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Content Marketing

Content marketing is when you create content written, spoken/audio, picture, or video. Once you’ve made content, you have to publish it so the world can find it. Your only cost is TIME creating the content and publishing and promoting the content.

Content Marketing can take many forms today:

  • Written
    • Blogging
    • Email Newsletter
    • Books (pdf) / Reports
    • Magazine articles
    • Newspaper articles
  • Audio
    • Podcasting
    • CD
  • Video
    • DVD
  • Social Media Posting (pictures, videos, written)
    • Facebook 
    • Instagram 
    • Linkedin
    • Twitter
    • Pinterest
    • YouTube
    • TikTok

Content marketing has FOUR goals:

  1. Have someone find/discover your content.
  2. Get them to fall in love with your content
    1. So they Like it or Share it
    2. Become a member of your audience by subscribing or following
    3. Regularly consume the new content you publish by reading, listening, or watching. 
  3. Elevate them to the next level, turning them into prospects or customers.
  4. Maintain them as a customer, and get them to buy more.

1. How do people FIND your content?

If you are blogging, your content has to be search engine optimized (SEO) to rank in the search engines. If you’re creating YouTube videos, you have to search engine optimize your content because YouTube is the second biggest search engine next to Google. If you post to Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or Facebook, you need to include hashtags. Hashtags are words or groups of words that start with #. 

Twitter’s trending content and hashtags: https://twitter.com/explore/tabs/trending

The dark underbelly of content marketing is publishing consistently. Depending on the content you choose to create, you may need to post something weekly or even daily. This dark side of content marketing is that you have to commit to publishing content for an extended period. For example, when we decided to do The Empire Builders Podcasts as our content strategy, we committed to a year or 52 podcasts. We quickly figured out that we would need to spend two to three years publishing weekly to reach our business goals.

The Empire Builders Podcast Content Marketing Example

Using The Empire Builders Podcast as an example, we publish an episode each week at the same time. Publishing it is a search engine optimized webpage on our website. This podcast is then made available on all the popular podcasting platforms through the podcasting platform we have chosen. To notify people that a new episode is available, we post to: LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and send an email to our list.

In the beginning, you need to get friends and family to LIKE, SHARE, and COMMENT on your posts. Then, over time as your audience grows, you want to promote and reward sharing and commenting. These actions feed the algorithms (program behind social media) and encourage the platforms to put your content in front of new people. 

On top of these free promotional activities, we also engage in the paid promotion of our podcast. In addition, we run LinkedIn Ads, Instagram and Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads, and a complete PR Strategy.

2. Getting others to Fall in Love with your content

People will give you their time when you offer them entertainment. 

People will give you their money when you offer them hope.

– Roy H. Williams

Creating Entertaining content is a challenge, as it is easy to create boring content that no one wants to listen to or read. Our biggest tip is to find a successful model and leverage it. For example, decode a model from TV shows or successful YouTube channels. The key is to find success and see if you can replicate it in your way. 

Short cuts for creating entertaining content:

  • Tie into something newsworthy or new.
  • Make it intriguing, insightful, or informative.
  • Highlight the weird, bizarre and shocking.
  • Make it funny or humorous. Put a smile on people’s faces.
  • Sad or heartfelt. People connect with people that admit they are not perfect. Let people in.

Here are Pinterest’s predictions for the types of content people will be hungry for in 2022.

https://www.pinterest-assets.com/m/5119830941c43030/original/Pinterest-Predicts-Report-PDF-2022-06.pdf

3. Elevating

Elevating in content marketing is about getting subscribers and followers to move up to the next level by making them an OFFER! So the question you want to answer is, “What is the next step they should take?” In our case, it’s attending a free 90-minute interactive session that answers these four questions – Are you targeting the right customer? Are you saying the right things? Are you advertising in the right places? Are you spending too much? Or too little? For you, it can be something completely different the key is to figure out the answer to the question.

4. Maintaining your Audience

Once you have built an audience, you need to provide those subscribers with high-quality content continually. And you need to interact and engage with your followers. Respond to your subscriber’s comments and questions. Ask the audience a question or get them involved in a poll. Lastly, figure out something special you can do just for them. 

You will always have a bit of attrition in your audience, but you need to do everything you can to keep them happy they are following you. 

If you have any questions, email: [email protected]. Best of luck with your content marketing efforts.

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