Content marketing is a growing favorite tool among small businesses to interact with their customer base in the digital realm. While some businesses are successful, others try out this marketing model and fall off the wagon in just a few months. What is the key to successful, sustainable content marketing? Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute recently outlined 7 traits of successful content marketers. Desire, Persistence, Imagination—quickly it feels like reading a New Year’s resolution list. However, these characteristics are very telling of what good content marketing requires—prolonged, thoughtful effort. The resources required for content marketing, and their pay-off in the end, is what many businesses don’t think through when they decide to launch a blog or social media profile. Content marketing is more like building a house rather than pitching a tent; the end result will take longer to come to fruition, but the foundation will be much more stable.
Thing is, if you have the right view of what content marketing looks like, and what it will do for your business, you are more likely to stick with it. Misunderstand, and you can easily become frustrated and give up.
So let’s take a little quiz.
How do you feel about your business’ content marketing strategy now?
a) It feels like a menial chore.
b) It is essential to keeping in touch with my customers, and is another way for our business to provide value to them.
c) I don’t have time for marketing. I do fine with referrals.
Answers A and C both have a stepping-stone mentality of content marketing, that is, it is a checklist to get from point A to point B. But content marketing is actually a continuous action: the act of keeping up a conversation between a business and its customers. Answer B has a mentality that content market is part and parcel to the service a business provides—that is, marketing is actually another way of serving customers.
If you find that marketing eats into your work and takes away from what you really want to focus on, it may be time for you to delegate that responsibility to someone in your business who is passionate about connecting with customers and has ideas for how to do so. If there isn’t someone in your business like that, then it may be time to find a partner who can handle your marketing for you.
Don’t be shy about asking an expert when it comes to marketing. If you are looking for advice on creating and implementing effective content marketing strategies, send us an email or give us a call at 317-910-6252.
