Why you’ll never succeed at content marketing
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Content marketing is unquestionably one of the best ways to promote your business. It’s free, or relatively inexpensive, and more importantly, it keeps you in front of your target audience.
Not convinced? Check out the statistics in this infographic:
From Visually.
If you’ve already embraced content marketing but aren’t seeing any results, you might be going about it all wrong. Did you develop a content marketing strategy and set specific goals, or did you just start posting random links and messages?
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Setting goals is key to your content marketing success.” quote=”Setting goals is key to your content marketing success.” theme=”style1″]
There are many different types of goals you can establish for your content. Here are some of the most popular:
- To establish credibility, authority, and trust
- To grow your list
- To build brand awareness
- To generate sales
- To promote conversations and engagement with your audience
- To drive organic search engine traffic
- To educate your customer
Once you know exactly what you’re trying to receive, you can begin to create content that will support your marketing goals. As you do, make sure that your content supports your long-term vision and mission.
Above all, focus on creating content that puts your audience first. Providing value will demonstrate how you can help them far more effectively than any type of self-promotion.
Image © macrovector / depositphotos
Too big topic indeed! Thank you 🙂
I hope you’ll find it helpful!
I think one could argue that setting goals is key to succeeding in so many of life’s pursuits! I think of content marketing as one of many tools that businesses have. Love the quote about “identity, relationship, and content” being the core of content marketing. With so many businesses, letting your clients get comfortable with you is a wonderful first step toward a lasting relationship.
You’re so right, Seana, yet how often do we just dive into something without giving a thought to what we hope to get out of it?
I find this especially true with content marketing. I started blogging in 2006 because someone told me I should, but I didn’t know why or how to go about it. On any given day I would blog about organizing, productivity, technology, working from home, organizers, virtual assistance, or random thoughts that crossed my mind, and it took me nearly 3 years to figure out that I needed a focus and a niche! :O
Wow Janet, I never realized the impact that content marketing and blogs particularly played on your visibility in the online world! Good information to know and keep in front of me on those days when I don’t “feel” like producing more content! Thanks for the “food for thought” 🙂
Happy to inform and motivate you, Liana! Your blog is great – keep on doing what you do!
Yes, planning and setting clear goals is important, but when it comes to content marketing the most important thing is to provide information that has value for readers. Nothing more, nothing less.
Providing value to readers is extremely important; there’s really no point to it otherwise. But as a business owner, you ultimately need results, and setting goals will help you identify both the results you need and the best type of content to create and share to help you achieve those goals.
Great information, Janet. I started out just sending a newsletter with different information than my blog and realized the workload was really hard to manage so I began to think how can I make this easier and still give the mailing list followers a little more love. By just making a little change, it has helped emensely. Thanks for sharing the infographic.
That’s great, Sabrina! We often make things much harder for ourselves than we need to, don’t we? The key is to find that perfect balance between providing value to our subscribers and not taking too much time and attention away from other important activities.
Content marketing is always something i am working on. Thank you, Janet.
You’re welcome!
Great intro to content marketing Janet! You definitely piqued my interest! Thanks 🙂
Fantastic! 🙂
Love the compelling stats that you shared. Having jumped into the social media content generating arena about six years ago, I can attest to the effectiveness along several benefits you mentioned.
You always have such great info to share. I love learning new things from a great teacher like you. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing your personal experience, backing up the data in the infographic! You’re a master at content marketing, so I’ll be very interested in finding out your #1 takeaway from the eCourse.
Thanks for sharing this post, Janet. Content marketing is something we invest in at SpareFoot and I’m really proud of the high quality content that we put out there. Infographics and posts like this really help underline the importance of providing great value to potential customers.
You guys are doing a great job. I love the way you provide your readers with a wide spectrum of information by using multiple bloggers as well as featuring other experts within many of the posts.