Content Marketing-The Art of Growing Your Business Like ABC

Content marketing at it’s simplest is the use of great content on a website to promote your business.

It provides the most cost effective, long term way for you develop new clients or customers.

• A-Attract

• B-Build a relationship

• C-Convert

 

There are three aspects to content marketing-attracting potential clients in your target market by the quality of your website’s content, building a relationship with those people and converting those “fans” into clients.

 

People search the internet for many things but one of the most common types of searcher is one who is looking for a solution to a problem.

 

It may be a cure for some ailment, it may be to learn how to play the violin, it may be to learn how to get more customers for a business, it may be to find information about house training a dog or a solution to a legal problem.

 

Regardless of what business you are in if you are the one who provides useful, relevant information for that searcher then you have the opportunity to gain the visitor’s trust, build a relationship, demonstrate expertise and obtain a new client.

This form of digital marketing allows you to avoid making sales pitches as soon as your visitor lands on your site.

 

Done properly it allows you to gain trust and eventually make recommendations which are good for your business and your new client.

 

This form of marketing can be contrasted with slamming people with sales pitches as soon as they land on your site and allows you to build a long term client/customer base which will provide a fantastic return on investment over the long term.

Alternatives to content marketing

The alternatives to content marketing include the use of paid traffic to drive visitors to your site and the hope that they will buy your stuff or engage your services. The return on this type of promotion is transient, short term and cost ineffective.

 

Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are great ways to draw attention to your business.

 

But that is as far as it goes-there has to be more to your relationship with your potential customers than car crash marketing.

 

Fans on Facebook?

 

Real fans are people who trust you, like you and recognise your expertise or the quality of your business’s offerings.

 

Unless you are competing on price alone you really do need to demonstrate authority, knowledge and build a relationship for the long term good of your business.

The good news is that content marketing allows you to do all of these necessary steps in an ethical way.

Which is good for your business and good for your customers.

Return on investment

There is a change in mindset required to pursue this strategy. This involves deciding that your website should be actively working for your business and not the other way around.

 

Specifically it will entail committing to publishing good, relevant, unique, helpful content on your website rather than driving paid traffic to a content thin website and hoping for the best.

 

Any small business owner will be rightly concerned with the return on investment calculation involved here.

 

The good news is that this strategy is incredibly cost effective and provides significantly better returns than paid or social media traffic.

 

Because if you commit to publishing good content regularly you will be rewarded with

• better rankings in the search engines,
• more traffic,
• an opportunity to build a relationship with your readers and
• the positioning of  your business as a trusted authority in whatever industry you trade in.

 

The building of an email or subscriber list allows you to maintain regular contact with your readers and sell without selling because the ultimate goal of this strategy is for your subscriber to contact you and ask “what would you recommend?”.

 

The alternative is a one shot, buy or die strategy which is dependent on paid traffic and immediate conversions.

 

It is very difficult to succeed with this strategy as the biggest barrier to people doing business with you on the internet is overcoming the barrier of trust and it is virtually impossible to build this trust in the few seconds that someone lands on your web page having been sent there by an ad.

 

However if someone is sent to your site because a friend recommends your site as a good source of information or if you demonstrate over a period of time that you know what you are about you will see conversions increase dramatically.

 

Google’s commitment to quality search results

Google has waged a war in the last 12 months on sites that are content poor and “thin”. This has seen a massive fall in rankings for many sites and deindexing of others.

 

The reason for this is simple-virtually all of Google’s revenue comes from it’s advertisers and this ensures a huge emphasis by Google on delivering the best and most relevant search results to keep it’s advertisers happy and spending.

 

If you want to ensure that you get your share of business online then committing to a good quality, content rich site is a simple decision.

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• conversational marketing-death of a salesman
• internet marketing for small business in Ireland
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• how to get more clients case study 2012.

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