Content Marketing For Growing Businesses

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Greg 3 Comments

Talk is cheap. But there’s a way you can make it more valuable. It’s called content marketing.

You can talk about your products and services until you’re blue in the face. But if you believe in the old adage that a rising tide floats all boats then you’ll benefit from content marketing. It’s a way to develop leads and simultaneously position yourself as a market leader who can be seen as a valuable source of information.

Think of content marketing as when you provide your prospects and customers with something of value, regardless of whether they are buying something new or extra. You’re helping them by providing them with knowledge, tools, and insights that make them better in their own marketspaces.

Give And Ye Shall Receive

As a business-minded professional it’s natural to question the sanity of giving something away, other than throw-away swag with your logo pasted all over it. But the valuable content marketing pieces you distribute as a part of a content marketing strategy are more like software. Yes, it’s something of value. But hopefully it’s something digital, and hopefully it’s something that has a marginal cost of close to zero. Realistically, the content marketing pieces you distribute will probably cost less that the tchotchkes you commonly think of as promotional items.

But it’s not exactly giving it away for free. Rather, you’re asking for a little something in return and you’ll use it as a starting point (or continuation) of a way to engage the prospect along the buying cycle. This is where it differs from a simple promotional item that may a whimsical one-off give-away. Yes, you should know to whom you’re giving your little content gem. So require a name and email address so you can continue marketing to them through your email marketing program as well.

Content Marketing & Lead Nurturing

If you require a brief amount of information to download the goodie (and I do mean brief, like just name and email address) you’re venturing into the realm of lead nurturing. There are many ways to harvest lead information, and requiring simple registration information for a content download is only one of them.

Keeping track of how a prospect has interacted with your company, how to score leads, and how to systematically nurture those leads along the pathway to purchase can all become quite sophisticated. There are enterprise software companies like Eloqua, Marketo, and others that specialize in developing lead nurturing platforms. But the

Integrating Content Marketing

The whole idea of content marketing is to provide value to your prospective buyers. In turn, you’re going to organically grow your sales leads. Marketing can continue to nurture those leads through all appropriate marketing channels until they’re ripe and ready to pass on to sales.

Once you first get someone’s contact information from content marketing piece, that’s only the beginning. Decide on how to score that lead (what’s their value as a potential buyer) and what types of marketing makes sense for that lead. Can you use mobile marketing tactics to appeal to them? Are they interested in whitepapers? What is it that you can give them and provide more value.

Ultimately, quality content marketing is going to help your whole industry sector. If a prospect ends up buying from your competitor, perhaps you have a chance to woo them away. Since you were a source of high quality content and you interacted with them during their decision-making process you’ve got a better chance at that. And if they do buy from you you can continue to use content marketing to enrich the customer relationship.

Related posts:

1. Content Marketing Challenges
2. Link Building For Growing Businesses
3. How To Measure Your Content Marketing Efforts
4. Growing Businesses Advertise Online
5. What Is Your Point of Sale?