What is content marketing, why do you want to use it, and where can you get help if you don’t want to do your content marketing yourself?
Content marketing is a business tool that will increase your chances of selling your products or services to your ideal customers, if you do it right. In short, content marketing is a form of value added relationship building. You are literally gifting trustworthy information with value for the purpose of planting the seeds of a relationship that can grow into future business.
Content repurposing is a way to leverage your original content to make it work harder for you and save you time and money. You can read about that in my post on content repurposing.
Definition of content marketing
Content marketing is an inbound marketing tactic. Inbound means the prospect came to you; you didn’t hunt them down in some way. It involves using helpful, informative, and/or entertaining material to market to your ideal audience while it serves another primary purpose: serving, educating, persuading, or entertaining the readers or viewers of that content. It doesn’t have to involve trying to get them to buy from you, although if done right, it will increase your chances of selling your products or services to them. If it’s done right, they won’t even know that they are being gently led to the conclusion that you are the right provider for them.
Types of content marketing
Here are some content marketing examples:
• blog posts or other site pages
• infographics
• books you’ve written or that feature you
• videos
• podcast episodes
• social media status updates
Doing it well
The key to good content intended for marketing and repurposing is that it be helpful, informative, inspiring, and trustworthy material. It should serve to position you as the trustworthy voice in your space.
Delivering that quality content helps you attract, engage, and serve prospects and customers. It gives value to everyone who visits your site or other locations where your articles and other content reside. They think you might be someone they can trust with their purchasing decisions—if you give them reliable, accurate information consistently. You want to be the one there with that information when they are looking for it.
A content marketing planner or editorial calendar is a document where you or your content management agency can record the type of content that will be created, as well as when, and where it will be published. Publication locations include…
• your own website or blog
• your various social media platforms
• websites where you (or your content manager) have publishing privileges
• blogs where you can guest post
• YouTube
• other sites
One reason to create a content marketing editorial calendar is so that you can plan out the content and set a steady and sustainable pace. Otherwise, you’ll probably try to do too much, too soon, and you will burn out and then fade away. No one wants you to burn out, and MJ James is a great resource to help you prevent that.
When it comes to content creation, consistency is key. Producing content on a regular basis is important. You can use tools such as Asana or ClickUp to keep you on track.
The creation can be done in batches (in fact, batching is something we highly recommend), but the publication of it must be done in a steady drip. An editorial calendar tells you exactly when to drip it out.
Editorial calendar
Here is an image of an editorial calendar.
As you can see, it has rows for each of the locations and columns for the days this particular business owner has chosen to publish content.
When it’s time to set up your systems later in the book, set up your own content creation calendar/editorial calendar. Yours can contain whichever publications/locations you’d like, but don’t fill in all of the rows with plans. We recommend just picking a couple of channels to start.
Create your content. Publish it in one or two locations to begin with. Do not try to wing it. Do not try to blanket seventeen media channels with your content straight out of the gate. It is important to start slow so you don’t become overwhelmed.
When you first begin your content creation, just pick one or two channels to start with. You might choose your own blog/website and Facebook. An analogy that the author of The Wealth of Connection, Vincent Pugliese, often uses is that of launching airplanes. If you try to get four off the ground at the same time, there is going to be chaos. You’re going to struggle, and your chance of failure is higher. It’s better to launch one plane first and get it going well. Then you can get the next one lined up on the runway.
Using a system (or outsourcing it) lets you achieve the success you’re looking for. In this situation, each social media channel and publication platform is an airplane. Focus on getting one going at a time. When that one is doing well, when creating content for it has become part of your routine, then add another one. Also, repurpose all of the content you can, so that you don’t have to create all-new content all the time.
Focusing your marketing
You’re a business owner, an action-taker. It’s normal to want it all and to want it now. You are also pragmatic, and you know that there are different ways of doing things and that some are more likely to help you succeed than others. So, when the temptation hits to generate content and slap some up on each of six different platforms, please resist. Remind yourself that you need to build a sustainable content marketing practice just as you build a sustainable business. It is far better to start out with just one channel than it is to jump into three. Launch one plane at a time.
Be realistic in how much time you can spend on content marketing. If you don’t have the time, consider outsourcing to someone who can produce the content and distribute it for you. Just be sure you oversee the process so what is being created aligns with your vision and beliefs. Knowing your audience well will help you be sure you’re speaking their language and that your content is on target.
• Determine your goals for this. Focus on a narrow target audience and intimately understand their challenges. Be sure you allow enough time and resources to produce the content your target is looking for.
• Develop a content plan, aka an editorial calendar that provides the map for what content to produce and when.
• Create that content with focus and clarity.
• Produce content in a variety of formats. Repurpose your content across different content types. A blog post can be turned into an infographic, presentation, video, or a podcast. These different media types can then be shared on different platforms to increase your reach.
Once you’ve produced some content, do these things:
• Post your content in a variety of locations to reach your ideal clients.
• Produce quality content consistently.
• Document your strategy and your success. According to CoSchedule.com, those who document their strategy are more than 500% more likely to report success than those who don’t. This will help you prove to yourself (and your constituents) the ROI of content marketing.
• Lather, rinse, repeat.
What content marketing is not
It is not any of the following:
• Not traditional marketing
• Not traditional advertising
• Not copywriting
• Not spam
• Not a shoddy ploy to get business
• Not the easy way out
Some people think content marketing is the cheap way to go to get out of having to pay for advertising or marketing. You have to provide real value to your readers. You create good content that helps them and shows that you are an expert on the subject. Some of them will never become your customers or clients, and you have to be okay with that knowledge.
Content marketing will cost you in time, money, or both. Content marketing is not for the selfish or greedy. It’s for the generous. Let us be clear: not all content marketers are good people who are genuinely interested in your needs. Some are trying to game the system. As with big companies, some just want your money. But most people are smart and can sense that kind of thing, so we won’t spend any more time on that other than to say this: Don’t do that.
If content marketing has all these drawbacks, why would you want to do it? Because it is one of the most effective, practical, and useful digital marketing strategies that your brand can use to reach and engage a greater quantity of quality leads and customers.
Branding expert Mike Kim, speaking to the Total Life Freedom mastermind in November 2019, said it succinctly: “Create content.”
Content marketing versus other things
Content marketing vs advertising: Years ago, there was advertising and there was “the rest of marketing,” which basically amounted to all of a company’s branding efforts: logos, colors, packaging, messaging, sales offerings, and so forth. For most people, though, advertising was marketing. People became extremely jaded and immune to advertising over the years, understandably so. Every surface imaginable was plastered with ads—even inside urinals!
People learned to stop seeing ads and definitely to stop trusting them, so marketers had to get creative if they wanted to reach anyone. In This Is Marketing, Seth Godin dives deeply into this dichotomy and truth. He redefines marketing as it truly is and not what the popular notions have been about it. If you have not read that book yet, you are missing out.
Content marketing vs traditional marketing: Traditional marketing usually involved brand-awareness. It was focused on making a product a household name, on ensuring that consumers would recognize (and snag) the product wherever they saw it. It included billboards, newspaper ads, television commercials, logos, specific colors, jingles, and taglines, all designed to get the audience to recognize and choose that company’s product or service. Content marketing is a totally different approach for a totally different time and world. The world where traditional marketing worked really no longer exists, but most companies are still trying to make it work for them.
For large corporations, who have massive budgets they can throw at brand awareness advertising, it’s fine. For the rest of us, there’s just no way we can market in that manner. It’s far too costly and inefficient. Customers and clients are more cynical and think more critically now. The old junk just doesn’t work anymore. Building relationships with real people is the way of business, and really always has been. Content marketing is the path to those relationships today.
Content marketing vs copywriting: Content marketing can and does contain some elements of copywriting if it is done well. However, they are different things. Copywriting is creating written material that is designed to persuade or sell. There are formulaic structures involved in copywriting, including headlines meant to grab attention, phrases intended to evoke emotion and prompt action. Simply put, content marketing is the slow cooker to copywriting’s microwave.
Attracting traffic is simple, if you have the right ad manager and budget. It is much more difficult to build relationships with customers so that they do not forget you after their first visit to your website. Your content has a difficult and important task to do for you.
When we create content, we first think about the benefits users get. Does it serve them well? If not, go back to the drawing board, and create something that serves them well. Sales will come if you take the right approach. People are smart. If you don’t have their best interests at heart, they’ll know.
They will see right through you. And people talk, so word spreads. Have the right motives, or you might not be in business long.
Content marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Search engine optimization is a fancy term for “helping your web content show up higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).” It’s also faster to say.
Content for internet marketing helps your website’s SEO because if you provide excellent content, your site will be linked to by websites that have some authoritative rank. These are not purchased links from link builders but natural traffic backlinks. Example: You post a really good blog post about something you are an expert in. Other bloggers or influencers see it and share it by linking to it on their website. Now their audience has been introduced to you and what you have to offer. And you didn’t have to hunt them down; they came to you!
Now multiply that by . . .
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Reddit
• Tumblr
• Podcasts
• Websites
• Article platforms such as Thrive Global, Addicted2Success, and Medium.com
• Guest posts
• Pretty much every content platform under the sun. See where this is going?
Even if you order fewer than ten content placements a month from an agency (or write them yourself), within six months, there will be a noticeable growth in your website’s ranking, organic traffic, and conversions. Distribute them across a few select platforms you have chosen, publish consistently, and watch your business grow.
The more placements you have on third-party sites, the more inbound links you’ll have to your site, and the more likely that users will find you when they are searching online. Helpful content increases your visibility in organic searches because Google likes serving up just what the searcher is looking for.
Better than advertising
Content marketing is much more effective than contextual advertising, also known as pay per click (PPC). For some keywords, the price per click is more than forty dollars. For some services and products being sold, that’s more than the price of a sale, so it’s not worth it at all.
What’s worse is that not all clicks lead to sales. An average conversion rate is 1%. That means out of every 100 clicks ($4,000), you would make one sale. If your product or service’s price is $50, for example, you would go in the hole so fast, you’d sink your business. If your offering has a price tag of $5,000 and you have solid ad copy to attract only the right people, it would be worth it.
In any case, advertising costs add up fast, and most business owners are selling things at much lower price points than they’d need to make it worth using.
The importance of content marketing and why you should use it
Content marketing has some cool benefits:
• Generates website traffic
• Starts a conversation
• Develops relationships
• Improves brand awareness
• Creates loyalty and trust
• Lets you help your customer make good decisions
• Helps you build authority and credibility as it positions you as an expert in your industry
• Provides value with no strings attached
Increase website traffic
Content increases website traffic. Naturally, content for internet marketing needs to generate income. It does so, eventually and indirectly. Internet users will see articles, reviews, recommendations, and videos that all position you strategically while delivering great content. Ideally, they navigate through the links to your site. The advantage is that they are warm leads. They understand why they are going to your site and what they want to receive when they get there. More conversions result from content than from advertising.
The challenge is that measuring the results from content marketing isn’t as easy or clear cut as it is with today’s advertising platforms such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads. In years past, measuring results from any advertising was difficult or impossible, but today, it’s down to a science, and if you have the right ads manager, you will see results.
By creating and distributing useful materials, you make it clear that you are an expert in your field. You position yourself as the person people should go to when they are looking for what you do. As Seth Godin says in This Is Marketing, marketing is a noble effort, a high calling. The purpose is not just to sell products or services, but to establish long-term relationships with consumers, make them raving fans, and serve them in the best way possible.
Doing more deals
Content drives more deals. Boosting your traffic is pointless unless it helps you get more clients. Most of your clients won’t be prepared to purchase from you the first time they come across your business, even if you are the only one in town. In the case of small purchases or desperate needs, they decide quickly. For expenditures that are large or optional, especially if seen as a luxury, it usually takes a longer time and more persuasion.
You don’t have much time to spend convincing people to sign on the dotted line. You have a business to run. So what can you do? You can create or repurpose content and let it do the work for you. Content marketing is the answer.
Leads that come from your content have a 15% conversion rate on average, while leads from cold pitching and ads often have a rate of less than 2%. So, how persuaded are you?
Putting sales on autopilot
Content marketing helps you put sales on autopilot. Cold calling is torture. What if we told you that you’d never have to make another cold call again? Between creating good content and using the relationship-building process outlined in The Referral of a Lifetime by Tim Templeton, you will never need to make another cold call. We highly recommend this book.
Today, potential partners reach out to us when they’re ready. We have a conversation about their goals, identify the right approach to help them grow, and see if we’re the right team for them to partner with or if we can find a better fit for them among our network. Our number-one goal is and always has been to help them get exactly what they need, even if it’s not us. Why? Well, it stems from our moral convictions, but also, let’s face it: It’s a round world. What goes ’round comes ’round.
Instead of pushing a client to purchase from you, you are creating an important asset that is there for your clients and will nudge them to come to you when they are prepared to make a buying decision.
It’s far less irritating than conventional promoting. No one likes being interrupted by someone trying to sell them something. Ad blockers are now used by 40% of web users! Blowing cash on TV plugs and different types of publicizing that intrude on your clients personal space doesn’t seem like the best approach.
Content marketing ROI
Content marketing gives a great return on investment (ROI). In a few months, a piece of your content could rank first on Google. The number of people who see it depends in part on how many people are searching for that term each month. Each post builds your potential views.
Every potential client who discovers helpful content on your site turns into a potential customer and promoter for your brand. Some of them will follow you on Facebook or Twitter so they can be notified of things you create in the future. Some of them will share your content, and some will link to it from their websites. Web crawlers consider each new quality backlink as a sign that your article is valuable and authoritative. Each page that your article connects to is viewed as having quality, too.
The more love you send to your pages, the more probable you are to rank well on Google so you can be found when your clients are ready to buy. For instance, if your homeowners insurance page gets enough connections from your blog and other sites where your content is, it can begin to rank for “best homeowners policy.”
It makes life better for your clients, also. Connect with your business group and ask them which searches they conduct regularly. Compose helpful substance about these basic questions and worries. Send those articles to your business group. Request that they help you improve these articles based on what they see.
Celebrate. Your site just turned into your new best salesman (and it works for you all day, every day).
Cost effectiveness
Content marketing is usually cost effective. Content marketing costs much less than purchasing ads. Some people choose to buy ads that lead the potential customer to the content, and let the content do the converting. A potential customer can first hear about you on social media, read about it on your website, and see it in a video on YouTube. The cumulative effect of repeated engagement with trustworthy content is stronger than advertising, which simply isn’t noticed.
Hosted content solves specific problems, entertains, or otherwise provides value to your potential customers and clients. A strong emotional link to the brand can be created through your content, which is not achieved by other means of advertising. Remember, consumers don’t trust advertising at all anymore. They trust reviews (stats say that 84% of people check reviews before they make a purchase) and useful content. Producing valuable articles builds trust.
With every one of these advantages, it’s no big surprise that, as indicated by Hubspot’s 2018 State of Inbound Marketing report, 74% of advertisers have an inbound way to deal with promoting their businesses—they use content, and the smartest ones repurpose that content to make it do double duty (or more). Companies see higher ROI on inbound than outbound.
Sometimes advertising does work better. One example is when you need to quickly stimulate short- term sales.
Disadvantages of Content Marketing
Now that we’ve covered so many positive things about content marketing, it’s time to talk about the drawbacks.
Content marketing isn’t as simple as taking out an ad.
It takes a lot of time to create. If you want to write your own blog posts, you certainly may. See this blog post for two great ways to find time to write more.
You could write it and then have someone SEO it for you, such as in a content management package.
It takes time to get results.
Content marketing doesn’t always convince or convert. Just like anything else, it needs to be done well, or it won’t be effective.
Implementing the strategy can be complex. This is the main thing clients who come to me struggle with, and it might be the biggest disadvantage to content marketing. Content needs to be planned, created, published, publicized, and optimized. There are numerous channels on which to publish that content and numerous ways to publicize it. Regarding optimizing it, keyword research alone can take thousands of hours to master and conduct.
Most business owners don’t have the skill, time, or desire to do that. They get overwhelmed with just the planning and the creation, let alone all the rest. There is an easy solution for this but first, there are a few more things you might want to consider before pursuing content marketing.
There is a high barrier to entry. It is difficult for small businesses to deal with content marketing because of high initial costs of either time or money. If you want to do it yourself, you’ll need a large amount of time to spend creating the content. If you don’t have time, you need to hire a professional. Don’t conclude it’s impossible just yet.
If you hire an individual, it means you have an added task of monitoring their work. But if you contact an agency, you can have a certain amount of content produced for a fixed monthly fee. If you set up an automatic payment, all you have to do is accept the work. The agency handles everything else. This saves you time and lets you do what you are best at. Content marketing and repurposing definitely comes with a significant price tag. It’s an investment, but if you stick with it, it will pay off.
How hefty can that price tag be? Most content management agencies charge between $5,000 and $30,000 every month. There are ways you can cut the cost. You could handle your content promoting in-house, if you have the time it takes to do it yourself. You can also find an agency that lives on Planet Earth and charges a lot less (I run such an agency).
Results from creating content
Results are not instant. This is a long-term strategy. People who want to get results today become impatient with it. They try to cut corners, or they give up too soon.
If you want to not just sell but become a leader in your niche, then regular investments in content marketing will pay off. You won’t see results today, but in a few months, the effect will be noticeable. After several months, as leads come in on a regular basis, you’ll wonder why you didn’t get started sooner.
Your content marketing will not stop working as soon as you stop paying for the service, which is exactly what does happen with advertising. Stop paying for the ads, and the leads dry up immediately.
It’s important to know that it can take anywhere from a few months to a year for this path to produce results and begin to pay for itself. If you must have a return on your investment within a month, this is not for you. Run some Facebook ads instead, and when you have some clients and positive cash flow, then look at content marketing and repurposing for lasting results.
If using content to promote your business is something you’re not that familiar with, and you don’t want to invest massive amounts of time and effort, your logical option is to go with an expert who has the skills and experience.
Getting help with creating content
An organization that sells certifications will tell you that you must hire a certified content marketer. It is possible that you will get better results, but you certainly will pay more for them. You know your situation, and that includes your budget. If you can’t afford to hire someone who is a certified marketer, don’t worry about it. Hire someone who is a good fit for you.
You will want someone who first and foremost is the right kind of person. They should be a person of integrity, and they should care about you and your goals. Be sure they know what makes good content and the variety of formats it can and should appear in. You need someone who understands your industry enough to be able to create or curate that quality content, someone who is organized and has good systems and team members in place..
The agencies might have a physical location, a brick-and-mortar building, or they may be virtual and have their team members scattered around the country or even the globe. In my experience, virtual agencies are much more common. They are also more agile. They give everyone, including the client, added flexibility and lowered costs.
Offers vary from company to company, and most companies will have more than one package to offer. It’s important to ask what you’re getting. Beware anyone who says there is just one package, just one flat rate available. Content management is not “one size fits all.”
Content marketing writer: As clear as it looks, this is a person who writes content that serves to market your business in some way. You can find content marketing writers in various Facebook groups, on LinkedIn, and other sites.
This is not to be confused with a copywriter. Although they both do serve to “sell” your products/services in a way, content marketing is much more subtle, and its main purpose is to deliver valuable content that your readers can use. Copywriting’s purpose is to get someone to buy, not to inform them. Ray Edwards is a copywriting expert, and if you’re looking for a copywriter, first, read his book. Then talk to Ray. If you can’t afford him, ask whom he recommends that is in your budget range. He has a list of people who have passed his courses, and he can recommend someone who is more affordable.
Content management services
There are many companies that offer to handle certain tasks that business owners can’t or don’t want to do themselves. Some provide bookkeeping, handle incoming phone calls, or run social media accounts. Others offer web marketing content management services. From creating a content calendar to transcribing audio/video files to writing—some content management service providers even publish your blog posts for you on your blog or via your login to third-party sites.
The pricing on these services varies widely and depends on the volume of content desired, the turnaround time needed, and the skill of the provider. You can expect to pay anywhere from $250 a month for a very small and simple package to $30,000 a month for a robust package that involves multiple team members working full-time on your behalf. Most business owners need a package in the $500 to $3,000 a month range, with content posted at least once a week.
Paying by the piece is sometimes an option, but packages often provide better value overall. Talk to the prospective providers you are interested in. Ask them what their packages include, what everything means, and what the pricing is.
Video services: Video can be very effective. Some companies only create video content, and finding one is important if you want help creating them for yourself. But more important is to find someone who specializes in creating content marketing videos. If you’re looking for help in this department, we recommend Jeremy Allen.
Blog management services: This is one of the services we offer at Harshman Services. Several packages are available to fit nearly every budget and ambition level. The service involves cleaning up the drafts you write for your blog (or writing them for you), and includes sourcing images, logging in and scheduling the posts to publish on a certain date, and entering Alt tags and keywords. The posts are all valuable content that serves your readers, positions you as the expert they need, and increases the odds that they will choose you when the time comes for them to hire someone who does what you do. If you have 10 hours a week to do this yourself, great. If not,