Content Marketing

The New Marketing Magnetically Attracts

Content Marketing is the practice of providing free, helpful information to connect with and nurture relationships with your most wanted prospects. It is the foundation of modern, web-based communication, affecting every touch point through your site content, and social media. It’s the substance of what you have to share with the world, what sets you apart. Will you share something of value that attracts industry leaders and prospects? Or will you bore them, or try to sell to them?

Creating Relationships

The approach begins with identifying your target audience, and figuring out what kind of information they are urgently seeking. Uniquely tailored, compelling information that provides value, and is given away freely in the form of blog posts, white papers, and videos satisfies a information-seeking need — and can become the first stage of creating a relationship.

This approach involves a great deal of hard work that demands careful planning in terms of creating an editorial calendar, and consistently finding something of value to share. The next step is to consistently create content that delivers value and builds a trusting relationship over time.

Becoming the Trusted Expert

Sharing this kind of information positions your organization as a trusted expert that is generous, dynamic, capable, and is rich in every sense of word – rich enough to have more than enough ideas to be able to share, and rich enough to not need to constantly badger audiences with marketing messages. The classic soft sell, it works powerfully to position the organization as a trusted expert.

By eliminating the hard sell marketing message, content marketing works to magnetically attract leads, and creates and build the relationship that turns them into prospects and customers over time.

SEO Benefits

Similarly, there is also a great SEO benefit to content marketing – consistent efforts create a backlog of interesting, relevant, timeless content that builds up search engine equity over time. As a company’s blog posts, white papers, and videos get shared between colleagues and business contacts, the mere sharing directly influences search ranking results.

On a more basic level, the content, shared through social sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, are a consistent, relevantly-linked set of backlinks that also contribute greatly to search engine results.

There is no question that every organization in the business to business space needs to make content marketing a foundation of their marketing mix – the question is only how soon to get on board, and how relevant the content can be to that organization’s target customer.