I wouldn’t say that content marketing is overlooked as a sales tool, but it sure gets done wrong a lot. In almost all the cases where I’ve seen content marketing fail, the primary reason for the failure was the lack of a coherent plan. And the ironic thing is, a content marketing plan is dead simple to develop.
2 Things Good Content Marketing Accomplishes
- It persuades more prospects to opt-in to the email list.
- It push the prospects already on the email list further down the sales funnel.
Content marketing is not a boilerplate exercise. It has meaning and purpose that goes beyond cookie-cutter blog posts and paid email lists.
But there are essentially just two parts to a content marketing plan. The first part I’ll talk about in this post: creating content that leads to sales. In my next post, I’ll cover the second part: tracking the effectiveness of the marketing.
Why All Businesses Need Great Content Marketing
In 2023, I think we can all finally come to the conclusion that digital ads aren’t economical. They don’t work unless you have a ton of data and an equal amount of expensive data science. Social marketing has become, for lack of a better term, a dumpster fire crapshoot. Viral marketing and word-of-mouth can only take a business so far into its target market, and it does so painfully slowly.
For startups and other innovative companies, content marketing should be mandatory. Innovation, by definition, requires new methods, new perspectives and belief in new potential. Achieving that potential requires customer education, engagement, and trust.
<…….
