More often than not, business owners have serious doubts as to whether a content marketing strategy will work for their company. Are the time, effort and investment needed for content marketing worthwhile?
Joe Pulizzi is the Founder of Content Marketing Institute, THE go-to place for all things content. An accomplished author on content marketing, his book Content Inc. details a model for businesses to become successful using the content-first approach. His advice can be followed by both start-ups and large organizations in any industry. The Content Inc. model is radically different from the traditional marketing model, where the product/service is first determined, after which, the method to promote it is decided.
So, what does the Content Inc. model entail? It says, do NOT treat content like an advertising campaign for a company’s product or service. Instead, as a first step, create and publish content that attracts and builds a loyal audience. Doing this helps you get a foot in the door and paves the way to sell anything you want to that loyal audience.
Here are 6 steps that the Content Inc. model recommends to create an effective content marketing strategy.
Identify the sweet spot:
What content area does your business revolve around? This could be the intersection of your knowledge/skill area and your personal passion/customer pain point.
Let’s suppose you are the CEO of a data analytics company. Identify your potential client’s pain points, such as lack of insight into their target customer personae.
Tilt the content:
Once you’ve identified your sweet spot, find a differentiation factor or a niche area where your audiences are looking for help. Tools such as Google Trends help you find areas where there is less competition and yet enough audience interest. Aim to be the leading expert in this niche area.
Once you’ve identified your sweet spot, find a differentiation factor or a niche area where your audiences are looking for help.
As the CEO, ask yourself, what is the niche area that you wish to target? Can you help marketers who have all the data at their disposal make sense of the data and get actionable information? Or with data security being a major issue, can you give insights on how machine learning can be used to safeguard against cyber threats?
Build a base:
Don’t spread yourself thin by being on too many channels – it doesn’t really maximize your reach. Instead, choose a single platform – it could be a podcast, a blog, or YouTube. Establish yourself on that channel by consistently publishing valuable and relevant content on it. For example, you could start with a blog with tips to help marketers find their target audience and maximize the effectiveness of their campaigns with the help of the data available with them. Build a base of loyal audience who can’t wait to devour your content.
Harvest the audience:
Now that you have built a loyal subscriber base, grow the audience. Building the audience is key to long term growth and success. Email newsletters are critical for this stage – a great way to harvest the audience and a choice better than social media platforms such as Facebook, over which you have no control. Send out a fortnightly newsletter with compelling content that your clients look forward to! It could, for example, contain curated news from the world of marketing or case studies where other marketers have successfully deployed analytics-based solutions.
Diversification:
Once you’ve built your audience on a single channel, next, diversify.. Now use new delivery channels such as podcasts, blogs, webinars to expand the reach of your content. You could also look beyond the digital medium for opportunities. This is a medium-to-long-term strategy. Assess current channel(s) periodically and prep to add new channels simultaneously.
Monetization:
Lastly, figure out how you can monetize and build a revenue model that will give you great returns. What works for your business? Premium content with a subscription model, or sponsorship, or launching new products? This is a longer term play and may take more than a year or two to crystallize.
You will find umpteen examples of companies that have built audiences with a content-first, audience-first approach in the book.The Content Management Institute itself is a great example of a successful Content Inc. model. It all started with a single channel – a blog written by Joe Pulizzi himself on which he posted consistently for over 3 years. After establishing itself on that one channel, CMI diversified into other channels such as workshops, podcasts, and a print magazine, among others. Over the years, it became one of the fastest growing business media companies. It was acquired for $17.6 million by UBM, a global media company, in 2016.
All these success stories not withstanding, the fact of the matter is that content marketing requires long-term commitment. For any company to be successful at content marketing, they have to be at it for a minimum of 9 months and an average of 18 months. There is no doubt that preparing a long term content marketing plan and acting on that plan eventually pays rich dividends!
The fact of the matter is that content marketing requires long-term commitment