into your content marketing strategy. When are you going to publish your blog posts? When are you going to send out your newsletter and post on social media? The answers to those questions should never be “when I have time.” You need to do your research (including some A/B testing) to find out when people are most likely to read your blog posts, open your newsletter, and engage with your social media posts. If you publish and distribute content before doing any of this research, you could end up wasting a lot of time and effort on creating content no one is ever going to see.
Having a calendar also makes it that much more likely you’ll make the time to create content for your website. I maintain a weekly schedule for my blog and I treat that publication date and time just like I treat any deadline for a client.
To be continued…
If you want to read the whole book to find out how to create a content marketing strategy that drives results for your business, you can click the button below buy your very own copy now.
