Content marketing is on everybody’s radar, right? Well, if it isn’t, it should be–if you are interested in internet marketing at all. Content is what makes your site unique and differentiates your message from all the rest of the messages everybody gets hit with, so it’s important to pay attention to what you are saying to the world. It’s kind of ironic that “content marketing” is a trend because, in reality, the point of marketing has always been what you are saying to the world and how they are perceiving your message.
Who, What & How
Who is your audience, and who is your spokesperson? Probably the most important thing about marketing is knowing who your audience is. If you haven’t worked on developing buyer personas or some other way of knowing your customer, how will you know how to reach them? And your spokesperson is the persona or voice your site and all communications have. If your business doesn’t have a consistent “voice,” you are missing out on a great way to communicate and connect with people. What is your voice? It’s how you say the message, the words you use, the tone…all the things that make it sound like a person wrote this instead of a robot.
What is your message? Is it relevant right now? Can they hear this message from anybody else? Can they hear it expressed as clearly and helpfully somewhere else? There’s a lot of noise out there, and many marketers are saying the same things. If you say what they want to know in a way that connects and it’s easy to access, yours will be the content and message they choose.
How are you going to make this content and message accessible? There are two sides to good content marketing. The creativity that develops all the content and the various messages is usually not the same person who is great at analyzing the data. I think a content team is one of the best ways to do content marketing, because together you create a much better message than one individual can possibly accomplish on his or her own.