Content Marketing works. In fact, so long as the material you produce is genuinely useful, it can work extremely well. You may or may not be familiar with the term, yet you visit content marketing sites every day.
When you visit news sites, entertainment sites or blogs that offer free business advice, you are visiting a site that uses content to market itself. Content Marketing can successfully be used to market any type of business. And it is unbeatable when it comes to attracting new clients, sales leads and subscribers.
Briefly, here’s how Content Marketing works:
You create a website, blog, vlog, newsletter or podcast, etc. You use it to provide free information that has real value to your prospective clients, whilst offering them the opportunity to purchase goods, services (or both), which are closely linked to the information you give away.
For instance, on my blog I provide thousands of marketing tips and regular, valuable, free marketing advice. People read the information, use the ideas and share what they find here with their friends. Then, some of those people see the quality of my information and decide to hire me, when they need expert marketing help.
I’ve spoken about Content Marketing with thousands of business owners. The most common question they ask is a version of this: ‘Hang on Jim. If I freely give all this valuable Content Marketing information away, surely people will simply do the job themselves?’
I answer by explaining that there are three groups of people who will read your Content Marketing:
1. The first group is small. They are what I call serial freebie hunters. These people never, ever pay for professional help. They were never prospective clients, so you lose nothing.
2. The second group is the largest. These people will try and do something themselves, but will hire professional help if they are not getting the results they need. They value genuine expertise.
3. The third group is the smallest. These are the rare people, who understand that by hiring an expert to do something correctly for them, it works out a lot less expensive, the results are better and things happen faster.
Here’s what that means to you and your business:
1. No one in the first group was going to spend a dime with you anyway. You lost nothing by giving them free information.
2. Some of the people in the second group will use your information and have a go at doing the job for themselves. Others in the group will see that they need expert help, and some of those people will hire you.
3. With the third group, if you demonstrate through your Content Marketing that you truly are an expert in your field, they will hire you. They already know all about you and your work. They trust you.
Content Marketing tip: ignore anyone who tells you that any content will do or that you can automate the process. This is not the case. If the content someone produces isn’t useful, it won’t do anything other than make them look bad.
This article was sourced from: jimsmarketingblog.com
