Some of the folks who use content to market online come from years of experience in the offline marketing world. Traditionally the content used offline has been well developed from high quality research, interviews, and various other respected resources. If you take those time honored traditions to heart and use them with your online marketing, you should find the content you produce is highly valuable and well worth the effort it takes to generate.
Content Marketing Challenges
One of the biggest challenges however is that while it may take a lot of time and effort to develop excellent content, if it’s not used correctly online, all of its greatness can easily get lost. With so many channels available to publish and broadcast marketing messages, overwhelm can be a chief cause for irresponsible placement.
Not every marketing video is going to go viral. These are simply the facts. The reality is that true viral marketing messages are almost a freak of nature and surely cannot be counted on ahead of the fact. If your content is fortunate enough to get picked up by pop culture or your targeted niche market and spread rapidly around the community, consider yourself lucky indeed.
More important for you to see a decent ROI is to fully understand the segment of the marketplace you’re hoping to gain the attention of. Knowing who you’re speaking to is half the battle. One of the chief complaints from companies advertising via mass mediums of television, radio and the like is the fact that such an increasingly small percentage of the ad’s message are reaching actual buying customers.
When you start out with a smaller potential market, but have done the work ahead of time and know this niche is filled with highly enthusiastic, possible consumers of what you’re selling, your job is more than half way done. Of course, your content still needs to be engaging and offer them something they cannot get elsewhere for free. Once you’ve demonstrated your respect for your customer, you’ll have every chance of convincing them to make the desired buying action.
Spreading Your Content
Having multi-pronged messages is another way to ensure the value and worth of your content. Video is certainly a popular medium in today’s short attention spanned audiences. But there are other very valid, popular ways to gain attention as well. Creating a Twitter account dedicated to providing excellent customer service to existing and future customers is another way you can develop your community. Even with the limitations on number of characters you’re able to send, careful integration of your overall marketing message is a very effective way to generate little snippets of content.
Freshness of your marketing messages is another often overlooked tactic to maximize the value your content. Stale, often repeated, and duplicate content can have a number of deleterious effects to your intended niche target market.
Most savvy online readers get information from a number of sources. You need to plan for and use to your benefit as many channels as your intended audience uses. If they value RSS feeds for their daily incoming messages and your website or blog is lacking this technology, you’ve just lopped off a large percentage of your potential customers.
Mobile Content
If mobile messages are important to your consumers, be sure to budget effective and powerful outgoing texts, MMS, and other mobile media. Without a clear understanding of how your folks are getting their knowledge and understanding about your products, it won’t matter how valuable your content is. They simply will place little if any worth on what you have to say to them. Ultimately, of course, if no one hears what you’re saying, you’re just wasting your breath. Not to mention your marketing dollars.
Your Thoughts on Content
What are you doing to ensure that your content is not only valuable, but also getting shared for others in order to be found valuable?
About the Author: This is a guest post by Steve Lazuka of Interact Media, a website content marketing firm based in Ohio. He also writes on his content marketing blog, providing useful information for fellow marketers.
