David needs to find a trucking employee. He does an Internet search. Up pop relevant hits, and he clicks one of the links. That takes him to your blog. Liking the information he finds, he checks out your other pages. Based on your content, David decides you can find him a qualified employee, so he picks up the phone.
Maria just moved, and now she needs to find a job in elementary education. She contacts her friends via Facebook and Twitter and asks if they know of anything. They send her links to your blog, website, and videos. Maria browses your content. Because of your helpful information, she then creates an account to start her application.
What Content Marketing Is
Content is what you produce with words. Your website is content. Blogs and other forms of social media content reach a wide audience. Newsletters and emails go to a targeted audience that signed up for that content. And don’t forget your print collateral, such as brochures or direct mail.
When you use that content strategically, you’re marketing. You can send brochures to clients before cold-calling or use emails to remind past applicants of your services. You can coordinate a social media blitz to attract new applicants and clients. And your newsletter broadcasts your growth.
Content marketing is all about the client or applicant, not you. Your content should benefit them with relevant information and give a call to action.
What Content Marketing Does for You
Content builds your brand and increases trust. Clients and applicants get to know you. They reblog, retweet, and link back to relevant content. You gain authority in your field because with all that quality content out there; you must know what you’re talking about and sharing. It improves your SEO rankings and boosts traffic to your site. Creating content draws on the skills of different people in your company (writers, designers, and marketers) and builds camaraderie.
How Content Marketing Works
The great thing about content marketing is that you decide on your goals. It doesn’t matter what other people say you should do. You decide what you want, then figure out the best ways to get it and to measure it. Possible goals include increasing your:
- blog followers
- newsletter subscribers
- new-applicant accounts
- calls from prospective clients
- social media shares
- pingbacks to your content
- hits on your homepage
Creating content that gets your desired results costs time and money. If your numbers are staying static, don’t give up—you’re probably close to a tipping point. For example, you might scrape together a monthly newsletter for 43 subscribers. But with an extensive marketing strategy, you could get 2195 new subscribers. That would more than pay for the newsletter. So, once you’ve established that you have good content, it will cost less to produce and increase your reach.
ASJ Partners offers high-quality content for websites, blogs, newsletters, emails, and social media. Contact us today to get your content marketing strategy started.
