Follow These Tips and Get More Customers With Content Marketing

Nowadays, social media allows you to connect with your audience in an easy and effective way. Increasing brand awareness and customer loyalty has never been easier. The only thing is; you do not want to upload posts to your social media channels just for the sake of posting. Content marketing is becoming increasingly essential to businesses. Let’s start with why content marketing is important to your business.

Goals of content marketing

Content marketing is creating content and distributing it across your website and social media channels.

The content you create should provide value to your existing and potential customers. This can be to inform or help them, or sometimes to entertain them in a way that they remember your brand and think of you next time they need services you provide. It is important to connect with your audience if you want your company to stick in their minds.

The content you are putting online should always have a goal behind it (more on this later). Here are some goals that your business can achieve with content marketing:

• Brand awareness
• Customer loyalty
• Creates a community
• Provides value to your audience
• Improve Google ranking
• Lead generation

Content marketing, when done right, can help to reach your goals without spending large amounts of money on product advertising, for example. Create content that your audience wants to see, not what you want them to see. 

Content that does not feel like an advertisement to your audience (but serves your underlying goal) will do much better than just an advertisement. This is what you should be looking for. To achieve this, you need a content marketing plan.

Having a plan

Just putting out content all the time does not directly help to achieve your goals. The important part about content marketing is to have a plan. Every piece of content you put out has to serve an underlying goal. Every piece should have a purpose.

Posting nice looking images of your products, posting a link or posting an inspiring quote can work, but this will mostly result in short-term gains. Of course, some people might click the link to your website and buy a product, but what you want to look for is long-term gains.

The trick is to create content that does not advertise the product you are selling. Do not just create posts that try to sell your new product or service, but try to find out what your customers feel and think. Focus on storytelling and think about how you can tell your story in a piece of content.

A good example of a company doing content marketing right is Marriott.

Marriott created a 24-minute film to drive revenue. In this film, Marriott focused on showing potential customers what it is like to stay at their hotels. You get to see the rooms and people enjoying champagne and chocolate.

Marriott tried to capture the experience you will have at their hotels in a film. The storyline of this short film is focusing on peoples’ feelings rather than selling more rooms. They wanted to make people want to stay at that amazing hotel they have seen in the film. Then, Marriott can offer it to them, which fulfills the need of the customer. They were able to give them the same experience as they saw in the film.

This is what storytelling is. The reason why this works is because Marriott focused on the feeling of the customer instead of just showing their product or service.

The film generated $500,000 worth of hotel room bookings in 60 days.

Efficiency

Having a hard time creating original content every time? You can also break up one piece of content and reuse smaller bits on different social media channels.

For example, you have a short video of an interesting interview. The interview will reveal some tricks your audience can apply to their business. Now let’s break it up.

• You can post the interview on your YouTube channel
• You can upload the sound of the interview to Soundcloud (podcast)
• You can transcribe the interview and make it a blog post
• You can cut up smaller parts and have several Facebook posts
• You can take quotes from the interview, create images and post them on Instagram
• You can also post the same quotes to Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr

See how this works? This is called micro-content. This way you can create one piece of content and post it all over your social media channels and website. Every piece of content will still be related to the complete interview and will serve your particular underlying goal.

From a 20-minute interview you can easily create a podcast, a blog, 3-5 Facebook posts and 6-8 quotes. You have just created nearly 15 pieces of content out of one interview. This way of working is very efficient and also creates brand awareness at the same time.

Quick content marketing tip

When creating content, you should always have a goal. Don’t create content just to create content. Decide what purpose you want your piece of content to serve.

When the goal is clear, ask yourself this question:

‘Does this piece of content serve my underlying goal?’

If the answer to this question is not ‘yes’, then change it.

In content marketing, ‘why’ is more important than ‘what’ you are showing your audience.

Try it!

To conclude, think about what your audience needs to feel or experience, and think about ‘why’ you are creating the content that you are creating. Do not create content just to have something to post but think about the meaning and the purpose of the piece of content. In the end, you are looking for long-term effects. When content marketing is done right, great things can happen for your business.