Content Marketing & Blogging

What Is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is a marketing discipline in which you focus on developing and publishing content that focuses specifically on the wants and information needs of a targeted audience online.

The Goals of Content Marketing are:

• To Establish Authority for your company, your Brand as an expert in your defined field.
• To expand a company’s potential customer base by developing Brand Awareness.
• To develop Brand Loyalty with content that brings those potential customer back over and over again looking for answers.
• To provide Customer Education about how your industry and your business in particular operate and work. An educated client makes for a happy client.
• To inspire conversation and facilitate Customer Engagement.
• To create Customer Evangelists that so appreciate the value of your content they actively promote it by sharing it.

Unlike other methods and techniques in online marketing Content Marketing is about developing valuable information. “The idea central to content marketing is that a brand must give something valuable to get something valuable in return. Instead of the commercial, be the show. Instead of the banner ad, be the feature story.” (link)

Once upon a time marketing consisted of broadcasting your marketing message via familiar Outbound Marketing methods such as advertising via the yellow page, direct mail, television and/or radio ads, val-pac, classifieds, local “Pennysaver” publications and you just hoped someone who needed your particualar product or service would stumble across your ad.  In the words of Marketing Guru Seth Godin “Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.”

Being remarkable today consists of making content available to a market searching for answers that demonstrates your expertise and understanding of your product or service to potential clients at the different stages of the buying process that they are in.

What Are Elements of a Content Marketing Strategy?

1. Defining Your Target Audience — Before you write any content, craft an offer or even think about your marketing funnel, you first need to decide exactly who you’re marketing to. 
2. Developing the Content — The content can be Experiential Stories, Product Reviews, Product and/or Service Information, Work Photos, Finished Project Photos, Who’s Who profiles,and Step-By-Step Tutorials. And can be delivered as web page content, blog articles, social media posts, or in the form of downloadable PDFs and eBooks too.Keep in mind that your content should avoid being promotional and should instead address what is the problem your service or product is trying to solve and exactly how you service or product addresses that issue.
3. The Offer — While your content may not promote your business, your offer will. Keep in mind your offer often isn’t a hard sale; in fact, it’s often completely free, and meant to capture emails, not to make immediate sales.First and foremost, your offer should be something that’s very valuable to your target audience, and that they can’t get anywhere else. This could be an e-book, white paper, report, case study, free consultation, etc. Again, the offer won’t usually be a direct selling tool, but a way to showcase your expertise and help your customers get to know you.
4. The Promotion and Distribution of the Content — While well written content is one of the primary foundations Search Engine Optimization it is not the only tool in the SEO Toolbox and we’ll work with you to develop a plan to make sure your content is there for those people who want it and are searching for it.
5. The Follow-up —
   • We can help you reply to everyone who has shared your content or commented on it.
   • We can help you recommended your content to everyone who might be interested in it: groups, forums, communities, etc.

How Does Blogging Fit Into Content Marketing?

For Building & Remodeling Contractors blogging is a great delivery tool in your content management strategy and can be used to tell the story of how your brand cares for it customers and delivers their expertise.

• A blog is based on your site and you control the message and own content we develop.
• Your blog is a form of social media, website visitors can subscribe to your blog and your website can also be engineered to post your blog posts automatically to your FaceBook page too.
• Your blog while a content delivery vehicle will also help improve your search engine rankings and blog articles and be created to focus on specific keywords or phrases that your target market is using in search engines.
• Your blog can help drive sales by focusing or going into detail about a particualar service or building and remodeling product people are asking about and searching for on the web that doesn’t necessarily fit into to the content structure on you website internal pages.
• You blog can help you establish authority by continually demonstrating your expertise in your building and remodeling market discipline.