Content marketing

Why Bother?

Content marketing is the creation of any kind of material that is interesting or valuable for your audience and is one of the single most effective way to create loyalty, engagement and ultimately win business - content should avoid being a direct sales message, and focus on addressing the needs and problems of your clients and prospects.

Content marketing is also the backbone of all of your other marketing. Without having content, you're limiting the amount of information search engines can pick up and also causes regular communication via emails and social media to become very difficult and not sustainable if you don't have anything of value to say.

Content comes in many forms: Blogs, articles, case studies, webinars, podcasts, videos, guides, FAQs, publications and more.

Where to start?

The first place to start is back your user profiles which highlights what you need to communicate to your audience. Then put together a plan for several months, perhaps 6 or even 12 month in the future. 12 months down the line might end up a little vague, but putting something into a plan can help keep momentum going later.

Your content plan should outline the following:

1. What type of content you're producing and what the title is
2. Who is responsible for producing it
3. When the deadline is
4. Who the audience is
5. What the key messages are
6. What the calls to action will be

Map out your content plan and take annual events into consideration. So plan around school holidays - will these be extra busy times for your business and require more planning and resource, or will it be a quiet time allowing you divert resource into other projects temporarily.

Useful tips:

• Recycle and re-use your content for maximum exposure and minimum input from your resource. For example, slides from a presentation can be broken down into a series of blogs that can then be collated together into a large white paper or guide later. So one presentation could give you weeks of content and enable you to communicate with your audience multiple times.
• Having a theme for each month can help generate ideas for content.
• Having input from multiple people around the business can help keep content production sustainable. One person might struggle to create four blogs per month, but four people can split the burden between them.