Content & Content Marketing

First, let me answer the question of “what is content?”. Content is everything from blogs, graphics, and videos to infographics and tweets. So let’s take a look at content marketing.

Content marketing is exactly what it sounds like: distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract, convert, and gain leads through a clearly defined audience.

The point is to EDUCATE not to sell. Selling doesn’t build that community that you’re hoping to build, in fact, it might just push them away. The secret to content marketing is adding VALUE, but even before that you must identify what is valuable to your community.

Your Community

If you don’t already know who your audience is or don’t have a community built, think about your brand and your product.

Before you start, you should create a “fake” person, or as we like to call them, a buyer persona. This buyer persona is your ideal customer. To do this, think about the answers to these questions:

• Who am I trying to sell my product to?
• What problem does my product solve?
• What kind of people do I want to support my business?
• What do they do?
• What is a day in their life like?
• How can I educate to them instead of hard-sell everything?

After answering a few of these questions, think about how you can create informative content about your product without saying “buy” or thinking too hard about selling.

Most importantly, think about how your product can help solve a problem they might have.

Your audience, or community, is your company’s life source. Without them, your product would not be talked about or bought. Keeping that in mind, entertain them, “wow” them, and delight them.

Once you’ve done that, a conversation will evolve from your content as well as shares and support.

Content + Conversation + Support of Others = A community built from YOUR content!

However, Rome wasn’t built in one day, so building this community won’t happen overnight, but it will take some TLC. That’s where inbound marketing can help.

Incorporating Inbound

So, you might see the scary, unfamiliar words “inbound marketing” and still don’t quite get it.

According to Hubspot, inbound marketing is about using your marketing efforts to bring potential customers to you rather than fighting for their attention. It is curating content around your ideal customers and allowing them to join in on the conversation.

The key to inbound marketing is posting the right content, at the right place, at the right time.

So what do you post? Well, inbound marketing works with social media posts, blog posts, and also works into helping your website come up in searches, through SEO.

But wait, there’s more!

By using an inbound marketing team or an inbound campaign, you can monitor how posts are doing, who is looking at your website, or who clicked on a certain page, and curate your content to those people!

You’ll be able to see what people are looking for and from there, build your community based off of the questions they might have!

Remember, community gives your product purpose. Create content that they would want to read, know when and where to post, and answer questions!

These people are your supporters, converse with them online as much as you would in person. This will make your marketing efforts worth it.