Can Every Business Benefit From Content Marketing?
Content marketing: should every business be engaging in it or does it depend upon what you do?
Content marketing.
We’all all heard about how doing things like blogging and publishing online can be a great means of driving inbound attention to your business.
If you work in marketing then you’re probably already very familiar with the typical inbound-selling spiel.
Inbound is far more cost-effective outbound — think advertising — although exponents of the method typically caution against expecting immediate results. (And that would include me).
But you may have had a question about inbound marketing that you didn’t see addressed.
Is content marketing something that every business should be engaging it?
Or do you have to be a technology startup to really derive good benefit from it.
What Can Content Marketing Do For My Business?
At a bare minimum, content marketing can “work” wherever there’s an audience that’s trying to solve a problem — and using search engines like Google to try find resources to answer that problem.
The basic mechanism that underlies content marketing and drives its success is usually pretty simple.
Consumers compose search queries that tell us various things about their intention. And it’s our job, as content marketers, to try to create content that will address that search for knowledge and simultaneously lure the prospect(s) into a marketing funnel.
This means a few thing:
a) The content has to be pertinent. It needs to contain information that’s likely to be useful to the intended readership.
b) The content has to be somewhat sequential or progressive in nature. We’re unlikely to go from “first time lead” to MQL in the course of offering one blog. Therefore, we’re more than likely going to need to create a content marketing funnel — using multiple pieces of content to hit up on various types of prospects at different touchpoints. We should at a minimum have assets available that are intended to relate to leads at all three commonly charted points of the marketing funnel.
So if that’s what content marketing is then where do we create it? The first myth to do away with is the idea that content marketing even needs to be online. If we were to distribute our latest blog post in paper format at a trade show as a handout at our booth, we’d be doing a form of offline content marketing.
In fact, this is where content marketing owes its origins to.
If we backtrack far enough through the history of content marketing — to before a time when brand journalism was even a common term — we’d inevitably find the first references speaking about publications (on paper) that companies printed.
Back then, the idea of anybody but a news organization printing journalistic-style information was considered pretty revolutionary. But there’s nothing stopping most companies from employing those same tactics today when we’re all familiar with major companies emulating the efforts of news media and putting together incredibly professional content — whether it comes formatted as blog posts, videos, or podcasts.
Besides saving trees, trying to capture information online plays perfectly into one of content marketing’s major strong suits: if what you’re selling isn’t geography-restricted, it can open up customer bases virtually anywhere there’s internet connectivity.
Of course, if we’re going to the trouble of creating lots of “content” we can do so much more than “just” attract early stage leads — even if that’s going to be the backbone of our content marketing strategy.
For example, we can use those assets to define and build a brand, create awareness in markets where nobody’s ever heard of us or our product, and use our content assets to build and nurture a community.
If You’ve Ever Bought An Advertising Spot, You Should Think About Investing In Content Marketing
One of the great beauties of content marketing lies in its extreme versatility (the other major one, relative to outbound marketing, is how cost-effective it is. But my personal favorite is the fact that it can operate mostly passively).
By playing around with keywords — from an SEO standpoint — or angles — from a public relations ones — you can use content for very different purposes and to reach entirely different audiences.
Have you (or your organization) ever advertised on local radio to try shore up business (perhaps whenever your seasonal demand typically ebbs)?
If you have, then there’s a good chance you could use local content marketing to try replicate that effort.
To what extent that might succeed will depend on your business, how well you understand your target audience, and how accurately you can map that understanding onto the process of creating content that you think might match their search intent.
But at least one generality can be offered.
Almost all businesses with an online presence could benefit from keyword optimized web-page content — if you’re maintaining a website it makes sense to at least attempt to rank for obvious local search keywords.
But not all local businesses are necessarily going to see results from operating a blog.
If you repair zippers and are located in Copenhagen, then it definitely makes sense to create content trying to capture the simple low-hanging-fruit intent ‘Copenhagen zip repair.’
But a zip repair store — even one with a website — probably isn’t looking to sell to an international clientele.
What you could do … create zip repair articles in Danish. In exchange for useful information, you’d be positioning your store as the obvious choice.
Content marketing is all about creating good information that yields long term returns for the authoring party.
Think about investing and consider what you could get for the cost of your last local TV or radio campaign. The yield may take longer to mature, but it’s likely to continue long past your quiet season has passed.
Where Content Marketing Can Really Shine: International Products And Services With Long Sales Cycles
While local businesses can and do use content marketing to add organic discoverability to their list of lead generation sources, content marketing really shines when we can take advantage of each of its advantages:
- Its reach is virtually limitless: Assuming that things like internet access and censorship aren’t concerns, you can get eyeballs on your blog — or on your YouTube video — from almost anywhere in the world serviced by internet companies. This makes content marketing an incredibly powerful strategy for any company selling a product globally. A good example is a software as a service (SaaS) platform.
- Complicated products with long sales cycle: Both thought leadership and content marketing are great inbound marketing approaches that can be used in conjunction whenever you’re trying to convince a B2B buyer of the value of your solution. When purchases cost millions of dollars — or far more — a long buying process can often be expected. Prospects vendors are expected to showcase their best thinking on a topic. This is where you can use both tactics to considerable advantage.
To summarize:
- The pool of companies who could benefit from content marketing isn’t really limited by any factor other than whether the target audience(s) can be expected to use the internet to identify somebody selling a product or service.
- In fact, although that’s often the case, it’s really a false limitation. If you can find some way to get objectively interesting information in front of somebody who could buy form you (and that’s not advertising) then you can find a way to drive people into content marketing funnels.
- Content marketing is an investment and its results tend to accrue over time, although they typically take a while to start bearing fruit.
- If you’re selling internationally and/or a product/service with a long sales cycle, then you can double down on the benefits you can derive from this form of marketing.
