Saturday, March 23, 2013

Content as a Marketing Strategy


Estro Communications
By +Steve Estrellado | @steveestro | Download PDF


Smart digital marketing has provoked and deprecated traditional advertising.  As a modern day marketer, it is necessary to focus on creating blogs, images, videos, and audio podcasts.  The content you create must resonate with your core audience and target market.  For example, restaurants should share mouth-watering food images.  Services (business consultants, contractors, lawyers, and doctors) should share basic how to and do-it-yourself tips.  In essence, think of your business as a publisher of entertaining and educational content.  It is your content that will drive sales from your target market.

Build trust with your prospects with the right content; nurture them to become an educated consumer.  Your business will grow because you have become the authority and thought leader in your business.  Investment advisors have been doing this for years.  You buy their white papers and even their services based on their assessments of the market.

To create an effective content marketing strategy you need to focus on the needs of your customers.  Remember, this is your marketing material.  People are naturally inquisitive.  If you consistently share fresh and relevant content, your customers will seek your products and services.

Overall, if your content specifically answers your customer’s needs it will successfully garnish new inquiries (long-tail leads).  These inquiries are a low-cost and highly-effective alternative when compared to the price of traditional advertising (TV, radio, and print).

Bonus: Technical SEO Tip

Better known as the Panda algorithm update, Google has made it a priority to curate fresh and relevant content from your website.  You’re out-dated website will fall off search if you treat your site as a “yellow pages advertisement.”  Also note, the Penguin algorithm update has made it impossible to use black hat SEO techniques, i.e. keyword stuffing, unorthodox link-building, and spam blogging.


All original content copyright Steve Estrellado, 2013.

No comments:

Post a Comment