A good content marketing strategy can create a lot of wealth for your business by helping you to position yourself as an expert, educate your customers about the value of doing business with you and inspire them to take action and purchase your products or services. Content marketing is the act of using high-quality and information content like blogs, articles, press releases, e-books, blogs, email newsletters, and other forms of content to market to reach prospects and to help them become customers.
Marketers like Seth Godin have stated that this type of marketing is becoming more and more important for businesses as we progress into the information age and consumers are becoming more and more educated about their purchasing decisions. In this article, we’ll be looking at three basic principles of good content marketing and how you can use them to create content that will translate into bottom-line earnings for your company.
Branding Your Company as the Authority
No matter what kind of content you’re delivering to your customers, you can bet that someone somewhere is giving away the same or similar content. To set yourself apart and to stand out from the crowd is to position yourself or your company as an authority with a unique brand and personality in the marketplace. Steven Covey, Seth Godin, Eban Pagan, and Dan Kennedy are all examples of people who are more than just experts in their niche. They each have their own unique personality and delivery style which makes them both experts and celebrities among their customers.
These experts do more than just deliver high-quality content to their customers. They present that content in an interesting and engaging way that establishes them as unique experts and builds a tremendous amount of trust with their prospective clients. This approach makes them both unforgettable and irreplaceable, which is an asset of great value when it comes to building customer relationships.
Educating Your Customers to Deepen their Sense of Value
In addition to branding yourself or your company as the authority, you need to be consistently educating your prospects and customers on the value of your services and your products. This can be done through your email marketing campaign and through your company blog and social media marketing strategies. However, the important thing is that you become a company that is consistently devoted to educating your customers and helping them to deepen their sense of value in your products and services.
The first reason for this is that it helps you to retain your customer base so that they’re not swept away by your competitors who are doing a better job at educating your customers. However, the second reason is that the more people understand about your products and services, the more value they'll be able to get out of them and the more likely they'll be to purchase from you again and again. Marketing research consistently reveals that US businesses lose anywhere from 10 to 13% of their customer base every year. This is why it's essential that you continue to educate your customers using post-sale content marketing strategies.
Inspire Your Customers to Take Action
Finally, your content marketing strategy has to be effective in soliciting some type of action from your customers, whether it be to sign up for your subscriber list, purchase a product, set up a free consultation, or anything else which equals bottom line profits for your company. Unfortunately, this is the area where many content marketers focus all of their energy, which is a mistake. It’s much easier to inspire your customers to take action if you've already positioned yourself as an authority and presented them with high-value content that educates them and about the value of doing business with you.
Inspiring your customers to take action is all about connecting with the specific emotional need which your product or service answers. In other words, is your product or service providing people with a greater sense of security, more excitement, or a personal sense of purpose and validation? Understanding and connecting with your customers based on these needs is the key to awakening the desire which will inspire them to exercise your offer. So as you’re creating your content, here are a few important questions to ask yourself:
- What keeps your customers awake at night?
- What makes them afraid or insecure?
- Who are they mad at?
- What do they get excited about?
- What provides them with a sense of personal significance?
- What would give them peace of mind?
These are all questions that help you to connect with the emotional drives which will compel your prospects to become customers. As long as you brand yourself or your company as a unique authority in your niche and commit to providing your customers with ongoing education about the value of your products and services, you’ll have no problem getting them to take action by connecting with their deepest emotional drives.
