What is Your Content Marketing Strategy?

Content Marketing is something that I talk a lot about with my clients, and it's nice to say that most of them are starting to make content marketing part of their ongoing and future marketing budgets. Content Marketing is also a fundamental principal of Scrappy Marketing, as it's the cornerstone of owning your marketing.   Joe Pulizzi's Junta42 blog is a blog that I started reading a few months ago and it's good. Joe is also the author of the book Get Content. Get Customers. book which I just ordered from Amazon. So, I am going to use his latest entry Striking Content Marketing Gold - Direct from the Content Experts to give you a perspective on Content Marketing.

The question with content marketing should not be "What is the short term ROI of a content marketing initiative" but rather "What is the cost of not doing any content marketing?"

Here are a couple of good intro excerpts from Pulizzi's entry.

What is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is all about valuable, relevant and consistent content delivered to a target customer group - the goal of which is to create or maintain behavior.

Content marketing is the art of understanding what your customers need to know and delivering it to them in a compelling way.

Instead of focusing on your product or service and selling them, you devote resources to creating information that your customers and prospects need.

Your marketing is publishing...you are a publisher.

Case Studies

• Digital Nomads from Dell - Chris says this is a great way for Dell to target a buying niche without actively selling.
• HomeMadeSimple.com - P&G home and living tips site. P&G uses this for research and product development (very successful according to P&G). Also see BeingGirl.com for another example, a site targeting teenage girls (here's the ROI article on BeingGirl.com).
• MasterCard Small Business - 50% of new card signups coming directly from a content page. 322% increase in traffic over one year.
• Out-Law.com from Pinsent Masons - 250,000 uniques per month.  Their sole marketing for the law firm. Two people dedicated to content marketing in the 100 person firm.
• Miller Electric - Big user of content marketing.  Print, online and in-person. Great example of a resources/business tools section here.
• WillitBlend.com from BlendTec - According to Paul, over 120 million video downloads to date. Key to success was that they did a lot of planning in advance of the launch, which consisted of talking to bloggers and leveraging social media - which was a key difference maker.

Content Tips

• Create content that is byte-sized and has handles...meaning that people can share it and make it actionable. "People don't read Moby Dick anymore" according to Chris.
• Go niche - the smaller the better...and easier to solve your customer's informational needs.
• Call your customers - find out what their challenges are so you can better share relevant content with them.
• Listen first.
• Just starting?...get a nice bed of content that will form the base of your site after you've listened. Why not start with a blog?

That's right. Why not start with a blog? That's how I will end my week of blogging? What is your reason for not having a blog?

[ratings]

Tagged as: Content Marketing